Lebanese army closes numerous illegal crossings with Syria to stop smuggling

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BEIRUT, (Xinhua) -- The Lebanese army on Wednesday closed numerous illegal crossings along with border with Syria in North Bekaa in a bid to stop smuggling between the two countries, TV Channel LBCI reported. According to LBCI, smuggling between the two countries costs Lebanon about 600 million U.S. dollars every year. This is not the first time that the Lebanese army closes illegal crossings between the two countries. Last year, the army closed more than 50 illegal crossings along the borders. In the past years, the illegal border crossings between Syria and Lebanon have witnessed the smuggling of products ranging from fuel and arms to antiquities. Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, more and more reports have emerged about the illegal trade in cultural relics looted from the country's historical sites, which have been devastated by waves of fighting. According to the Lebanese Directorate General of Antiquities, security forces seized more than 300 cultural objects between 2012 and 2014. Maroun Chammas, head of the Association of Petroleum Importing Companies, previously said about 1.5 million liters of petrol and fuel oil is smuggled from Syria to Lebanon on a daily basis, representing 20 percent of petrol consumption in the country.

15 years ago, Google's CEO had a brilliant response to a tricky interview question – and it helped him get hired

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by cnbc.com --Tom Popomaronis, Contributor -- When it comes to job interviews, we all want to give answers that make us stand out from the rest of the candidates. That means knowing how to answer each question, including the tricky ones designed to stump you. But what if you don't know the answer to a question? That's a problem Google CEO Sundar Pichai faced in 2004, when he first interviewed at the company for the VP of product management position. In a 2017 chat with students at his alma mater, Indian Institute of technology, Pichai shared details about his interview experience at one of the world's largest tech companies. In the first few rounds, Pichai said the interviewers asked him what he thought of Gmail.

There was just one problem: Google had just announced the email service that very same day, on April 1st. "I thought it was an April Fool's Day joke," Pichai said. He responded by saying he couldn't answer the question because he hadn't been able to use the product. "It was only in the fourth interview when someone asked, 'Have you seen Gmail?' I said no. So he actually showed it to me. And then the fifth interviewer asked, 'What do you think of Gmail?' And I was able to start answering it then," Pichai said at the talk. Most candidates would have attempted to make something up before trying to move on to the next question. Pichai did the exact opposite and ended up impressing his interviewers (after all, he got the job).

Here's why his response was so brilliant:

1. He displayed "intellectual humility" More often than not, telling an interviewer you don't know the answer to something will dock off a few points, but it's better than coming up with something that may be completely false. "Successful, bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don't learn how to learn from that failure." -Laszlo Bock, Former senior VP of people operations at Google Science agrees, too. Research has shown that people with "intellectual humility" – or, as they say, the willingness to admit what you don't know – are better learners. Laszlo Bock, Google's former senior VP of people operations, calls it one of the top qualities he looks for in a candidate.

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Pope arrives in Abu Dhabi

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by catholicherald.co.uk -The Pope was welcomed by Emirati Prime Minister Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum -- The sun had set long before Pope Francis arrived in Abu Dhabi on February 3, but Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince, and Egyptian Sheik Ahmad el-Tayeb, grand imam of al-Azhar, still went to the airport to welcome him. It had been a rare rainy day on the southeast coast of the Arabian peninsula, which, the Pope told reporters traveling with him, was seen as a sign of blessing by the people of the United Arab Emirates. Since the Pope arrived at almost 10pm local time, the official welcoming ceremony was scheduled for the next day. But there was a brief greeting inside the President’s Airport. The Pope then went to Al Mushrif Palace, the government’s guesthouse for visiting foreign dignitaries.

