In previous al-Shabab attacks, the perpetrators were often Somali; in the Nairobi hotel siege, many were Kenyan.

At DLD, an annual tech conference in Munich, the week before Davos, Sheryl Sandberg asks What Kind of Internet Do We Want? Her company is suffocating the open web, so it’s really not her question to ask. Imho, ultimately we'll think of the big tech companies the way we think of any powerful dominant industry. Imagine the CEO of Exxon on stage asking What Kind of Environment Do We Want? The pundits would say "see there's nothing to worry about, Exxon wants the best for us." And of course they don't. Not their job.

Also I see what she did there. Sandberg asks what kind of internet do we want. Hah. As if what we want has anything to do with it. They hire good PR consultants and speech writers at Facebook. The best. Remember, never automatically accept the premise of a question.

Most Android smartphone vendors have been notorious for the time they take to roll out the newest Android OS updates to their respective handsets. To tackle this, Google in 2017 announced Project Treble, which bypasses some middlemen in delivering new updates to consumers. With Project Treble now supported by all Android phone makers, in theory updates should roll out to us faster than before. To test this, news blog AndroidAuthority looked at the data to see where things stand. From the report: On average, Nougat updates took about 192 days to reach key devices, while Oreo was slightly faster at 170. Android Pie updates hit devices much faster, averaging just 118 days from Google's launch to significant OEM rollout. That's a significant improvement, though we're still waiting on updates from LG and HTC, which could drag this average back up. Most manufacturers are faster at providing updates now, but a few are slower. Huawei, Samsung, and Xiaomi were noticeably quicker this time around, bringing updates to key devices before the end of 2018. OnePlus and Sony were especially fast, but they've always been speedier than most. Disappointingly, Motorola has rolled out updates to its flagship Z series slower over the last few years.

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James Ball writing in the Columbia Journalism Review says tech companies should not fund journalism, for the same reasons I've been giving for decades. But he misses one. Tech has created a level playing field where you and I have equal chance to write the news as any comfortable Church of The Savvy pundit. Journalism wants money from tech so they can keep pretending they are the source of truth for the masses, when their lazyness and corruption have made our lives worse. We need an Indivisible for journalism. Journalism should compete with tech, as distasteful as it may be for them to create a level playing field where all of us can report the news. Tech had the guts to give all of us an equal voice. Journalism must match that.

Defending champion beaten in four sets by 20-year-old who described himself as the 'happiest man on earth right now'.

Thousands of women were systematically underpaid at Oracle, one of Silicon Valley's largest corporations, according to a new motion in a class-action complaint that details claims of pervasive wage discrimination. From a report: A motion filed in California on Friday said attorneys seek to represent more than 4,200 women and alleged that female employees were paid on average $13,000 less per year than men doing similar work. An analysis of payroll data found disparities with an "extraordinarily high degree of statistical significance," the complaint said. Women made 3.8% less in base salaries on average than men in the same job categories, 13.2% less in bonuses, and 33.1% less in stock value, it alleges. The civil rights suit comes as the tech industries faces increased scrutiny of gender and racial discrimination, including sexual misconduct, unequal pay and biased workplaces. The case against Oracle, which is headquartered in Redwood Shores and provides cloud computing services to companies across the globe, resembles high-profile litigation against Google, which has also faced repeated claims of systematic wage discrimination.

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The speech Trump's secretary of state gave in Cairo put the thuggish truth of American imperialism on full display.

The deadliest attack in Colombia for 15 years killed 21 people and injured dozens more.

Proposed new Bangsamoro envisions a more powerful and possibly larger political unit for country's Muslim minority.

From a report: Last summer, Justin Sun, the 28-year-old CEO of Tron acquired BitTorrent, the 15-year-old file-sharing company that is one of the biggest decentralized networks in existence for $140 million. He wanted to take advantage of blockchain, the decentralized ledger that is both secure and transparent, and combine it with the decentralized file-sharing app, offering crypto rewards to those who share their computers for file sharing. And this week, Sun appeared on stage with former basketball star Kobe Bryant at the NiTron Summit, which drew more than 1,000 attendees. Tron has also created a $100 million fund to convince game developers to make games that use Tron's protocol and its TRX cryptocurrency. The promise is to create a crypto network that is both fast -- at 2,000 transactions per second -- and reliable. I interviewed Sun backstage at the NiTron Summit, where he said he wanted his company to become the major blockchain platform that could one day be the decentralized alternative to the centralized internet networks of Google, Facebook, and Apple. But to make that happen, Sun has to get mainstream people like the 100 million BitTorrent users to trust cryptocurrency, even after a coin market slide that has wiped out billions in value, including taking Tron's TRX market value down from near $20 billion to $1.6 billion today.

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At least eight killed, several injured in attack on UN peacekeepers camp in Mali's northern Kidal region.

Greece's agreement with Macedonia has angered Greek nationalists, who view Macedonia as an integral part of Greece.

Despite threats reportedly growing, fewer than 100 of 12,000 Russia-affiliated parishes have joined the new church.

UNRWA accuses Israel of violating 1946 Refugee Convention over its plan to shut agency's schools in East Jerusalem.