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Verizon Communications Inc. wants to attract teens and millennials who are more used to watching videos on their mobile phones than on a TV in a living room. Yahoo! Inc., which is spinning out its main Web business, has been investing heavily in online-video content.

So it’s probably not a coincidence that executives at the largest U.S. wireless carrier were chattier than usual this week when asked the question: Would Verizon be interested in buying Yahoo’s Internet assets?

Chief Executive Officer Lowell McAdam and Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo, using similar language, both said within the past two days that Verizon would look at a Yahoo deal "if it made sense," instead of declining to comment. 

Islamic State's official magazine carried a photo on Wednesday of a Schweppes soft drink can it said was used to make an improvised bomb that brought down a Russian airliner over Egypt's Sinai Peninsula last month, killing all 224 people on board.

The photo showed a can of Schweppes Gold soft drink and what appeared to be a detonator and switch on a blue background, three simple components that if genuine are likely to cause concern for airline safety officials worldwide.

"The divided Crusaders of the East and West thought themselves safe in their jets as they cowardly bombarded the Muslims of the Caliphate," the English language Dabiq magazine said in reference to Russia and the West. "And so revenge was exacted upon those who felt safe in the cockpits."Western governments have said the Airbus A321 operated by Metrojet was likely brought down by a bomb and Moscow confirmed on Tuesday it had reached the same conclusion, but the Egyptian government said it has still not found evidence of criminal action.

Even after the Internal Revenue Service refused in September to grant its blessing to Yahoo’s proposed tax-free spinoff of its $32 billion stake in the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, Marissa Mayer was determined to go forward with the deal.

In late October, Ms. Mayer, Yahoo’s chief executive, told shareholders that the plan was on track, and the preparations were still continuing last month.

Yet last week, when Yahoo’s board met to review the planned January spinoff, it decided to call off the deal.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has ordered fantasy-sports operators Fan Duel Inc. and DraftKings Inc. to shut down in the state, saying that the games constitute illegal gambling and are subject to criminal penalties.

A handful of other states have previously said fantasy sports amounts to gambling and isn’t allowed. But Tuesday’s cease-and-desist order from New York is the first time fantasy-sports operators have been formally accused of criminal activity. It is the latest blow for the daily fantasy industry, dominated by FanDuel and DraftKings, which faces a federal criminal probe and scrutiny of state legislatures over the legality of their business model and the oversight of their operations.

“Daily fantasy sports is neither victimless nor harmless,” Schneiderman said in a statement. “And it is clear that DraftKings and FanDuel are the leaders of a massive, multibillion-dollar scheme intended to evade the law and fleece sports fans across the country.” FanDuel responded in a statement: “This is a politician telling hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers they are not allowed to play a game they love…. The game has been played — legally — in New York for years and years, but after the attorney general realized he could now get himself some press coverage, he decided a game that has been around for a long, long time is suddenly now not legal.”

In light of Friday's attacks on Paris, Facebook activated a feature allowing people to super-impose the French flag over their profile picture.

Some railed against this idea since the feature was not provided after an attack by ISIS on Lebanon just one day earlier.

One site called LunaPics began offering users the option to convert their profile picture into a show of support for Lebanese victims instead.  Now a website called the "All Flags Profile Photo Converter" cropped up.

If upheld, Planned Parenthood says the decision would leave 5.4 million Texan women of reproductive age with only 10 abortion providers in their state.

This decreased access would be especially detrimental to already marginalized groups and those with limited economic resources. Forty-two percent of the women who have abortions fall below the federal poverty line, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Denying women abortion access only increases the risk of falling into poverty, ThinkProgress reported in 2012.

providers disproportionately affects Latina women, according to Jessica González-Rojas, executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health. "While this politically-motivated attack threatens all Texas women, it's particularly harmful for the 40% of Texas women who are Latina," González-Rojas said in an emailed statement. "Latinas are twice as likely to experience unintended pregnancies as non-Latina white women and are more likely to be of reproductive age.

After the terror attacks in Paris that killed at least 129 people, the placement of refugees fleeing Syria has come under scrutiny as at least two dozen governors — mostly Republicans — have raised concerns about Syrian refugees relocating to their state.

"The first and foremost responsibility of government is to keep its people safe," Texas Governor Greg Abbott said Monday. "We are working on measures to ensure ... that Texans will be kept safe from those refugees."

Abbott is joined by Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner who also announced their states would "suspend" the resettlement of Syrian refugees. The governors of Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin made similar vows following the attacks, which killed at least 129 people.

The number of people killed by law enforcement in the US this year has reached 1,000 after officers in Oakland, California, shot dead a man who allegedly pointed a replica gun at them.

Authorities said several officers opened fire on the man on Sunday evening when he walked toward them as they towed away cars that had been used to perform so-called “sideshow” stunts in east Oakland. Officers discovered later that the gun was a replica, police said.

