Lyft has closed $530 million in new funding led by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, TechCrunch has learned. The new financing, which is slated to be announced tomorrow, brings total cash raised to more than $850 million since being founded and values the company at $3 billion. Read More
TOKYO (Reuters) – A surprise interest rate cut by South Korea’s central bank on Thursday helped lift an index of Asian stocks away from the previous session’s seven-week lows, while the prospect of higher U.S. interest rates buoyed the dollar.
SEOUL (Reuters) – The foreign ministers of South Korea, Japan and China are preparing to meet this month for their first talks in nearly three years in a bid to resolve tensions over Japan’s wartime past and discuss a trilateral summit.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Secret Service said on Wednesday that two agents were under investigation after an incident last week in which they were reported to have driven a government car into White House barricades after drinking at a late-night party.
MADISON, Wis. (Reuters) – About 1,500 people, some banging plastic pails or blowing whistles, marched on Wednesday to the Wisconsin corrections department in Madison to protest the fatal police shooting last week of an unarmed biracial young man.
Cuba’s most high-profile opposition group, the Ladies in White, voted Wednesday to keep their leader, Berta Soler, in a referendum prompted by complaints that she was autocratic and should resign.
A 42-year-old woman running for mayor in a southwestern state has been kidnapped and decapitated, state prosecutors said Wednesday.
The office of a Tamil news channel was attacked on early Thursday morning. - Source
More than 600 medical workers have been killed in Syria’s civil war in deliberate and indiscriminate attacks, most of them by government forces, an international rights group announced Wednesday.
Apple stopped offering a number of fitness bands from its retail stores. The move is interpreted as clearing the way for the soon to be available Apple Watch (the wearable will begin shipping on April 24).
Popular fitness bands such as the Nike FuelBand and Jawbone Up are no longer available to purchase in Apple’s major retail locations. The company has also notified other fitness tracker manufacturers that it will no longer offer their products going forward.
Of course, Apple has not commented officially on the matter. However, the company pointed that it regularly changes its merchandise lineup.
The Apple Watch marks an entry for the company into a brand new market segment. Therefore, it is hardly a surprise that Cupertino is trying to give its new device a sales edge, especially considering the huge focus on health and fitness Apple Watch carries. The company is initially expected to ship three million units of its new creation.
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A man from Pakistan who was a permanent resident of Canada told an undercover officer that he planned to bomb the United States Consulate or the financial district in Toronto, an immigration panel revealed on Wednesday.
Y Combinator-backed Treeline is trying strip the job of building a backend down to its essence: building the pipelines through which data will flow in an application or service. Read More
MOSCOW (AP) — Russian mission control says a Soyuz capsule carrying two Russians and one American has landed in Kazakhstan after the trio spent nearly six months aboard the International Space Station…. - Source