Pope Francis boarded the Alitalia plane for the almost six-hour flight to Abu Dhabi after praying the Angelus at noon with pilgrims in St Peter’s Square. After reciting the Marian prayer, the Pope asked the crowd to pray for the success of his “brief but important trip.” The Pope was scheduled to spend less than 48 hours in the UAE. Many people had wondered if, during his stay in Abu Dhabi, Pope Francis would mention the ongoing war in Yemen and the humanitarian catastrophe it has provoked; the UAE has a leading role, along with Saudi Arabia, in fighting the Houthi armed movement in Yemen. Both sides have been accused of serious human rights abuses, including targeting civilians and preventing the distribution of emergency humanitarian aid. Pope Francis spoke of the crisis after reciting the Angelus. “With great concern I am following the humanitarian crisis in Yemen,” he told the crowd in St Peter’s Square. “The population is worn out by the long conflict and many, many children are suffering from hunger, but they are unable to access the stores of food.” “Brothers and sisters,” he said, “the cry of these children and their parents rises to God.”

Pope Francis called on “all sides involved” and the international community “to urgently promote the observance of the agreements that have been reached, ensure the distribution of food and work for the good of the population.” “I invite everyone to pray for our brothers and sisters in Yemen,” he said, leading the recitation of the Hail Mary. “Let us pray hard because there are children who are hungry, who are thirsty, who do not have medicine and are in danger of dying,” the Pope said. Before praying the Angelus, Pope Francis met at his residence with a dozen refugees — Christians and Muslims — being assisted by the papal almoner and the Rome-based Sant’Egidio Community; the group included a couple of women from Yemen, a family from Morocco and a married couple from Iran, Sant’Egidio said in a statement.

When a job interview goes very wrong

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By Peter Rubinstein -bbc.com - Olivia Bland, a 22-year-old from Manchester looking for a job in communications, knows how a job interview is supposed to go. A handshake, a few questions about strengths and weaknesses, some CV inspecting and a pleasant send-off. “They’re usually casual,” Bland says, “and definitely not two hours long.” But earlier this week, an interview she had with tech firm Web Applications UK left her in tears. In a viral tweet, she alleged that chief executive Craig Dean degraded and humiliated her about everything from her music taste to her parents’ marriage. Bland was offered the job but declined, likening Dean’s behaviour to that of an abusive ex. “He went on from attacking my writing to attacking me, including the way I sat and how I held my arms,” she says. Her tweet was shared tens of thousands of times, and prompted Dean to post an apology saying it had not been his intent to see anyone hurt. Web Applications UK has publicly denied Bland’s claims, but did not respond to BBC Capital for comment.

Stress test

The type of experience described by Bland is known as a ‘stress interview’ – a technique to test how applicants deal with pressure by taking them out of the comfort zone of expected questions and answers. One example is a trend that was prevalent in the tech industry earlier this decade – where an interviewer would ask a candidate bizarre questions such as “why are manhole covers round?” or instruct them to design something on the spot. The goal isn’t to get an exact answer – instead it’s to see how a candidate reacts and to test their thought process. “There are certainly different kinds of stress associated with many positions - achieving results, meeting deadlines, dealing with difficult clients, for example,” says Neal Hartman, senior lecturer in managerial communication at MIT. “The stress interview can create conditions to see how an applicant would handle those challenges.” Stress interviews can also be used to simulate certain situations, such as testing customer service agents who need to be prepared to deal with abusive phone calls, says Kim Ruyle, president of Inventive Talent Consulting. In such situations, the candidate would need to be told in advance. In any case, there’s a stark difference between asking a tough question and belittling a candidate, Ruyle says, adding that verbal abuse in any workplace setting is inappropriate and should never be part of the interview.

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Why Microsoft is 'sending shivers down Amazon's spine'

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By Alyssa Newcomb -- nbcnews.com -- Amazon has a history of dropping cash on companies, like its $13.7 billion cash acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017. But when it announced in its latest earnings report that it planned to increase investments in 2019, the company’s shares fell 5 percent, even dropping into bear territory on Friday. But Amazon may want to continue to buy up smaller companies, said Daniel Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities — especially if it wants to keep up with cross-town rival Microsoft, which is rapidly advancing in the "cloud" arms race. “Amazon's biggest nightmare is what is happening on the other side of town in Seattle and Redmond, Washington," said Ives. "Microsoft is really starting to get a strut in their step with cloud and that is sending shivers down the spine of Amazon. If you look at what Microsoft are doing on the cloud side, they are aggressively going after Amazon."