The man shot in Oakland became the 1,000th database entry in The Counted, an ongoing investigation by the Guardian to record every fatality caused by police and other law enforcement officers in 2015, to monitor the demographics of the people who died and detail how and why they were killed.

It is one of the great investment conundrums of our time: Why do so many stockholders cheer when a company announces that it’s buying back shares?

Stated simply, repurchase programs can be hazardous to a company’s long-term financial health and often signal a management that has run out of better ways to invest in the business.

given the enormous popularity of buybacks nowadays, those that are harmful probably outnumber the beneficial.

A month after adopting a new national constitution, Nepal has elected Bidhya Devi Bhandari as its next president. She will be the country’s first female president and only the second president since Nepal became a democratic republic in 2008.

The new constitution required an almost entirely new government,

beginning with parliament’s election of prime minister Khadga Prasad Oli. He and Bhandari both represent Nepal’s Unified Marxist-Leninist Communist party.

BARCELONA, Spain - The regional parliament of Catalonia approved a plan Monday to set up a road map for independence from Spain by 2017, in defiance of the central government.

The proposal was made by pro-secession lawmakers from the "Together for Yes" alliance and the extreme left-wing Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP). The groups together obtained a parliamentary majority in regional elections in September.

The Spanish government reacted swiftly. In a nationally televised address, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said that his government will appeal against the decision at the Constitutional Court, which has in the past blocked moves toward independence."Catalonia is not going anywhere, nothing is going to break," Rajoy said.He added he would meet with the leader of the main opposition Socialist Party, Pedro Sanchez, to forge a common front against the separatists.

Russia's status as a sports superpower and its participation in track and field events at next year's Olympics came under threat Monday after a report accused the Russians of widespread, state-supported doping reminiscent of the darkest days of cheating by the former East Germany.

The findings by a commission set up by the World Anti-Doping Agency were far more damaging than expected. It means that two of the world's most popular sports — soccer and track and field — are now mired in scandals that could destroy their reputations.

The WADA investigation's findings that Russian government officials must have known about doping and cover-ups, with even its intelligence service, the FSB, allegedly involved, threatened to severely tarnish President Vladimir Putin's use of sports to improve his country's global standing. Russia hosted the last Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014 and will hold the next World Cup in 2018.

The global role English plays today as a lingua franca—used as a means of communication by speakers of different languages—has parallels in the Latin of pre-modern Europe.

Having been spread by the success of the Roman Empire, Classical Latin was kept alive as a standard written medium throughout Europe long after the fall of Rome. But the Vulgar Latin used in speech continued to change, forming new dialects, which in time gave rise to the modern Romance languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Italian.

Similar developments may be traced today in the use of English around the globe, especially in countries where it functions as a second language. New “interlanguages” are emerging, in which features of English are mingled with those of other native tongues and their pronunciations.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry hailed the newly passed international climate change agreement as a major achievement that could help turn the tide on global warming, but got a quick reminder that Republicans will fight it all the way.

Obama said the climate agreement made Saturday night by almost 200 nations "can be a turning point for the world" and credited his administration for playing a key role. He and Kerry predicted it would prompt widespread spending on clean energy and help stem carbon pollution blamed for global warming.

The immediate reaction of leading Republican critics was a stark reminder of the conflict that lies ahead.

For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews.

The special arrangements are detailed in hundreds of pages of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times. The records, generated in 2017 by the company’s internal system for tracking partnerships, provide the most complete picture yet of the social network’s data-sharing practices. They also underscore how personal data has become the most prized commodity of the digital age, traded on a vast scale by some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley and beyond.

Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.

it took 4,000 years for the world to warm about 1.25 degrees from the end of the ice age to about 7,000 years ago. The same fossil-based data suggest a similar level of warming occurring in just one generation: from the 1920s to the 1940s.

scientists may have to go back 125,000 years to find warmer temperatures potentially rivaling today's.

the climate had been gently warming out of the ice age with a slow cooling that started about 6,000 years ago. Then the cooling reversed with a vengeance. The study shows the recent heat spike "has no precedent as far back as we can go with any confidence, 11,000 years arguably,"

Thousands of people showed up in freezing temperatures on Sunday in Michigan to hear Sen. Bernie Sanders denounce Republican efforts to repeal President Barack Obama's health care law, one of dozens of rallies Democrats staged across the country to highlight opposition.

"I'm going to get really sick and my life will be at risk," said Bible, an online antique dealer.

Sanders has been barnstorming across California in hopes of winning the primary and, his team argues, momentum to help win over so-called superdelegates who have already vowed to back Clinton. Because pledged delegates are awarded proportionally, a narrow Sanders win in California would do little to help him catch up to Clinton, who also holds a decisive lead in pledged delegates.

“California is the big enchilada,” Sanders said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet The Press.” “Obviously, if we don’t do well in California, it will make our path much, much harder.” He added: “I’m knocking my brains out to win the Democratic nomination.”

Trump was not going to take a loss without throwing a few below-the-belt punches of his own (emphasis ours).