Boom

SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK: Amazon.com’s expanding business of selling space on its site to merchants helped it double profits on Thursday, and some see the move as a step toward taking advertising dollars from Google and Facebook. With $2 billion or less of advertising revenue, Amazon is dwarfed by Alphabet’s Google and Facebook, often called an internet duopoly, but it is growing fast, may be outselling ads on Twitter Inc and Snapchat, and it has advantages that other contenders lack. Amazon has users’ purchase data and…

GUIYANG, China: Giant robots and futuristic cyberpunk castles rise out of lush mountain slopes on the outskirts of Guiyang, the capital of one of China’s poorest provinces. Welcome to China’s first virtual reality theme park, which aims to ride a boom in demand for virtual entertainment that is set to propel tenfold growth in the country’s virtual reality market, to hit almost $8.5 billion by 2020. The 330-acre (134-hectare) park in southwestern Guizhou province promises 35 virtual reality attractions, from…

TAIPEI: Taiwan's economy grew at the fastest pace in more than a year during the July-September period, data showed Friday, fuelled by a strong recovery in the electronics sector. The 2.06 percent year-on-year growth, which beat expectations, was the best performance since the first-quarter of 2015 when the economy expanded 4.04 percent. The second straight quarter of growth is encouraging for the island, which just came out of recession in April-June. Traditionally an export-driven technology hub, Taiwan is home to…

PYONGYANG: The skyline of the capital is rising and despite its political and economic isolation, the North Korean capital is in the midst of a building boom.

BERLIN: The influx of asylum seekers into Germany, especially from cricket-mad Pakistan and Afghanistan, has created an unexpected boom for the sport in a country where football has long been king.

ISLAMABAD: In the Hindu Kush mountains craftswomen painstakingly stitch flowing scarves, skilled artisans who were unable to sell their products beyond the remote region until mobile internet came to Pakistan and dropped the market into the palms of millions of previously marginalised people.

SOST: A glossy highway and hundreds of lorries transporting Chinese workers by the thousands: the new Silk Road is under construction in northern Pakistan, but locals living on the border are yet to be convinced they will receive more from it than dust.

PARIS: Flying over the flaming barricades of the Maidan protests in Kiev, the camps of Auschwitz or hurtling down a ski slope -- drones have become a vital tool for cameramen, but they are increasingly running into legal and practical obstacles.