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When Iraq is better than German refugee camps: A growing number of refugees are going back

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Migrants walk in Slovenia after passing through the Croatian village of Kljuc Brdovecki, October 22, 2015. REUTERS/Antonio Bronic

To get to Germany’s promised land, he walked for eight hours into Turkey and took a gruelling 20-hour ride in a crammed and stinking lorry across south-east Europe.

But now Mohammed Aziz Qadir, an Iraqi Kurd, has returned home, one of scores of refugees who have decided that facing perils and hardships in Iraq is preferable to the ordeal of a transit camp in an unwelcoming Europe.

“When I first entered the camp I was shocked to see the difference between the Berlin I had in mind and what I was seeing,” Mr Qadir, 24, said.

“I was looked at as a second class citizen, I didn’t feel respected. When I walked into town it was clear I was a camp guy – a refugee.”

Refugee agencies say a growing number of Kurdish refugees are returning home, even as hundreds of thousands of Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans make the dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean to Europe, an indication of the huge upheavals in the Middle East.

Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, and leaders of other affected European states held crisis talks last night in Berlin to decide how to handle the flow.

Some 25,000 people from Iraq’s Kurdish region have left the country since last year, according to the Iraqi Ministry of Migration.

Germany migrants Europe refugeesBut last week alone a group of 50 Kurdish asylum-seekers arrived back in Erbil, the region’s capital, flying in from Germany. Germany is a top destination for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Syrians fleeing the region’s instability, yet many are disappointed with what they find upon arrival.

Mr Qadir had spent two and a half months in a transit camp on the outskirts of Berlin. He had hoped to open a pizza shop, make enough money to help his family in Erbil, marry and raise children in a European country.

He was fleeing northern Iraq’s debilitating financial crisis, brewing political turmoil and the presence of the Islamic State, who had reach closer than 50 miles from the city.

He took a bus to Istanbul, walked for eight hours to the Greek border and then was smuggled the rest of the way in a refrigerated lorry.

“We sat with our knees pressed against our chest,” he said. “We could barely breathe. It was not a human way of travelling. We felt like livestock. People used bottles for toilets and the smell was very bad.”

But in the camp conditions also worsened as more people arrived. Food was limited to two meals a day and camp regulations imposed a curfew.

Germany has seen a particularly high number of violent incidents between locals and refugees and within the refugee community itself. “The hard situation in the camp made me feel like life in my own country was better,” he said.

iraqWhile Mr Qadir had a home and a family financial safety net to come back to, other returnees like Nawaf Alias have only a flimsy tent and a cold winter ahead. Yet he too chose to turn his back on the European dream.

The 35-year-old Yazidi was forced into a camp near the Kurdish city of Dohuk after Isil seized his village in August 2014. The harsh conditions there convinced him to embark on the perilous journey to Europe.

Alias paid a smuggler $20,000 to help him and his ten-year-old son travel to Germany by land. After weeks on the road and a 13-day stint in a Bulgarian prison, they reached eastern Germany where they shared a room with two other asylum seekers.

“The German government offered food and 540 euros to me and my son but it was not enough,” Mr Alias said. “My son was sad and scared, he didn’t have any friends or relatives and it was hard to find someone to speak to in Kurdish or Arabic.”

Now he is back - his tent in Dohuk preferable to poverty in Germany. “My community welcomed me back,” he said. “My friends came around to drink beer and smoke together, like before.”

SEE ALSO: 'Everybody is scared': The European migrant crisis is about to face an unstoppable problem

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NOW WATCH: Here's how the migrant crisis is spreading through Europe and the Middle East


The largest defense budgets in the world

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china soldiers marching

The United States' military spending has dominated the world for years, but recent figures show that other nations are beginning to catch up.

While global tensions increase, with an increasingly complex Syrian conflict at the centre, countries are flexing their military might in a region ravaged by war.

But which countries are the biggest spenders on defence?

The United States dominates global spending on defence, with a budget more than double that of the next biggest spender, China.

It spends around $569bn a year on defence - the majority of which goes on operations, maintenance and personnel.

This has decreased from $587bn in 2014, according to data provided by IHS, which takes into account international exchange rates.

The world's 25 largest defence budgets

Country  Defence budget
United States569.3
China190.9
United Kingdom66.5
Russia53.2
France52.7
India49.7
Japan49.3
Saudi Arabia46.3
Germany43.8
South Korea35.7
Australia34.3
Brazil30.7
Italy29.0
Canada17.2
Turkey15.9
Israel15.6
United Arab Emirates14.7
Taiwan14.5
Spain13.9
Algeria12.4
Poland12.2
Netherlands10.6
Singapore10.4
Pakistan10.3
Iraq10.3

 

us army, soldiersAs well as the United States, Japan and Brazil had the biggest falls in defence spending between 2014 and 2015.

South Korea, the United Kingdom and China had the largest increases - with China boosting its defence budget by $14.7bn in a year.

Of the 25 largest defenses in the world, 13 were Asian - with a total defence spending of $840bn.

Largest increases and decreases in spending 2014-15

 20142015
United States586.9569.3
Japan54.649.3
Brazil34.430.7
South Korea32.635.7
United Kingdom58.166.5
China176.3190.9


russia soldiers bless itThere were fewer Western countries in the top 25 - with seven of the top spenders being European and two being North American.

Three other continents were represented in the world's 25 largest defence budgets - Australia from Australasia, Brazil from South America and Algeria from Africa.

There are several different estimations of defence spending from a variety of sources.

Japan military exerciseThe IHS has standardized all budgets into USD. Consequently, Russia's budget is lower due to the depreciation of the rouble against the dollar.

The IHS also said that Saudi Arabia looks lower compared to other sources because the figures do not include security spending, while the USA figure does not include FMF (foreign military financing) allocations. 

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NOW WATCH: Russia's military is more advanced than people thought

Apple just reported the biggest annual profit in history

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tim cookApple has recorded the biggest annual profit in corporate history, with record sales of the iPhone helping it to make $53.4bn (£35bn) in the last 12 months.

The world's biggest company surpassed the $45.2bn made by ExxonMobil in 2008, after the release of its latest smartphones increased profits by 31pc in its fourth quarter.

However, Apple warned that growth is likely to slow down significantly in the crucial Christmas period, and sales of the iPad fell by a fifth to their lowest level since 2011.

The company predicted that sales in the current quarter would be between $75.5bn and $77.5bn – as little as 1pc up on the same period last year – partially due to a strong dollar.

Apple's growth

Apple has been facing questions about its ability to maintain the tremendous growth that propelled it to a $750bn value this year, as China's economic troubles raise fears about customer demand for its pricey devices.

Analysts have also suggested that the Apple Watch, the company's first new product category since Steve Jobs' death four years' ago, has got off to a slow start since launching earlier this year.

Nonetheless, Apple said revenue increased by 22pc to $51.5bn in the three months to September 26, the final quarter of its fiscal year. The company sold 48m iPhones, an 22pc increase, during the quarter, which included the first two days that its new 6s and 6s Plus models went on sale.

Android users are switching to the iPhone at a record rate, the company said.

iPhone sales

Apple's full-year revenue reached $233.7bn and annual profits were $53.4bn – equivalent to just over $1bn a week.

Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said the quarter had been “a very strong finish to a record-breaking year”, and that sales in China, which Apple expects to become its biggest market, had been strong despite recent economic turmoil.

“Looking at our sales trends I wouldn't know there's an economic issue at all in China,” he said.

One low point for the company were sales of its iPad tablet, which at 9.9m were 20pc down on the same quarter last year. Sales of the iPad have now fallen for seven consecutive quarters and are at their lowest since early 2011, with owners upgrading the device far less frequently than their iPhones.

Apple shares were flat in after-hours trading, as the better-than-expected sales were cancelled out by somewhat disappointing forecasts for the next quarter.

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NOW WATCH: Every square foot of an Apple store is designed to make you spend more money

A biscuit from the Titanic just sold for $23,000

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biscuit titantic

A cracker that survived the Titanic and lives on, un munched, has now been sold for $23,000 (£15,034).

The biscuit was saved by James Fenwick, a passenger on the Carpathia vessel that saved Titanic passengers at sea, and was kept intact in a Kodak film envelope by Fenwick along with the following notation: "Pilot biscuit from Titanic lifeboat April 1912."

The 103-year-old biscuit was used as part of a survival kit on one of the Titanic lifeboats.

It has not rotted or decayed because it is similar to a hot cross bun, in that when the biscuit gets old, it dries out and fossilizes.

These types of biscuit do not tend to grow mold if they are kept dry. It was sold at the weekend Henry Aldridge & Son auction house.

