China has become the latest nation to introduce a gold dispensing vending machine, which was installed within the busy Wangfujing Street shopping district in Beijing on Saturday.
The machine is a joint collaboration between the Beijing Agricultural Commercial Bank and a gold trading company, and will allow customers to withdraw gold bars or coins of various weights based on the prevailing market prices.
U.S. diplomats led a walkout from the United Nations General Assembly as Iranian Mohammed Ahmadinejad began his sweeping attacks at the “arrogant powers” of the West, and suggesting that “two planes couldn’t bring towers down.”
According to a recent WikiLeaks cable, China is allegedly buying into gold, away from the U.S. dollar, in a bid to undermine the dollars’ role as a world reserve currency.
The cable, titled “China increases its gold reserves in order to kill two birds with one stone,” together with recent policy announcements by the Chinese banking authorities indicates that China is slowly moving to replace the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
Oracle Corp has estimated that it suffered US$1.2 billion in damages from Google Inc.’s alleged patent and copyright infringement through Android software, according to a federal court filing in San Francisco on Thursday.
The creators of Java technology broke down the damages into individual components, claiming that its patent damages could be as much as $202 million, its copyright damages could be as much as $136 million, and that Google’s profit from copyright infringement reached $823.9 million.
China will embark on its first ever unmanned space program at the end of this month, with the launch of the Tiangong-1 (the “Heavenly Palace-1”) space module from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China’s Gansu Province, said state-owned news service Xinhua on Thursday.
Chinese state media reports that the Tiangong-1 will be used as a testing site for a full-fledged space station that the country hopes to deploy by 2020.
The Venezuelan government is only proposing a US$1 billion settlement to Exxon Mobil Corp for the nationalization of its assets in 2007, said Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday.
The Obama administration has ordered federal agencies to do a complete expense review for conferences after an internal audit by the US Justice Department discovered “extravagant and wasteful” spending by the agency in 2009.
According to a report done by its own Office of Inspector General on Tuesday, the Justice Department spent $121 million on conferences from 2008-2009, exceeding its own spending limits.
Google’s answer to Facebook has officially gone live, meaning that anyone can now join the web giant’s social networking platform, Google+.
Until now, Google+ had only been available to people who received invitations from existing users or Google employees.
In what is set to be a social network battle, Google+ is by far the search company’s most ambitious product in its attempt to challenge Facebook’s unrivaled popularity and success.
Google Inc.’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt has rejected charges made against the search engine giant of “cooking” its search engine results to favour its own subsidiary services online.
Speaking before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights on Wednesday, Schmidt defended his company’s practices, asserting that Google “does nothing to block access to any of the competitors and other sources of information in Web searches.”
Insurance giant, Aviva, revealed yesterday that a quarter of those living over the age of 55 survive on an income of less than £24 (US$38) a day.
In one of the largest and most important surveys of over-55s in Britain, Aviva paints a gloomy picture for the aging generation forced to spend less on food as they struggle to meet their daily needs on a paltry and simple income, with little or no savings, no pension, and huge debts yet unpaid.
