New top story on Hacker News: How a Chinese businessman became the largest supplier of pyrotechnics in the US

How a Chinese businessman became the largest supplier of pyrotechnics in the US
90 by acdanger | 35 comments on Hacker News.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Elizabeth Warren Takes on Democratic Rivals on Fundraising in Speech

Image
(Bloomberg) -- Elizabeth Warren took an unusually aggressive stance against her moderate rivals for the Democratic nomination in a speech billed as an economic address on Thursday.“We know that one Democratic candidate walked into a room of wealthy donors this year to promise that ‘nothing would fundamentally change’ if he’s president,” Warren said, referring to Joe Biden.“We know that another calls the people who raise a quarter-million dollars for him his ‘National Investors Circle’ and he offers them regular phone calls and special access. When a candidate brags about how beholden he feels to a group of wealthy investors, our democracy is in serious trouble,” Warren said, referring to Pete Buttigieg.For months, the Massachusetts senator refrained from directly criticizing her rivals in the race for the Democratic nomination. But Warren has seen her poll numbers slip both nationally and in the first two primary states. With the Iowa caucuses only a couple of months away, she’s taking...
Read more

Apostrophes trip up Kazakhstan's move away from Russian alphabet

Image
Kazakhstan's quarter-century struggle to assert its autonomy from former overlord Russia has hit an unlikely snag: the lowly apostrophe.  A vast but sparsely populated country wedged between Russia and China, Kazakhstan came under the rule of its northern neighbour as Russia and Britain jostled for control of Central Asia in the Great Game. It also came under its linguistic influence, and to this day, many Kazakhs speak more Russian than their Turkic native tongue.  This became especially concerning after Russian state media, which remain popular in Kazakhstan, helped whip up Russian-speaking separatists to fight government forces in Ukraine in 2014. In April, Kazakhstan's president of 27 years, Nursultan Nazarbayev, ordered the government to prepare a new Kazakh alphabet based on Latin characters and ditch the one based on Russia's Cyrillic script, which the Soviets implemented in 1940. He has said this will give Kazakhstan “real independence” and help it join the “informa...
Read more