Alan Aldridge, who sold the biscuit, told The Washington Post: "You might say it's the cracker that took the biscuit," noting that while it was "very much a human biscuit," Spillers and Bakers were known as manufacturers of dog biscuits.

The biscuits and other edible goods they made were austere and inexpensive and generally used as emergency rations or sustenance during times of war.

Aldridge said: "I couldn't imagine anything less appetizing, but if you're in a rowing boat in the middle of the ocean, you'd certainly eat it with the rest of them."

TitanicOther artifacts from the Titanic include the last luncheon menu, which fetched £58,200 at auction. The menu, which was saved by a first-class passenger, was sold on September 30 to a private collector, Auctioneers Lion Heart Autographs said.

Stamped with a date of April 14, 1912, and the White Star Line logo, the menu also included grilled mutton chops, fried and baked jacket potatoes; a buffet of fish, ham and beef; an apple meringue pastry; and a selection of eight cheeses.

There have also been various letters up for sale from the Titanic, including a very haughty message from a female survivor, who faced derision after it was found that her lifeboat, which could have carried 40 people, carried only 13.

Another scandalous letter that went up for sale was from one of the Titanic's most infamous survivors slamming the "unjust inquiry" he faced after he was accused of paying to escape the ship.

Landowner Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon, his wife, Lady Lucy, and their secretary, Mabel Francatelli, were among 12 wealthy passengers who were rowed to safety.

They were saved on the hastily launched Lifeboat Number One — which had a capacity of 40 — and the couple were the only people questioned by Scotland Yard on their return.

The scandal allegedly turned Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon into a recluse.

SEE ALSO: There's a crazy conspiracy theory that the Rothschilds sank the Titanic to set up the Federal Reserve

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Meet Halo: A $330 million luxury airship of the future with a ballroom, open-air viewing deck, and space for a helicopter

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A rendering shows Halo airborne over Monaco

Oligarchs who have tired of their superyachts could instead spend future holidays on Halo, a proposed residential airship with a living area the size of four football pitches and an estimated cost of $330 million.

The project has been conceived and tested by Andrew Winch Designs, a longstanding London-based studio that has contributed to the design and development of some of the world’s largest superyachts, private jets and homes and, though the outlandish renderings of Halo may appear fanciful, the firm claims the inaugural airship could be airborne within a decade of the first order.

A 266ft-long prototype flew in 2013 and has received certification from America’s Federal Aviation Administration.

Anyone tempted to splurge on the futuristic blimp can expect any number of extraordinary privileges beyond the cachet of owning such a distinctive aircraft.

If built according to current plans Halo would feature 20 bedrooms in addition to work spaces, a spa, cinema and ballroom.

An additional cargo deck would accommodate all the additional necessities travellers would need when travelling from one remote terrain to another, with space on board for yachts, helicopters, cars and motorbikes.

A rendering shows Halo airborne over Monaco 2Should passengers be tempted to explore what lies beneath, they would be able to lower the outer ring of Halo to ground or sea level, creating an artificial private island from which to dive or swim.

Opportunities to explore would be virtually unlimited too. Halo has been designed to fly below 12,000 feet so wouldn’t be pressurised. Guests on board could enjoy views of landscapes below from open-air viewing decks and would be able to fly over urban areas, mountain landscapes and uncharted territories.

Transparent flooring in some parts of the aircraft would also facilitate views of what passes directly beneath.

The aircraft has been designed to include inflatable landing pads and would be capable of vertical take-off and landing from both land and water. It is expected that Halo would have a range of 6000 miles and would cruise at 130mph.

Halo features a ballroom, open air viewing deck and space for your yacht and helicopter.It is, its designers say, very fuel-efficient, with lightweight composites in the frame and outer skin minimising drag. Some furniture will be made from carbon fibre, but Andrew Winch Designs will also work with prospective owners to create bespoke interiors tailored to their preferences.

Speaking about the development, the firm’s head of aviation Jim Dixon said: “Halo is a ground-breaking project and will provide a completely new perspective on the world. [It] represents the way we will live and travel in the not-too-distant future.”

The only impediment, it seems, to Halo getting off the ground is the difficulties the company will likely face in finding an interested customer with the means to make their plans a reality. But the release of plans for Halo come at a time when a number of companies and organisations are spearheading the development of unconventional modes of transport.

 Ambitious plans to return Concorde to service were exclusively revealed by Telegraph Luxury last month, while a number of other companies are making progress with their efforts to introduce commercial supersonic flights more generally.

Dutch airline KLM, meanwhile, has also revealed plans for an entirely different “ plane of the future ” and Abu Dhabi-based carrier Etihad recently unveiled its new Residence, a three-bedroom suite aboard A380 aircraft that is being marketed as a “better than first class” cabin.

SEE ALSO: 5 of the world’s most luxurious train trips

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NOW WATCH: 7 incredible things ‘Back to the Future Part II’ got right about 2015

China is reportedly not afraid to fight a war with the US after South China Sea move

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U.S. Navy and Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force ships steam in formation during their military manoeuvre exercise known as Keen Sword 15 in the sea south of Japan, in this November 19, 2014 handout provided by the U.S. Navy.

China is not afraid of fighting a war with the US in the South China Sea, a newspaper with close links to the government said on Wednesday, after Washington sent a warship near artificial islands built by Beijing.

The furious response from official media erupted as the US vowed to send more vessels to the region after the USS Lassen guided missile destroyer sailed within 12 nautical miles of at least one of the disputed land formations.

The move sparked an angry rebuke from Beijing, which summoned the US ambassador and denounced the move as an “illegal” threat to its sovereignty.

“In face of the US harassment, Beijing should deal with Washington tactfully and prepare for the worst,” the fiercely nationalist Global Times said in its editorial.

“This can convince the White House that China, despite its unwillingness, is not afraid to fight a war with the US in the region, and is determined to safeguard its national interests and dignity.”

The newspaper did, however, call for restraint as it kept to a common theme across Chinese media that Beijing occupies the moral high ground in not being provoked by the actions of the US.

“The Pentagon is obviously provoking China. It is time to test the wisdom and determination of the Chinese people,” the newspaper said. “We should stay calm. If we feel disgraced and utter some furious words, it will only make the US achieve its goal of irritating us.”

south china seaThe China Daily said the US was “making trouble out of nothing” and accused Washington of double standards in accusing China of militarising the South China Sea.

“The US warship displays exactly who is the real hand pushing the militarisation of the South China Sea,” its editorial said.

The People’s Liberation Army Daily, the official newspaper of the army, said the US was aiming to sow discord in the region, as it had done in the Middle East.

“The US claims time and time again that they will take responsibly for its allies,” said the front-page editorial under the headline: “Who cannot stand a tranquil South China Sea?”

“However, its actions … worsen the regional security environment and damage regional and national interests, exposing its unreasonable, overbearing and rude side.”

South China Sea Map_05Despite the media furore, the Chinese government’s response has been confined to strongly-worded statements rather than any firm action in the South China Sea.

Beijing’s unwillingness to confront the US with force has been a source of frustration for many on China’s social media networks.

“They walked around our house, and all we could do was shout through the window,” one netizen bemoaned on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter.

“It is a joke that we can only try to stop the US from harming Chinese sovereignty in the South China Sea only with a warning,” another said.

Another angry web-user posted a message addressed to the US Embassy in Beijing which called on Washington to “Get out of the South China Sea!”.

“You messed up in Iraq and Syria,” the post said, “Now what do you want to do in our waters? Do you want to be the one who stirs up the third world war?”

Additional reporting by Ailin Tang

SEE ALSO: The US just called China out on a huge bluff

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NOW WATCH: This 580-ton monster machine is building bridges across China

Pentagon: 'We are in combat' in Iraq

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Iraqi Counter Terrorism Force

The Pentagon has acknowledged that US troops are "in combat" in Iraq after previously characterizing the mission as one of training and assisting Iraqi security forces against Islamic State.

Colonel Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman in Baghdad, told reporters: "We're in combat. I mean, of course, this is a combat zone. There's a war going on in Iraq, if folks haven't noticed. And we're here and it's all around us.

"I thought I made that pretty clear. That is why we all carry guns. That's why we all get combat patches when we leave here, that's why we all receive an immediate danger badge. So, of course we're in combat."

In June last year President Barack Obama said, "We will not be sending US troops back into combat in Iraq."

There are now around 3,500 US troops in Iraq, and the US government has sought to avoid describing their role as a combat one.

Earlier this week Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, said the troops were there only to "train, advise, and assist."

