The Daily News Bloggers

Alan Greenspan doubled short-term interest rates in just 12 months which set the stage for the Asia financial crisis. Mark Wilson/Getty Images Asia will always have complicated feelings about Alan Greenspan. In the mid-to-late 1990s, the then-Federal Reserve chairman was a bona fide celebrity. His photo was showing up in People magazine, Entertainment Tonight and the style pages of national newspapers. Greenspan’s command of the globe’s biggest economy earned him a glowing Bob Woodward biography titled Maestro . Yet Asia mostly remembers the Greenspan era for precipitating the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis. It was the Fed’s 1994-1995 tightening cycle—doubling short-term interest rates in just 12 months—that set the stage for Asia’s reckoning. As the dollar surged and capital raced toward the West, officials in Bangkok, Jakarta and Seoul could not maintain currency pegs to the greenback. The resulting waves of currency devaluations also pushed Malaysia toward the brink and n...

Even if I had no concept of how calendars work, I would know it’s back-to-school season right now. That’s because friends, family, and people I haven’t heard from in ages have all been coming out of the woodwork to ask about laptops. advertisement advertisement I don’t mind. As a reasonably technical person with almost zero noteworthy skills or abilities outside the world of technology, it’s the very least I could do to give back. Now, the interesting thing about people asking which laptop is “best” (especially when asking about Windows machines) is that they rarely have a specific price point in mind but they definitely don’t want to spend more than necessary. So the question they should be asking really is: How can I get the best deal on a worthy laptop without overspending? In that vein, I generally adhere to the following three Goldilocks rules when recommending Windows laptops: not too cheap, not too expensive; not too big, not too small; not too underpowered, not to...

From Spirited Away and Kiki’s Delivery Service to Howl’s Moving Castle and Princess Mononoke , the films of legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki run the gambit of wholesome slice of life portraits to full-fledged historical epics, all of which are infused with fantastical elements peppered throughout. One storytelling element that is prevalent throughout more than a few of his works is romance, or rather, the casual allusion to or near omission of it. Miyazaki's work is famous for being highly romanticized and lovingly sentimental, but traditional romance itself is not the driving force of the narrative, despite being a clear and present element in the likability of some of his most popular stories. COLLIDER VIDEO OF THE DAY While Miyazaki’s films depict a more subdued and even ambiguous approach to romantic relationships when compared to the likes of modern romantic-comedies or even classic Disney Princess fables, they do so to greatly benefit the focus of the story and the aut...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Fuel leaks and a possible crack discovered during final liftoff preparations threatened to postpone the launch of NASA’s mighty new moon rocket Monday morning on its shakedown flight with three test dummies aboard. As precious minutes ticked away, NASA repeatedly stopped and started the fueling of the Space Launch System rocket with nearly 1 million gallons of super-cold hydrogen and oxygen because of a leak. The fueling already was running nearly an hour late because of thunderstorms off Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. The leak of highly explosive hydrogen appeared in the same place that saw seepage during a dress rehearsal back in the spring. Then a second apparent hydrogen leak turned up in a valve that had caused trouble in June but that NASA thought it had fixed, officials said. Later in the morning, a crack or some other defect was spotted on the core stage — the big orange fuel tank with four main engines on it — with frost appearing around the suspe...

AirAsia Group's aircraft stand on the tarmac at Kuala Lumpur International Airport 2 (KLIA 2) in ... [+] Sepang, Selangor, Malaysia, on August 24, 2020. Samsul Said/Bloomberg AirAsia Group —controlled by Malaysian tycoons Tony Fernandes and Kamarudin Meranun —plans to resume taking new aircraft deliveries from 2024 onwards as it seeks to expand its fleet amid a post-pandemic recovery in air travel demand. “We will be taking delivery of the new Airbus A321 neos from 2024, which will further reduce our emissions per seat by 20% while further driving our business growth,” Fernandes, CEO of AirAsia parent Capital A, said in a statement on Friday. Formed in January this year, Capital A has been diversifying with the addition of logistics and digital businesses that include ride hailing and food deliveries. On Friday, Capital A said the group’s revenue increased to 2.3 billion ringgit ($512.4 million) in the year ended June 30 from 710 million ringgit a year ago as AirAsia’s re...

BEIJING -- More than 100,000 people have been moved to safer areas by Monday as heavy rains brought flood risks to a region of southwest China that was devastated by a heatwave and drought for most of the summer. Heavy rain was forecast for parts of Sichuan province and Chongqing city through at least Tuesday. Chongqing, a megacity built in a hilly area and that also oversees the surrounding mountains and countryside, issued a flash flood warning for both days. The Sichuan emergency management administration said Monday that 119,000 people have been evacuated. One village under the jurisdiction of Guangyuan city recorded 18.8 centimeters (7.4 inches) of rain, state broadcaster CCTV said. The city was one of two in Sichuan most affected by the drought. A national level IV emergency response for floods, the lowest in a four-tier system, is in effect in Sichuan, Chongqing and neighboring Gansu and Shaanxi provinces to the north. The hard, sunbaked soil left by the heatwave increases ...

England’s rivers will continue to deteriorate unless the Environment Agency stops “shutting down” the public’s calls about pollution, according to an ex-employee who worked at the agency for three decades. Officers are told to ignore calls from the public and told not to look at possible incidents if the caller thinks they are lower impact, meaning they fall into so-called category 3 or 4. This has left staff “demoralised” says Helen Nightingale, a catchment planner in north-west Lancashire who left the Environment Agency in April. Once a river is damaged, it becomes harder to have a major incident on it. “You can only kill so many fish. Once you’ve already killed them, the chances of getting a significant incident are much reduced,” said Nightingale, who is appearing on Channel 4’s Dispatches programme Britain’s Water Scandal on Monday evening. “The health of the poorer rivers will go down quite quickly … it’s just wrong”. Between 2010 and 2021, the agency’s annual budget for enf...