UbuneBlog

The Taliban raised $400 million last year through taxes, donations, and extorting businessmen and narcotics dealers in Afghanistan, according to a new U.N. report. The Islamist group has also taken hundreds of millions of dollars from the billions pumped into Afghanistan for development projects, according to the report released this week by U.N. sanctions experts […]

Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the World Wide Web, has warned governments that attempts to block the Internet were doomed to failure due to its scattered structure. Speaking at the launch of a league table showing which countries use the web most effectively, Berners-Lee said the lack of a global Internet “off-switch” meant authoritarian […]

Guy Gerald brought wild flowers from his garden and a poem he wrote for Diana, laying them gently among the mementos that dotted a makeshift Paris shrine to the princess on Friday, 15 years after she died. The 65-year-old was one of a steady trickle of tourists, well-wishers and die-hard Diana fans who filed past […]

In his 1997 book, Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee wrote that a successful company needs a “heightened sense of crisis”, so that it always looks ahead even when it’s doing well, and needs to be able to respond to change. It’s a credo that has driven Samsung Electronics to become the world’s biggest technology firm by […]

Move over Wi-Fi, there’s a new wireless technology coming. So-called “Super Wi-Fi,” which offers a bigger range than existing hotspots, is being deployed in the United States and generating interest in a number of countries, including Britain and Brazil. Super Wi-Fi is not really Wi-Fi because it uses a different frequency and requires specially designed […]

A Chinese man was arrested for attempted theft and taken to hospital for a dose of laxatives on Wednesday after swallowing a diamond worth nearly $14,000 at a gem exhibition in Sri Lanka, police said. The 32-year-old had asked the stall owner for a close inspection of the diamond on the opening day of Facets […]

A hacker group has claimed to have obtained personal data from 12 million Apple iPhone and iPad users by breaching an FBI computer, raising concerns about government tracking, but the FBI said it never had the data. The group called AntiSec, linked to the hacking collective known as Anonymous, posted one million Apple user identifiers […]

Already chilling youth unemployment figures around the world are set to worsen as the impact from the eurozone debt crisis spreads, an International Labor Organization report said Tuesday. “As the euro area crisis continues in its second year, the impacts are spreading further, slowing down economies from East Asia to Latin America,” the U.N. labor […]

Australia’s Jacqueline Freney on Monday won her fifth gold of the Games in the stand-out performance of the day, after a row involving sprinter Oscar Pistorius overshadowed the sporting action. World record holder Freney, who has cerebral palsy, took gold in a new Paralympic best of 1min 9.39sec in the S7 100m freestyle to add […]

NASA has shown off the first high-resolution, colour portrait images taken by the Mars rover Curiosity, detailing a mound of layered rock where scientists plan to focus their search for the chemical ingredients of life on the Red Planet. The stunning images, unveiled on Monday, reveal distinct tiers near the base of the five-kilometre-tall mountain […]