Last week saw the first death of an American serviceman in action in Iraq since 2011.

Master Sgt. Joshua Wheeler died in a firefight as US special operations soldiers and Kurdish forces freed 70 hostages from an ISIS prison near Hawija.

Ash Carter, the US secretary of defense, speaking on Wednesday, said: "Of course he died in combat. That's what happened."

Ash CarterBut he added: "It doesn't represent assuming a combat role. It represents a continuation of our advise and assist mission."

Meanwhile, retired Gen. John Allen, President Barack Obama's special envoy in the campaign against ISIS, said European nations might consider combat operations to battle extremists there.

He said: "I expect that as time goes on, and as more opportunity becomes available to us, we may well see our European partners become more kinetically involved in Syria."

This article was written by Nick Allen Washington from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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A behind-the-scenes look at the British Super Bowl of advertising: Christmas

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John Lewis Christmas ad 2014

Why do Christmas adverts from the likes of John Lewis and Sainsbury's try to make us laugh or cry, rather than sell us products? Harry Wallop goes behind the scenes of the Waitrose Christmas advert with Heston Blumenthal to find out.

How many art directors does it take to light a Father Christmas candle? The answer is an awful lot, along with a blowtorch and two camera crews, and an estimated £1 million budget.

It’s a warm Autumn day and I’m in a house off the North Circular, where the Waitrose Christmas advert is being filmed. There is a home economist in the garden making a fake Christmas cake out of polystyrene and royal icing and more men with hipster beards than you can shake a clapperboard at.

In total, there are 39 people on set and this does not yet include Heston Blumenthal and his entourage, which includes a PR woman and a business manager.

The celebrity chef (who has had a tie up with the supermarket since 2010) is here to film precisely two seconds -- the dusting of some cocoa powder onto his signature Christmas delicacy. In previous years it has been pine-flavoured mince pies and a candied-orange Christmas pudding which fetched up to £500 on the black market when supplies ran low.

waitrose ad

This year it is a chocolate pud – a Chocolate Bucks Fizz Swirl to be precise – which will be getting all the attention, a sort of large mousse that will appeal to Jaffa Cake fans.

After the first take, the director Simon Ratigan, who sports a Van Dyke goatee says: “Heston you were very good. But could we try just a touch less frowny.”

In between the dusting (“some of the best dusting you’ll ever see”, Blumenthal says wryly), a group designers examine various Father Christmas candles, which are lit on a table in the corner. Some are gently blowing the flames, others are firing up the blow torch.

“I’m not really feeling it,” says Rattigan, who has come over to inspect. I can’t tell if he’s being serious.

“Wait for it the candle to burn further down. When it gets down to Father Christmas’s feet. Yes?” He makes clear he’s looking for less than a second -- the perfect shot of a flame fluttering in a draught.

waitrose ad

If you thought this was all a large amount of faff for a 60-second commercial designed to shift a few mince pies, wait until this weekend. This is officially when the full Christmas advert circus rolls into town. And it will be impossible to escape the hoopla.

Lidl and Asda have already released theirs -- low key and high-octane respectively. But in the next few days John Lewis, Tesco, Marks and Spencer, Aldi and most of the rest of the high street will be launching their adverts - some with 'premieres’ in West End hotels. This first big one out of the blocks is Waitrose, which is building up the hype by releasing a series of different teasers on social media. Yes, really. Mini adverts for its advert .

waitrose ad“It has become our Super Bowl,” says Richard Brim, the executive creative director at Adam & Eve/DDB, the agency in charge of this year’s Waitrose advert, which features various scenes of families getting ready for Christmas, intercut with shots of Waitrose suppliers.

He is not the only one to compare the frenzy to America’s Super Bowl -- an event watched by many more for the adverts in half time than the actual sport. 

Bryan Roberts, analyst at Kantar Retail, says: “In the last few years, retailers have become less interested in shifting products, and more concerned about competing over who can out-emote each other. It’s all about tugging at heartstrings or raising a smile.”

The 2011 Christmas advert for John Lewis (also created by Adam&Eve/DDB) is widely acknowledged as godfather of all these . It featured a boy desperately waiting for Christmas, with the twist being he was impatient not to receive a big toy, but because he wanted to give his parents a present.

Last year, the bar was raised even higher with Sainsbury’s three-minute epic set in the trenches of World War I to honour the fallen and the spirit of giving. Or trying to shift a few chocolate bars -- depending on your outlook.

Cold-hard finances do come into it, of course. Waitrose will not reveal the exact budget of its advert, but Rupert Thomas, its marketing director, says it is in the same ballpark as John Lewis’s last year: £1 million to make the advert, and a further £6 million on buying slots on television, the internet and press.

He said: “Ultimately advertising is about sales. That’s what we are looking to try to do. We use a lot of focus groups, econometric models to understand the sales revenues generated by advertising, so we can be pretty confident about the effectiveness of the advert." But ultimately the most important measure is - has Waitrose had a good Christmas?

Clicks on YouTube and buzz on Twitter is all very nice, but the ringing of the tills is what really matters.

waitrose ad

Blumenthal himself is clear his 3 seconds of dusting is about shifting his £13.49 chocolate pud made with Marc de Champagne, popping candy and sprinkled in 'gold’ dust. “There is such a massive chunk of supermarket sales that come at Christmas,” he tells me. “If you’re going to spend money on food and booze, that’s when you do it. That’s when you see more things containing the word 'luxury’.”

But why do so many of us, after our heart strings have been tugged, willingly pass the advert around on social media?

Dimitrios Tsivrikos, who lectures in consumer and business psychology at UCL, says: “Recently, we have become a lot more cynical. We are looking for excuses to communicate emotions and ads are providing us with that platform. Ads have becoming almost a Trojan horse for our emotions of the season.”

His theory that we’d rather upload the Boots or M&S advert onto our Facebook page than send a Christmas card is a compelling one: 24 million people on YouTube clicked on the John Lewis penguin advert last Christmas and 17 million on the Sainsbury’s World War I advert.

As Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of Ogilvy & Mather UK, one of Britain’s leading ad men, says: “We like the experience of buying things from people we trust. It’s about likeability.”

Whether Waitrose can pull off this likeability trick remains to be seen. The advert is warming, helped by the incongruous, but upbeat, soundtrack: the 1948 jazz song Everybody Eats When they Come to my House by Cab Calloway.

The Father Christmas candle? It didn't even make the final cut. It was replaced with a gold-striped rival. Showbusiness can be cruel sometimes.

This article was written by Harry Wallop from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

SEE ALSO: This is how Aldi is killing Waitrose in Britain's supermarket price war

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Syrian rebel groups use caged prisoners as human shields

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The video published by opposition news outlet Shaam Network showed cages of men and women in the street

A Syrian rebel group has defended its decision to use prisoners as human shields against regime and Russian air strikes.

Video footage posted over the weekend showed dozens of people being transported in cages around the besieged Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta.

“Your women are our women,” a teenage boy standing near one of the cages is filmed as saying. “If you want to kill my mother, you will kill them too.”

Shaam News Network, a local opposition outlet, said local rebels had distributed 100 cages, each containing around seven people, to markets and other public spaces around the neighbourhood.

Hitting back at a hail of international criticism, the leader of one of the largest armed groups operating in Eastern Ghouta, Jaish al-Islam, claimed the cages were being used to halt the bombing.

“The cages in Ghouta are not human shields to protect combatants, but rather have been placed among civilians to protect them,” Mohammad Alloush posted on his Facebook account on Monday.

Calling the hostages a “powerful bargaining chip”, another Jaish al-Islam commander, Hamza al-Birqdar, told the specialist news website Syria Direct that the cages had forced a reduction in air strikes, a claim that could not immediately be verified.

Forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, have systematically targeted the rebel-held Damascus suburbs in what activists describe as a campaign to sow terror among civilian populations there.

Still from a video that showed people being transported on the backs of three lorries through war-ravaged streets as young children rode by on bicycles.It is feared that the caged hostages may have been drawn from the hundreds of civilians, mostly from the same Alawite sect as Assad, abducted by Jaish al-Islam and the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra in December 2013.

“Nothing can justify caging people and intentionally putting them in harm’s way, even if the purpose is to stop indiscriminate government attacks,” said Nadim Houry, Human Right Watch's deputy Middle East director, said on Monday.

“Ending Syria’s downward spiral requires international backers of armed groups as well as the government to make protecting civilians a top priority,” he said.

As Syria’s war grinds through its fifth year, the conditions for civilians living in rebel held territory is growing increasingly desperate. Much of the area is under siege by government forces, slowing the delivery of food, medicine and fuel and sending prices skyrocketing.