Amazon reported $7.4 billion in cloud revenue last year, marking a 45 percent increase from the same period the previous year. However, it’s still down from 49 percent from two quarters earlier. “It's a cloud arms race going on. Amazon has been miles ahead of the competition, but that gap is narrowing. We believe this is going to lead to more mergers and acquisitions this year,” said Ives. Microsoft does not break out its cloud revenue for investors, but said it was up 76 percent in its second-quarter earnings for 2019, which Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said was a reflection of “our deep and growing partnerships with leading companies in every industry.”

In Microsoft’s earnings call on Wednesday, Amy Hood, the company’s chief financial officer, said the company is picking up more large, long-term contracts from Microsoft Azure clients, including a five-year deal with Gap. Microsoft is a massive competitor to Amazon and is expected to close some of the gap. However, Amazon is still in a dominant place, despite the slight deceleration, according to Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “AWS delivers more profit dollars to the company than all its retailing and products combined. It is natural for the percent growth to slow a little bit as a business gets large,” said Moorhead. “Investors needs to recognize that the 45 percent gain is on a huge base of business. AWS’s real-dollar growth was larger than Azure, GCP, and Oracle combined.” There’s still a massive opportunity to reach new customers who have not migrated to the cloud, so the next few years will be pivotal as the tech giants lean heavily on growing their services revenue. The cloud services market is expected to be worth $555 billion globally by next year, according to a report by Allied Market Research

FaceTime Bug Let People Eavesdrop – Now, Apple Is Trying To Fix It

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by evolving-science -- Apple is already testing a version of iOS 12.1.4 that is meant to address the rogue FaceTime bug that allowed a caller to access the microphone and even the camera of the recipient before the latter picked up the call. The FaceTime eavesdropping bug allowed iPhone users to exploit a privacy-invading 'Group FaceTime' flaw that let one person connect to another person and hear conversations (and see a video, in some cases) without the other person ever having accepted the call. he glitch was embarrassing for Apple, who is set to report disappointing financial earnings in the past year. The Silicon Valley company has long-positioned itself as a protector of user privacy offering more secure devices than its rivals. Apple’s revenue warnings sent its shares down more than 7 percent in after-hours trading on Wednesday (Jan 30, 2019) evening, dropping its market value to less than $700 billion. It is not clear whether this is a problem particular to Apple or whether China’s slowing economy will affect other American companies too.

Apple has already put a stop to the FaceTime bug by disabling Group FaceTime server side, leaving the feature unavailable, but questions remain about how long the bug was accessible and how long Apple knew about it before attempting a fix. The mother of a teenager, who originally discovered the bug, shared convincing evidence that she contacted the Cupertino company as early as January 20, 2019. She did not receive a response from Apple despite sending emails and a video. Therefore, it is not clear when the team at Apple learned of the bug and when work on a fix was started. There was a multi-day wait for an official solution to perhaps one of the worst Apple-related privacy bugs we've seen. However, this does suggest that development on the iOS 12.1.4 did not start too far ahead of when the bug went public.

New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo, and the new Attorney General, Letitia James, on Wednesday (Jan 30, 2019), said the state was probing Apple's failure to warn consumers about a FaceTime bug that lets iPhones users see and hear others before accepting video calls. The statement also mentioned that Cuomo and James would probe Apple's slow response and cited media reports that a consumer had made the company aware of the bug more than a week before it acted to disable the FaceTime feature.

Upcoming iOS 12.1.4 Update will Fix FaceTime Bug Apple is already testing a version of the iOS (12.1.4) meant to address the FaceTime bug. Though the update is not yet available for consumers, it has been confirmed that Apple is indeed testing it. As a placeholder, Apple shut down Group FaceTime to prevent the hack from being exploited. The company said that it would push out an update “later this week” to fix the bug and that update appears to be iOS 12.1.4. It is still not evident when exactly Apple will begin the rollout, but with iOS 12.1.4 already popping up, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a change within the next 24 to 48 hours.