Daily Archives: 11/07/2017


‘Hamilton’ Creator Visits Puerto Rico, Announces $2.5M Fund

“Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda made sandwiches, took selfies and announced a partnership with a nonprofit group for a $2.5 million hurricane recovery fund during a trip Tuesday to Puerto Rico.   Miranda said seven local groups already have received grants …


Retired All-Star Pitcher Halladay Killed in Plane Crash

Retired Major League Baseball pitcher Roy Halladay was killed Tuesday when his private plane crashed into the Gulf of Mexico near St. Petersburg, Florida. Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco said Halladay, a former All-Star, was flying a light sport plane …


Twitter Doubles Character Limit to 280 for (Nearly) Everyone

Twitter says it’s ending its iconic 140-character limit — and giving nearly everyone 280 characters.   Users tweeting in Chinese, Japanese and Korean will still have the original limit. That’s because writing in those languages uses fewer characters.   The …


Rodney Crowell, Kelsea Ballerini Honored by ASCAP

Singer songwriters Rodney Crowell and Kelsea Ballerini and hit country songwriter Ashley Gorley were honored at the ASCAP Country Music Awards in Nashville, Tennessee on Monday.   Crowell, who announced earlier this year he was cancelling all his 2017 tour …


Indonesia Threatens to Block WhatsApp Messaging Over Obscene Content

Indonesia on Monday vowed to block Facebook’s WhatsApp Messenger within 48 hours if the service did not ensure that obscene Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) images were removed. WhatsApp, which is widely used in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, …


Snapchat Outage Prompts Complaints on Twitter

Snapchat faced a worldwide outage for at least four hours on Monday, prompting a flood of complaints on rival mobile application Twitter a day before posting its third quarterly earnings as a public company. “We’re aware of the issue and …


Catalonia Faces 10 Percent Tourism Hit in Fourth Quarter

The restive Spanish region of Catalonia faces a potential $500 million financial hit in the fourth quarter as business-related travel dips following the attack in Barcelona and the uncertainty generated by the disputed independence referendum.   In an interview Monday …


Stephen Hawking Says Technology Could End Poverty But Urges Caution

Technology can hopefully reverse some of the harm caused to the planet by  industrialisation and help end disease and poverty, but artificial intelligence (AI) needs to be controlled, physicist Stephen Hawking said on Monday. Hawking, a British cosmologist who was …


Forget Rice, Dish Up Aztec Pigweed to Help Feed the World

From Aztec pigweed to dragon beans – several ancient, often forgotten foods are making their way to the dinner table in an effort to diversify the diet of a growing global population. In an initiative to cut the world’s dependency …