The death toll has surged following repeated regime attacks on the town of Douma. With burial space running thin, overwhelmed grave diggers have been forced to construct multi-tiered burial pits in order to hold the large numbers of dead.

Last week, at least 70 people were killed and more than 500 injured in an attack on the town’s crowded marketplace. Lasting for six hours, the bloodshed unfolded as Assad’s key allies, Iran and Russia, attended international talks aiming to end the war .

SEE ALSO: Almost as many migrants crossed the Mediterranean in October as in all of 2014

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Rioting over the mysterious death of an Iranian asylum seeker has turned Australia's Christmas Island into a ‘complete disaster zone’

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Australia Christmas Island Detention Center

Security guards fled Australia’s remote migrant detention centre on Christmas Island after the death of an Iranian asylum seeker sparked violence and turned the facility into a “complete disaster zone”.

The Australian government has reportedly despatched riot police to the centre and said it was negotiating with detainees to try to “restore order”. Guards reportedly abandoned the centre but the government insisted there had not been a large-scale riot.

“The perimeter of the centre remains secure and patrols by service provider staff are continuing,” the border authority said in a statement.

A detainee at the Christmas Island immigration detention centre said he feared for his life after a riot broke out at the centre on Monday .

In a phone call to 720 ABC Perth, the man, named Matt, said the situation was “getting worse and worse” and described the scene as “fires everywhere”.

The violence at the centre, which is on a small Australian island in the Indian Ocean, was apparently started by numerous ex-convicts who were detained there before being permanently deported from Australia.

They apparently reacted angrily to the death of Fazel Chegeni, an Iranian Kurdish asylum seeker whose body was found at the bottom of a cliff on the island after he escaped on Friday or Saturday. About 203 detainees are currently being held on the island.

The incident follows numerous outbreaks of violence at Australia’s offshore detention centres in recent years, including a riot at Manus Island off Papua New Guinea last year which one left dead and almost 80 injured.

The centre at Christmas Island was the scene of serious rioting in 2011 in which the facility was set alight and police used tear gas and bean bag shots to restore order.

Christmas Island Australia Refugees Asylum

Detainees said the centre was “a complete disaster zone” and claimed the latest violence was triggered by the “suspicious” death of Mr Chegeni.

"The death [of the Iranian man] is very, very suspicious," a detainee told ABC News.

"I clearly heard him in the morning screaming for help, and the next thing I see they be bringing him in a body bag, and after that the whole place went into lockdown… They are setting fires everywhere.”

Another detainee, named Matt, told ABC News: “It is out of control and we are fearing for our life… There are no guards here. None. They are behind the fence… We don’t know if help is coming or not.”

But Australian authorities played down the violence, saying the detainee’s death was not suspicious and there had not been a riot.

“It started with the Iranian cohort understandably distressed at death of the escapee over the weekend but opportunists used the situation to foment restiveness,” said Australian border authority commissioner Roman Quaedvlieg.

“No actual rioting. No injuries reported. Damage has been reported but extent unknown until we can fully assess.”

The government has launched a controversial crackdown in the past year aimed at deporting serious criminals, including some who have spent most of their lives in Australia. The move has led to the deportation of hundreds of New Zealanders and prompted an angry response from John Key, New Zealand’s prime minister.

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Apple design chief Jony Ive reveals the story behind the new Apple product that Steve Jobs once hated

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Apple pencil

Reinventing an object billions of people across the world know and use every day is no mean feat. The humble pencil has been around for thousands of years, with its origins in the discovery of graphite deposits in Borrowdale in Cumberland circa 1564.

The 19th century’s industrial revolution witnessed the foundation of some of the world’s best-known pencil companies, including Faber-Castell and Steadtler, helping people to express their innermost thoughts on paper. Then again, if anyone is qualified to reimagine the ways in which we communicate, it’s Jony Ive.

Widely known as the British design mastermind behind Apple’s most famous products including the iPod, iPhone and iPad, Ive and his secretive team of designers hidden away in Apple’s Californian headquarters have created the company’s first tablet stylus, the Apple Pencil. It’s a companion accessory to the supersized iPad Pro, a giant 12.9-inch iPad which goes on sale this week, following its grand unveiling alongside the iPhone 6s and 6s Plusback in September.

The Pencil has been designed to replicate the tactile experience of using a pen or pencil as naturally and accurately as possible, albeit with a plethora of artistic implements, from paintbrush and airbrush to felt tip or fountain pen depending on which app you’re using to squiggle on the iPad’s screen.

The decision to name the stylus Apple Pencil, Ive says, is clearly an acknowledgement of how objects and instruments have grown and evolved over hundreds of years. One of the key challenges was designing something in the form of a traditional writing instrument for use in iOS, Apple’s iPad and iPhone operating system largely designed for fingers, not fine points.

“We hoped if you are used to spending a lot of time using paintbrushes, pencils and pens, this will feel like a more natural extension of that experience - that it will feel familiar,” he says, carefully. “To achieve that degree of very simple, natural behaviour, was a significant technological challenge.”

The term natural is a recurrent theme for Apple's recently promoted chief design officer, who shoulders the burden of bridging the tangible and familiar with pushing the boundaries of what is possible through persistent technological innovation. Born in Chingford, London in 1967, he went on to study Industrial Design at Newcastle Polytechnic, now Northumbria University. 

Steve Jobs, Tim Cook and Jony Ive Illustration Portrait

The stark divisions of the digital and analogue worlds appear to occupy Ive. After all, he points out, plugging the Pencil into the iPad to charge it is hardly a natural and intuitive thing to do. "If somebody points that out it’s hardly a moment of considerable epiphany for us!" he laughs. "We don’t like to have to charge multiple devices and manage them either so one of the things we’ve worked extremely hard on is the actual process of charging."

Ive is a quiet and considered man who thinks very carefully before speaking. When talking, you feel he is mentally weighing the value of every word; its significance, its implication. It’s probably this perfectionism and willingness to strip a process back to its bare bones to examine its fundamental components that sets Apple’s electronics apart from its competition, a blend of ergonomics and good old-fashioned problem solving.

“What I think is remarkable is the force of habit, and the fact that while we can have a practice for doing something that has been repetitive and established over many, many years, it doesn’t actually mean there’s any virtue to doing it that way at all,” he ponders.

He grows genuinely excited when he learns I’ve been testing the Pencil for the past few weeks, and implores me to keep on using it to get the most out of it, as his 11-year old sons have.

Apple Pencil

“I always like when you start to use something with a little less reverence. You start to use it a little carelessly, and with a little less thought, because then, I think, you’re using it very naturally. What I’ve enjoyed is when I’m just thinking, holding the Pencil as I would my pen with a sketchpad and I just start drawing,” he enthuses.

“When you start to realise you’re doing that without great intent and you’re just using it for the tool that it is, you realise that you’ve crossed over from demoing it and you’re actually starting to use it. As you cross that line, that’s when it actually feels the most powerful.”

I can't imagine Sir Jony using anything carelessly, let alone flinging the Pencil about with reckless abandon. Ive’s seeming patience in the face of such rapid technological innovation seems remarkable and almost charming, especially given the legions of beady-eyed analysts waiting for Apple’s tech bubble to burst. In an age when other companies are bending over backwards to reinvent the wheel, Jony Ive has reinvented the pencil.

This article was written by Rhiannon Williams from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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China is on a gold 'buying spree'

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China Chinese Women Gold JewelryChina's historic devaluation of the yuan this summer fuelled a gold bar and coin "buying spree" in the country as investors sought to shelter themselves from further market volatility, according to the World Gold Council.

Lower gold prices pushed up overall gold demand by 8pc in the third quarter to 1,120.9 tonnes compared with a year earlier, following an early sell-off by Western investors anticipating a US interest rate rise.

"Having trudged a little wearily through the first six months of the year, the gold market started the third quarter with a jolt," it said in its quarterly gold demand trends report.

"The US dollar gold price dropped to a five-year low and consumers were spurred into action."

Bar and coin demand jumped by 33pc during the quarter to 295.7 tonnes, according to the council, led by a 70pc year-on-year increase in Chinese investment. Jewellery demand rose by 6pc to 631.9 tonnes.

Alistair Hewitt, head of market intelligence, said demand among Chinese investors was driven by the combination of the sharp price drop and the Bank of China's decision to devalue the renminbi in August .

"Gold will always be an asset of choice for Chinese investors and savers.

"A lot of retail investors now want to own something tangible, something real, something which they understand." Alistair Hewitt

"The price dip, the stock market turmoil, the depreciation of the yuan - it gave people an opportunity to reappraise their outlook and as a result you saw surging growth in bar, coin and jewellery demand," he said.

The council also said the appetite for physical gold soared in the US, where demand for Eagle coins rose to levels not seen since the financial crisis.

In Europe, investors continued to plough their money into physical gold amid fears that the Greek crisis would return or Russia's recession would deepen.

UK demand for bar and coin jumped 67pc to 2.5 tonnes as the Royal Mint extended its offering of gold and silver bullion to investors .

Mr Hewitt said the financial crisis had changed the risk appetite among investors, especially in advanced economies.

"The world's changed since 2008, especially attitudes towards financial markets," he said.

"A lot of retail investors now want to own something tangible, something real, something which they understand, and gold is something that taps into these strong emotions, which is why we've seen such strong demand in Europe."

The council said Russia continued to "lead the pack" in terms of central bank purchases.

Mr Hewitt said strong demand was "entrenched" and was likely to continue in the coming months, even as the council cautioned that overall demand was likely to be weaker in the final three months of the year.

"Festival and wedding purchases were brought forward to take advantage of the price dip. Therefore demand towards the end of the year is likely to be correspondingly affected," it said.

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Michael Dell: 'The post-PC era has been great for the PC'

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Micheal Dell

Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, caused a stir this week when he declared that the PC was on its way out. “Why would you buy a PC anymore?” he said in an interview with the Telegraph, discussing the launch of the company’s new super-sized iPad Pro .

His words echoed those of his predecessor, Steve Jobs, who in 2010 proclaimed that the “post-PC era” had arrived.

But for Michael Dell, who has been making computers since the early 1980s, the era of the PC is far from over. In spite of reports that the market is in rapid decline, with shipments in the third quarter falling 10.8pc against the same quarter a year ago, Mr Dell insists that PCs remain a vital part of his company’s business.

“The post-PC era has been great for the PC. When the post-PC era started there were about 180m PCs being sold a year and now it’s up to over 300m, so I like the post-PC era,” he said.

“For the last 11 quarters in a row, we’ve been gaining share in PCs. Last year we outgrew HP and Lenovo . It’s a business with an installed base of 1.8bn PCs, 600m of them are more than four years old, and as we create new beautiful, thin, powerful PCs that are better than the thing you bought five years ago, people will replace the old ones. And we are getting more and more share of that opportunity each quarter that goes by.”

He admits that the market is changing rapidly. While PCs haven’t exactly gone away, (they still make up over half of Dell’s revenues), they now have to compete for attention with a multitude of other devices – including smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, games consoles, and even connected cars and appliances – all of which rely on the cloud to work.

Tim CookThe cloud, in essence, is a series of giant warehouses full of data, with massive pipes transporting packets back and forth to people’s devices over the internet. Users connect to it to access their applications, carry out transactions, stream music and video, and store their digital photos.

While data is in the cloud, there is huge scope for companies to make use of it – and make money from it. Powerful analytics machines can crunch the data to provide insight into how people are behaving and reacting, and companies can then use this information to improve and tailor their products and services.

The sheer analytical and computational power of the cloud also makes it ideal for supporting new data-intensive areas of technology like the internet of things, machine-to-machine communications, machine learning and artificial intelligence .

Mr Dell believes that this so-called “data economy” is the next big opportunity for the technology industry. It is why he is investing $67bn in data storage provider EMC– the biggest technology takeover in history – to bolster the company’s cloud offerings and offer what he describes as “end-to-end solutions”.

“If you take a step back here, you have a thousand times more computing devices than you did ten years ago. It used to be PCs and smartphones; now you have tablets and sensors and cars spinning out all kinds of telemetry data, and all kinds of machines and products and services becoming digital products,” he said.

michael dell bill gates 2001“Within all of those devices, you have a thousand times more applications, and the data is very rich. If you look at companies today, most of them are not very good at using the data they have to make better decisions in real time. I think this is where the next trillion dollars comes from for our customers and for our industry.”

Dell has sold servers for use in cloud systems for many years – with customers including Gap, Honda and the University of Cambridge – and EMC has sold digital storage devices.

Together with VMware, a public company that is 81pc-owned by EMC, and other subsidiaries like Pivotal, which makes data analytics software, Dell and EMC have managed to gain a strong foothold in the cloud computing market.

However, by taking ownership of the entire technology stack, Dell will be able to offer pre-packaged solutions in a way it couldn’t before. Its hope is that it will be able to sell this “converged infrastructure” to firms that want to build their own private clouds, and perhaps even to big cloud hosting companies like Rackspace, many of which now contract manufacturers to put together their hardware.

Mr Dell does not believe, as some do, that the rapid growth in computational power, together with the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence, will put people's jobs at risk . He said that ideally, companies will combine the creativity and intuition of humans with the analytical and computational power of machines to drive industries forward.

He gave the example of the healthcare industry, where Dell already stores more than 10bn medical images for use by doctors and nurses all over the world. He envisions powerful computers working alongside humans to analyse and interpret patient data, and suggest possible diagnoses and cures.

Dell Logo

“You don’t want to replace the healthcare provider, but you want to assist the healthcare provider in saying, ‘There’s an 80pc likelihood, based on what we’re seeing, that it could be this condition here,’” he said.

“This is very different from when you go to medical school, and they teach you to be an all-knowing creature that can solve every problem. There’s something about data and collective intelligence that is incredibly powerful. Consumer companies like Google and Facebook have figured this out, and it’s just starting to come to the rest of the economy.”

He asserted that organisations should take a cautious and informed approach to adopting cloud technologies. As some recent high-profile data breaches have highlighted, putting data in the cloud essentially means entrusting it to someone else, so it is important to check they are taking every possible measure to protect it.

He also condemned the UK government’s draft Investigatory Powers Bill, (or Snooper's Charter), which would place a legal requirement on communication providers to provide unencrypted communications to the police or spy agencies if requested through a warrant.

“Whatever the laws and rules are in a given country, obviously we’ll follow those. But our position on creating a backdoor inside our products so that the government can get in is that it’s a horrible idea,” he said.

“The reason it’s a horrible idea is if you have a back door it’s not just the people you want to get in that are going to get in, it’s also the people you don’t want to get in. All of the technical experts pretty much agree on this. We have an active dialogue with governments around the world, and certainly will engage with the UK government to explain our views from a technical perspective on why things may or may not work.”

 

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This is how the US and UK tracked down Jihadi John

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Jihadi John Mohammed Emwazi

For Jihadi John, death could not have been more different than that of his victims.

While his hostages suffered unimaginable horror as he beheaded them, for him the end came instantaneously and without warning.

For more than a year British and US intelligence agencies had been trying to gain live information on the whereabouts of the masked man whose first victim, the American journalist James Foley, was murdered in a video posted on YouTube in August 2014.

Their efforts finally paid off shortly before midnight on Thursday, when intelligence pinpointed him to a car in the centre of Raqqa, Syria, within a short walk of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s headquarters in the old governorate building.

Mohammed Emwazi – his real name was finally confirmed by David Cameron for the first time today – is understood to have been located by either MI6 or GCHQ, either through a human source on the ground or by monitoring his communications.

The intelligence was passed on to the Pentagon, enabling the operators of an armed Predator drone already in the sky above Raqqa to spot the car in which he was travelling.

At 11.40pm Syrian time (8.40pm GMT) the order to kill was passed to the drone operators at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

jihadi john victims

Controlling their drone via a satellite link, and using a second Reaper as a “spotter” plane, they selected their target and released a Hellfire missile from 10,000ft.

Experts say the Predator may have been several miles away at the time, invisible in the night sky. Its missile, travelling at Mach 1.3 (995mph) arrived at such speed that Emwazi would have known nothing before it struck. At 11.51pm the car, and its four occupants, were blown to pieces.

The result was described by one US official as a “flawless” strike, a “clean hit” that would have “evaporated” Emwazi, with no collateral damage. “We are 99 per cent sure we got him,” the official said.

Unconfirmed reports suggested another of those killed was another of the four British jihadis nicknamed “The Beatles” by their captives because of their English accents. Emwazi, 27, was given the nickname John after John Lennon.

isis jihadi john map

Emwazi’s death, if confimed, was doubly symbolic for the allied forces that hunted him down.

Not only was Isil’s main propaganda tool neutralised, but the location of the strike was within sight of two of the locations most strongly identified with the terrorist group.

The missile strike happened in or next to Clocktower Square, the roundabout chosen by Isil to carry out public executions.

In 2012, the roundabout was the location of the city’s first protests against Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, as a popular uprising spread across the country.

By the summer of 2013, Isil had seized control of the city, and video footage from May of that year shows three rebel soldiers, blindfolded with a green rag reminiscent of the colours of the revolution, before being shot dead.

Emwazi is understood to have been travelling from the Isil headquarters, inside what was once the office of Raqqa's city governor. He may also have been living in the building.

The hunt for Mohammed Emwazi began at the end of 2012, when the security services first suspected he was in Syria. He had been reported missing by his family in August of that year, having left the family home in Queen’s Park, north London and lied about where he was going.

Jihadi John, the then unidentified Isil executioner, became a top priority for MI6 after his video of Foley’s beheading, titled A Message to America, was posted last year.

The first step was to identify the masked, black-clad figure in the footage. With only his eyes visible, intelligence officers on both sides of the Atlantic examined other clues, primarily his voice and accent, but also his skin colour, height, physique and vein patterns on his hands. By September 14 last year his name was known to the UK and US governments.

British and American special forces operating in Syria for the past year have been gathering human intelligence on senior jihadists, paying informers and carrying out snatch raids on low-level commanders who can then be interrogated.

Raqqa, however, has proved impossible for them to infiltrate, so instead an RAF Rivet Joint spy plane, based at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, has been crisscrossing Syria for more than a year, “hoovering up” calls and messages for analysis by spies.

Tal Abyad Raqqa SyriaMuch of the communications chatter was analysed at Ayios Nikolaos, a top secret listening station in Cyprus and the largest UK overseas spy base.

Manned by UK military intelligence officers working for GCHQ, its highly sensitive dome shaped radars have the capability to “look out” over the horizon for up to 400 miles and pull in information from UK warships and submarines deployed in the region.

Despite reports that he had fled to Libya or had been expelled from Isil, the intelligence agencies remained confident he was still in Raqqa, even though he went quiet after his last beheadings, of two Japanese hostages in January.

An air strike targeting a German colleague of Emwazi last month may have been the first sign that Britain and America were hot on his trail, according to security expert Neil Doyle.

An air strike last month targeting a Denis Cuspert, a German associate of Emwazi who mixed in the same circles as him, may have been the first sign that Britain and America were hot on his trail.

David Cameron said Britain and the US had been working "literally around the clock to track him down". He added: "This was a combined effort. And the contribution of both our countries was essential."

Col Steve Warren, a spokesman for the US-led military coalition fighting Isil, said: “This is significant. He was somewhat of an Isil celebrity, somewhat the face of the organisation...he was a prime recruitment tool for the organisation. This guy was a human animal and killing him does probably make the world a little bit of a better place.”

He said coalition forces had been following Emwazi “for some time” and commanders had “great confidence” it was him before they gave the order to kill. The strike had been captured on video and there was no reason to believe any civilian casualties had been caught in the blast, Col Warren said.

From Mohammed Emwazi to Jihadi John The making of a terrorist 1988 Mohammed Emwazi is born

Jihadi John
Emwazi is born in Kuwait. He moves to Britain at the age of six, graduates from the University of Westminster with a degree in computer science and arranges to marry a woman in Kuwait. August 2009 Travels to Tanzania Emwazi goes to Tanzania with two friends, apparently on a safari holiday.

They are stopped at Dar-es-Salaam airport and denied entry. They are flown to Schiphol and questioned.

Their interrogators are believed to include an officer from MI5. September 2009 Emwazi leaves Britain Emwazi travels to Kuwait to stay with his father’s family. May 2010 Emwazi returns to Britain He is stopped at Heathrow, but allowed back into the country, before returning to Kuwait once more. July 2010 Six-hour questioning at Heathrow He returns to Britain, is questioned at Heathrow for six hours.

The following day he tries to go back to Kuwait, but is denied a visa and has to remain in Dubai. 2012 Becomes an English language teacher Emwazi earns a qualification as an English language teacher, applies unsuccessfully for jobs in Saudi Arabia. 2013 Becomes Mohammed al-Ayan Emwazi changes his name to Mohammed al-Ayan. Makes another unsuccessful attempt to get into Kuwait. August 2014 "Jihadi John" executes James Foley

jihadi john isisDressed from top to toe in black, “Jihadi John” makes his first public appearance in a video in which he executes James Foley, an American journalist.

September 2014 Steven Sotloff is killed Emwazi appears in a second video in which Steven Sotloff, another American journalist, is beheaded. "I'm back, Obama, and I'm back because of your arrogant foreign policy toward the Islamic State." September 2014 David Haines is killed Emwazi kills his first British hostage, David Haines, a Scottish aid worker and threatens David Cameron, whom he describes as a lapdog.

October 2014 Alan Henning is killed Emwazi appears in another video showing the beheading of Alan Henning a British taxi driver and aid worker. November 2014 Emwazi appears with a severed head

Emwazi, again dressed in black, appears in a video with a severed head, which he says is Peter Kassig, an American aid worker. January 2015 $200 million demand for Japanese hostages Emwazi demands $200 million to spare the lives of two Japanese hostages, Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa November 2015 Jihadi John 'dead' Emwazi is reported to have been targeted – and according to one source “eviscerated “ - in a US raid. 

This article was written by Gordon Rayner Chief Reporter from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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Facebook's plan to turn 'Messenger' into an app for everything (FB)

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David Marcus

Amid the chaos of Europe’s largest technology conference, the Dublin Web Summit, David Marcus looks perfectly unruffled.

In an immaculate white shirt and blazer, and coiffed salt-and-pepper hair, the soft-spoken French-born head of Facebook Messenger has the air of a man in control. And so he should: since the former president of PayPal joined Facebook in 2014, the app has more than doubled its number of users from 300m to 700m monthly active users. It is now the second most-used messaging app in the world, trailing only its sister-app, Whatsapp, which had 900m users at last count.

Facebook’s boss Mark Zuckerberg has publicly acknowledged the importance of Messenger to the future of Facebook. "One of the fastest-growing and most important members of our family is Messenger. We think this service has the potential to...connect hundreds of millions of new people, and to become a really important communication tool for the world,” he told the audience at the company’s F8 conference in March.

David Marcus’ job is to turn Messenger into a gateway to the mobile web. His plan: to replace apps with chats.

“The only thing people do more than social networking is messaging,” Marcus told me, as we chatted in a Facebook-branded booth, eating from chef-prepared lunch boxes with dozens of Facebook, Instagram and Oculus Rift employees milling around us. “I always like to rewind to what people did before technology. Before the web era, we just had conversations.”

There’s little doubt about it: messengers are some of the most successful apps today . Together, the five biggest ones - Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, Viber, WeChat and Line - account for more than 3 billion accounts.

The start of the messaging wars has been openly declared: upstarts who are vying for our thumbs globally range from the South Korean KakaoTalk to Japan’s Line and Canadian Kik.

Mobile phone messaging apps will be used by more than 1.4 billion consumers in 2015, up nearly 32pc on the previous year, according to eMarketer's first ever worldwide forecast for these services.

That’s roughly 75% of all smartphone users in the world. By 2018, that number will reach 2 billion and represent 80% of smartphone users. Within five years, it could reach total saturation.

In order to grow its user base at an exponential rate, Messenger has expanded its reach beyond that of the 1.5bn-strong Facebook network. “We’ve enabled people who don’t have a Facebook account to get Messenger, using their phone number,” Marcus says, echoing the strategy that Facebook-owned Whatsapp uses.

facebook_Messenger_3501279b 1

But Facebook isn’t just trying to expand your friends-and-family network . Next, Marcus wants you to conduct all your business transactions – with retail assistants, airline ticketing agents, telecoms call centres, robotic PAs – using Messenger.

“On Facebook, we already have 45m active businesses on Pages, and 700m active people on Messenger so the two sides of the network already existed, but there was no bridge between those two worlds to communicate,” he explains.

In August last year, around the time that Mr Marcus joined the company, Facebook spun out Messenger into a standalone app that could be your portal of communication with everyone. As part of this strategy, it announced an entirely new layer called ‘Businesses on Messenger’, which allows users to communicate with businesses and brands within the app.

If you use Marcus’ trick of recalling a pre-digital era, that would be like going over to your local seamstress and chatting with her about buying another dress like the one you bought last week.

If the idea seems far-fetched in our web-first world, there are eerily-similar precedents to look to. In 2011, Chinese tech giant Tencent launched a simple messaging app called Weixin. Now rebranded as WeChat for an international audience, it boasts 600m monthly active users who use the app as a filter for the mobile web: you can hail taxis, book doctor’s appointments, do your grocery shopping or pay your utility bill, all through WeChat.

WeChat allows any developer to build third-party apps into the chat ecosystem, leading to the growth of entirely new companies that exist solely inside WeChat. In September, a WeChat-based butler app called Laiye raised $4m in seed funding just two months after launch; similarly food delivery app Call a Chicken has raised $1.6m.

Neither company has its own app.

But Marcus says Asian app models won’t necessarily work for Messenger, which has a mostly Western market.

North America and Europe already have successful services for apps that exist within WeChat. “When it launched in China, you didn’t have a way to hail a cab other than the integration inside WeChat. Here we have Hailo and Uber and all kinds of apps,” Marcus explained.

Messenger’s proposition is that you won’t have to build or use new apps within their app – you can get rid of apps completely.

Instead, you can talk to businesses via a chat thread, so it feels more like a conversation than a transaction. “A thread of conversation is a much better form of app,” Marcus says. A Messenger chat retains your identity, the context of your previous conversations and always follows on logically from your last message.

Trying to kill apps is a bold ambition, at a time when the mobile app economy is ostensibly booming . With 2.6 million apps available on iOS and Google Play, and 140 billion app downloads in 2014, predictions for the size of the mobile app marketplace by 2017 range from $77bn to $150bn.

But in March this year, technology research firm Gartner published a report saying that app usage is going to plateau, as many smartphone users said they were fatigued – they don’t want to increase their current app usage levels.

“After eight years of searching for, downloading, and using smartphone apps, users are maturing in their usage behaviours,” said Brian Blau, research director at Gartner.“It’s not that smartphone users have lost interest in apps. However, users need to be convinced about the value of the app.”

This article was written by Madhumita Murgia from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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Putin hails diplomatic revival between Russia and UK

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British Britain Prime Minister David Cameron Russia Russian President Vladimir PutinVladimir Putin has hailed a "revival" in relations between Britain and Russia as he said that David Cameron shared intelligence about the Sinai plane crash.

In bilateral talks on the margins of the G20 after the Paris attacks, the Russian President told Mr Cameron that he recognised that the countries’ relations had been strained.

But he said: “The recent tragic events in France show that we should join efforts in preventing terror. Unfortunately our bilateral relations are not of the best.

“But there is certain revival as regards the inter-governmental commission. We created a working mechanism at different levels.

"Russia has analysed the positive groundwork that you have done in the past and to look into the future as to the way we should develop our relations."

He told Mr Cameron, the British Prime Minister, that Russia had “the opportunity to discuss urgent international problems”.

g20Mr Putin also thanked Mr Cameron for an offer to share intelligence data. "I want to thank you for the talk that we had when you expressed your ideas about the root causes and shared the intelligence data," he said.

It comes after Russia followed Britain in halting flights to Sharm el-Sheikh earlier this month after UK ministers said they feared the Sinai plane crash had been caused by an "explosive device".

There was speculation that Russia's about-turn came after Britain shared intelligence about the apparent bombing – a suggestion now confirmed for the first time by Mr Putin.

At the bilateral meeting, Mr Cameron said: “We are meeting together after the appalling terrorist attacks in France, and it is clear to me that we must work together to defeat this scourge of terrorism that is a threat to Britain, a threat to Russia and a threat to us all.

"I'm sure we can discuss that and the situation in Syria this morning. And as you say there's an opportunity to talk about our bilateral relationship as well."

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The 2nd-largest diamond ever found was just recovered from a mine in Africa

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Lucara diamond big

A small Canadian diamond company has announced the discovery of the world's second-biggest gem-quality diamond ever recovered.

Lucara Diamond Corp. said the 1,111-carat stone was found at its Karowe mine in north-central Botswana.

The Type IIa diamond measures 65 millimetres by 56mm by 40mm.

The biggest gem-quality diamond ever found is the Cullinan diamond, a 3,106-carat stone found in the Premier mine in South Africa in 1905.

It was cut into several polished gems, the two largest of which are part of Britain's crown jewels.

William Lamb, CEO of Lucara Diamond Corp., said: "This historic diamond recovery puts Lucara and the Karowe mine amongst a select number of truly exceptional diamond producers."

"The significance of the recovery of a gem-quality stone larger than 1,000 carats, the largest for more than a century and the continued recovery of high-quality stones from the south lobe, cannot be overstated," he added.

Earlier this month, Hong Kong's sixth-richest man, Joseph Lau, bought the Blue Moon diamond for a record £32 million ($49 million).

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Inside the 'Ant Trade' — how Europe's terrorists get their guns

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French police conduct a control near the Franco-Italian border in La Turbie, as security increases ahead of the World Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21), France, November 13, 2015.   REUTERS/Eric Gaillard

When they first pulled him over for a routine check on the Bavarian Autobahn, police saw little unusual about the middle-aged motorist in the rented VW Golf.

Aged 51 and from Montenegro, he told police he was on off on holiday to Paris, and was looking forward to climbing the Eiffel Tower.

Only when officers searched his car under a new procedure to check for illegal migrants did they discover there seemed rather more to his itinerary than sightseeing.

For stashed in hidden compartments was a terrifying arsenal of weapons, including several Kalashnikovs, hand grenades, a pistol and 200 grammes of dynamite.

An underworld armourer off to supply a gangster client for a particularly bloody feud? Or a would-be quartermaster to the terror network that brought carnage to the French capital last weekend?

As of yet the exact plans of the suspect, who was arrested eight days before the Paris attacks, are still a mystery. Identified only as Vlatko V by German officials, he remains in the custody of German police, who are “intensively investigating whether there is a connection with the events in Paris”, according to Bavarian interior ministry.

Either way, though, the case provides a disturbing snapshot of what security experts call the "Ant trade", the cross-border weapons traffic that arms criminals - and now also terrorists - all over Europe.

"We call it the Ant Trade because in Europe, it tends to be lots of individual operators carrying one piece at a time, rather than big lorry loads," said An Vranckx, an expert with the Belgium-based Group for Research and Information on Peace and Security, which monitors the global black market in small arms. "But if that ant column is big enough, it all adds up."

Paris Police Raid Officer

In Britain, the "Ant Trade" showed its deadly cumulative effect two years ago, when Dale Cregan, a Manchester gangster, used a hand-grenade in an attack that killed two female police officers.

The grenade was part of a batch of several hundred from former Yugoslavia believed to have been been used by everyone from Ulster paramilitaries through to drug gangs in north-west England. And as David Dyson, a British firearms analyst, told The Telegraph last week: "If a guy like that in Manchester can get hold of this kind of stuff, people who follow Isil may be able to do the same".

Mercifully, true weapons of war are still rare on Britain's streets, thanks to draconian gun laws imposed in the wake of the Hungerford and Dunblane massacres, and to our easily-policed island borders.

Indeed, when Scotland Yard parades confiscated underworld firearms stashes, they are more likely to be made up of World War II antiques and converted blank firers - a sign that the gun black market is not exactly a land of plenty.

It is, however, a different story on the Continent, where thanks to the borderless Schengen zone, those involved in the "Ant Trade" face little more than a long-distance commute to and from their supply sources in the ex-Communist countries of eastern Europe.

Belgium Belgian Brussels Grand Place Soldier Police Officer Gun

In the Soviet era, the likes of Bulgaria and Ukraine maintained vast small arms silos in anticipation of all-out war with Nato, and when the Iron Curtain finally fell, those weapons leaked all over the world, fuelling conflicts from West Africa to the Balkans.

In Albania alone, for example, some half a million weapons were pillaged from state depots following the collapse of the government in 1997, while in Serbia and Bosnia, nearly two million illegal weapons are believed to have remained in private hands since the civil war.

Neighbouring Montenegro, the home of the man arrested on the German Autobahn, is similarly awash. Indeed, it may be no coincidence that Montenegro is also the home Europe's top armed robbery gang, the Pink Panthers, whose raids on high-end jewellery stores in London and Paris netted them £100m in the last decade.

But while the Panthers' exploits have made them folk legends - a drama about their exploits, featuring John Hurt, hit British TV screens earlier this month - the same weapons supplies that made them so formidable are now also being accessed by terrorists.

For France, the wake-up call came in 2012, when Mohammed Merah, a petty criminal-turned-jihadist, killed seven people in a rampage targeting French servicemen and the Jewish community around Toulouse.

Belgian police stage a raid, in search of suspected muslim fundamentalists linked to the deadly attacks in Paris, in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek, November 16. 2015.

His arsenal later turned to include a Kalashnikov and a Uzi submachine gun, prompting the French newspaper, Le Figaro, to ask: "How was he able to buy all these guns, like one buys yoghurts?"

The answer was that he had not done so legally: in France, as in the rest of the European Union, automatic weapons like Kalashnikovs are already strictly forbidden.

Instead, all Merah had to do was meet his contacts in the French underworld, which has a strong presence in France's deprived immigrant banlieus as it is. According to Nic Marsh, a small arms expert at Oslo's Peace Research Institute, some 4,000 machine guns are thought to be in circulation just in the banlieus alone.

In the tough southern port city of Marseille, for example, Kalashnikovs have been used in dozens of drug-gang killings in the last five years, and were even fired at the city's police chief during a visit to a crime-plagued housing estate in February.

Was that how the Paris cell also got their Kalashnikovs? Right now, investigators are not saying. But given that several of the terrorists planned their operation from neighbouring Belgium, police may well be looking once again at a shabby back-street market behind Brussels' main railway station, where Kalashnikovs are known to change hands for as little as £750.

ISIS ISIL Islamic State Fighters Tank GunsIt was here that the Charlie Hebdo attackers are believed to have sourced their machine guns, which police are now said to have traced back to a dealer in Slovakia. In tracking down the source, however, they also exposed a gaping loophole in Europe's gun control laws.

For the dealer in the question was no shady underworld figure but a registered gun store, which sold such firearms entirely legally as "de-activated" weapons.

Such guns are legally available all over the European Union for use as props in movies, historical re-enactments and private collections. But the safety standards that they have to be deactivated to vary hopelessly from country to country.

While British weapons are all but impossible to reactivate, some countries require little more than a pin driven through the barrel that is easily removed. It was only this summer that the EU introduced continent-wide safety standards, having admitted last year that it was currently "unprepared to address the potential risks of reactivation.”

However, even if that loophole is closed, the EU still faces a tough task in the Balkans, particularly in former rogue states like Serbia, which now wants to join the EU.

Serbia cooperates with the South Eastern and Eastern Europe Clearinghouse for the Control of Small Arms and Light Weapons (SEESAC), a UN project designed to take illegal weapons out of circulation.

But a three-month amnesty earlier this year saw only 2,000 guns handed in, and while security been improved at state weapons depots, "theft of weapons from storage facilities continues to be a problem", according to Seesac spokesman Ivan Zverzhanovski.

An armed French CRS policeman secures the scene at the raid zone in Saint-Denis, near Paris, France, November 18, 2015 to catch fugitives from Friday night's deadly attacks in the French capital.He says the EU now needs a "complete change of approach" in the wake of this year's horrors in Paris. "This demand was originally seemingly driven by organised crime, but I think that since the Charlie Hebdo attacks, it has become clear that terrorist groups are also increasingly likely to favour firearms," he told The Telegraph.

"This points to the nexus between organised crime and terrorist groups. On amnesties, we need both the countries in question to take the issue more seriously, and also the EU to step up support both politically and financially."

Yet even if Mr Zverzhanovski to get his wish, the flow of weapons would be unlikely to dry up. Increasingly, criminals are turning to the "Dark Web" to get their guns, with 57 people arrested in France alone last year for buying firearms, including Kalashnikovs, over the internet.

And even if the Balkans was cleaned up for good, the vast external borders that Europe is already struggling to police against illegal migration may simply attract "Ant Trade" from elsewhere. Already, weapons have been reported trickling in from newly-failed states like the Ukraine and Libya. They are also presumed to be coming in via Turkey from Isil's home turfs in Syria and Iraq.

"If you can bring drugs in across these borders, you can bring Kalashnikovs in, and there really isn't much we can do stop it, other than having good intelligence," said Mr Dyson.

In the meantime, Europe's only hope is to ensure that those involved in the "Ant Trade" face the stiffest possible penalties, says Iain Overton, whose new book Gun Baby Gun studies the impact of global gun crime. Ironically, Isil's sheer psychotic bloodthirstiness may also finally bring about a sense of caution among a trade not known for its scruples.

"Anyone who sells guns to someone knowing that person is a terrorist is as guilty as they are," he says. "The penalties for trafficking should be as severe as for those who are committing the crimes."

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Who are the Turkmen reportedly holding a downed Russian pilot?

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An armed fighter from Liwa al-Nasr (Victory Brigade) stands with his hands in his pockets, in the Turkmen mountains, Latakia countryside April 18, 2015.

The downing of a Russian fighter jet on Syria's Mount Turkmen has thrown the spotlight on to its inhabitants, part of the broader Turkmen community that stretches across northern Syria and Iraq.

In Syria the Turkmen, who are linguistically and ethnically Turkish, live alongside Arabs and Kurds but have aligned mostly with non-jihadist rebel groups that oppose Syrian President Bashar Assad.

They historically objected to the Arab nationalism of the Assad regime's Baath party, which stressed assimilation to the Arab language and culture.

In turn, the regime has frequently regarded them as a fifth column working in favor of Ankara.

Around a dozen Turkmen militias have formed, some directly supported by the Turkish government. It is one of these, Alwiya al-Ashar, that is reportedly holding one of Russia's downed pilots.

They have been fighting alongside other rebel groups, including the Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and more moderate brigades, in Latakia province, which runs to the sea along the Turkish border in the northwest.

In recent days, thousands of civilians have fled over the border, saying they feared Russian bombing raids in support of regime forces in the area. Another 5,000 arrived at a refugee camp at Arfali, on the Syrian side of the border.

According to the governor of the Turkish province of Hatay, Ercan Topaca, 28 civilians arrived injured and one died in a hospital.

The clash that led to the downing of the Russian jet today may be connected to that fighting.

Alwiya al-Ashar is linked to a Turkish and CIA-backed logistics supply program that funnels a near-constant stream of small arms, ammunition, and cash for salaries to rebel groups across northern Syria.

SEE ALSO: Turkey's downing of a Russian jet is not the start of World War III

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Schoolchildren in India 'made to wear color-coded wristbands to show caste'

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A schoolboy walks amid fumes emitted from fumigation work carried out by a municipal worker (unseen) in a residential locality in New Delhi, India, September 15, 2015

Pupils in some southern Indian schools are being made to wear colour-coded wristbands to indicate whether they belong, it has been claimed.

The wristbands, which come in shades of red, yellow, green and saffron, indicate whether they are a lowly Dalit (or untouchable) caste, or one of various “upper" castes,

The Indian government has written to officials in Tamil Nadu's Tirunelveli district ordering them to investigate claims made in an exposé in the Indian Express newspaper which claimed that the practice, which is illegal, is used by student gangs to target victims on the basis of caste.

“If it the practice is prevalent in these areas it is a serious violation of human rights and in particular the Dalit community students,” Justice Darmar Murugesan, who ordered the investigation.

“The notice has been issued. After the receipt of the report we will suggest to the government how to contain this type of illegal and sinful act.”

The practice is enforced by powerful community leaders rather than the schools themselves. It is believed to have emerged in the 1990s, when upper-class leaders began asking fellow caste members to wear blue-and-yellow bands to identify themselves.

“It is community, upper-caste people who insist on these things,” Justice Murugesan told the Telegraph. “They also insisted that Dalit students be admitted into school only if they wear these types of wristband in green and red.”

Other caste markers, including colour-coded vests and tilaka - Hindu forehead marks - are also used.

The practice has not just let to discrimination at schools, but wider communal clashes between castes, he warned.

Local officials have asked the state’s education department to ban the wristbands, but no written order has yet been issued.

Schoolgirls make their way to their school through a vegetable field early morning in New Delhi December 11, 2013.Teachers in local schools are subject to the same caste pressures as the children and are often powerless to act, said Justice Murugesan. But Maria Soosai, of the Tamil Nadu-based Institute of Human Rights Education, believes more could be done.

“There is discrimination at the school level too,” he said. “Some teachers are intervening but it’s not enough.”

“The laws are there to block these activities, but teachers need to educate schoolchildren not to take part in these activities.”

Although there was no suggestion in the Indian Express report that teachers were encouraging the system, one local school headmaster told the newspaper that the coloured vests “come in handy during a game of basketball to draw up teams based on caste lines”.

There are also fears that such practices could be spreading.

"In some parts of India I know that even Dalit students are not allowed entry into a school where upper caste community people are studying. They maintain separate schools for Dalits. All these things we can take to the central governments’ notice," said Justice Murugesan.

Either practice is illegal under India’s Scheduled Castes act.

But there is no doubt that they occur. A 13-year-old Dalit student told the Indian Express that although yellow was his favourite colour, he could not wear it for fear of being abused by the more powerful Thiyar class, which has claimed the colour.

He said: “We get a yellow kayaru from temples, but I can’t wear that on my wrist. If I did, they would taunt me."

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