Technology executive Ron Black says nine companies are willing to join consortium in purchase of Newport Wafer FabThree more British companies have said they are willing to join a group to buy the Welsh semiconductor manufacturer Newport Wafer Fab if the UK government blocks a takeover by a Chinese-owned company on national security grounds.The technology executive Ron Black said the new companies had come forward after he revealed the existence of a six-member consortium willing to act as a “white knight” if Nexperia’s purchase of the south Wales company fell through. Continue reading...
Site aims to integrate service with Instagram which ‘could see Facebook withdrawing gifs from competing platforms’Facebook could be forced to sell gif creation website Giphy after an investigation by the UK competition regulator found its takeover could harm competition among social media companies and the digital advertising market.The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched an in-depth investigation earlier this year into Facebook’s acquisition of Giphy, the largest supplier of animated gifs to social networks such as Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter, after identifying a number of concerns about the $400m (£290m) deal which was struck last year. Continue reading...
Video platform suspends Republican senator, in latest move against a public figure who has spread Covid disinformationYouTube suspended Republican senator Rand Paul on Tuesday for seven days over a video claiming that masks are ineffective against Covid-19.It is the latest move against a prominent public figure who has spread disinformation about ways to protect against the virus or about the vaccines developed to fight it. Continue reading...
The poster for new film Parallel Mothers, which depicts a female nipple, was removed from the social network but has been restored because of ‘clear artistic context’Instagram has apologised for removing the official poster for Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s new film from the social network because it showed a female nipple, after the poster’s designer complained of censorship.Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, told the Associated Press on Wednesday that several images of the poster for Parallel Mothers (Madres Paralelas), which shows a lactating nipple, were removed “for breaking our rules against nudity” after they were uploaded on Monday. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#5N6VP)
New flip phones and phone-tablet hybrids, plus updated earbuds and first Google Wear OS 3 smartwatchSamsung is taking a big step towards making folding-screen smartphones mainstream with the launch of a pair of the first water-resistant models as part of its big tech event for the second half of 2021.The new and improved Galaxy Z Flip3 folding-screen flip-phone and Z Fold3 folding phone-tablet hybrid were announced on Wednesday during a livestreamed event, alongside a Google watch co-developed in an attempt to take on the dominant Apple Watch – the Galaxy Watch4. Continue reading...
The classic grinning emoji has once more changed its meaning – at least amongst gen Zers. So what is it communicating now – and what should you be using instead?
Near-future tale of a woman who accepts a male ‘companion’ robot played by Stevens is laboriously told and not really funny enoughDirected by Maria Schrader, this was a crowd-pleasing favourite at the Berlin film festival earlier this year and its star, Maren Eggert, won the festival’s new gender-neutral best leading performance prize. But I was disappointed with a film whose crises and dilemmas seem laborious and essentially predictable; it does not fully work as sci-fi or satire or comedy.We are in a world of the near-future (and the city of Berlin itself is certainly very plausible as its location). Eggert plays Alma, an archaeologist with an unhappy and frustrating personal life. She is persuaded by her boss to be a guinea-pig for a new hi-tech scheme: she will road-test a male “companion” robot, programmed to be infinitely considerate and obliging, which will attend to all her emotional and indeed physical needs. So Alma sceptically takes home this dashing humanoid geisha: Tom, played with elegant, fluent German by Dan Stevens. And after a rocky, angry start, after duly dismissing this soulless adventure in existential convenience, Alma inevitably comes to think that there could be something to it. In rejecting Tom, is she simply preferring the headache to the aspirin? Continue reading...
Silicon Valley has been anticipating virtual reality for more than three decades, and keeps running into the same problem: people mostly like actual realityMaybe this will be my Paul Krugman moment. The Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist was famously the winner of a study to establish which op-ed commentator was most consistently correct. In 1998, he also famously claimed, “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.” I am not nearly so storied in accomplishments as Krugman. But I do make my living offering predictions and forecasts. So I might as well say it: I predict that the metaverse won’t happen.The “metaverse,” for those who don’t know, is a still-mostly-hypothetical virtual world accessed by special virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology. The idea is to create a sort of next-level Internet overlaid on our physical world. People plugged into the metaverse exist in our physical world like everyone else but can see and interact with things that others can’t. Think The Matrix or the Star Trek Holodeck or the Fortnite-esque brandscapes of Ready Player One. Continue reading...
Company pays $3,500 to Bogdan Kulynych who demonstrated flaw in image cropping softwareTwitter’s image cropping algorithm prefers younger, slimmer faces with lighter skin, an investigation into algorithmic bias at the company has found.The finding, while embarrassing for the company, which had previously apologised to users after reports of bias, marks the successful conclusion of Twitter’s first ever “algorithmic bug bounty”. Continue reading...
Billionaire Lee Jae-yong will be released in South Korea on Friday having served 18 months in prisonThe billionaire boss of South Korea’s Samsung empire will be freed from jail on Friday after serving part of a 30-month sentence for bribing former South Korea president Park Geun-hye.
Project that could bring fibre broadband to remote areas while monitoring pipes for water leaksThe government has launched a £4m fund to back projects trialling running fibre optic broadband cables through water pipes to help connect hard-to-reach homes without digging up roads.The money will also be used to test out monitors in pipes that can help water companies identify and repair leaks more quickly. About a fifth of water put into public supply every day is lost via leaks and it is hoped that sensors could help deliver water companies’ commitment to reduce water loss by half. Continue reading...
On the surface Apple’s new features sound both sensible and commendable – but they also open a Pandora’s box of privacy and surveillance issuesPrivacy. That’s (no longer) iPhone. Continue reading...
by Robin McKie Observer science editor on (#5N2BB)
UK National Cyber Security Centre recommends approach for improved combination of usability and safetyIt is much better to concoct passwords for online accounts that are made up of three random words as opposed to creating complex variations of letters, numbers and symbols, government experts have said.In a blogpost, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) – which is part of Government Communications Headquarters – said a three-word system creates passwords that are easy to remember. In addition, it creates unusual combinations of letters, which means the system is strong enough to keep online accounts secure from cybercriminals. By contrast, more complex passwords can be ineffective as their makeup can often be guessed by criminals using specialist software. Continue reading...
Imagine a massive, invisible world that surrounds you but which you cannot see or engage unless you own the correct – expensive – technologyLook at all of our tech billionaires trying to leave the world to evade responsibility for their malevolent influence on it. Anything to avoid being confronted by the workers they exploit or the victims of the ethnic and religious clashes facilitated by their platforms. Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are flinging themselves into space; Elon Musk is burrowing into the earth; now Mark Zuckerberg is retreating into a virtual “metaverse”.Related: Revealed: the Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens Continue reading...
National Labor Relations Board official finds company’s anti-union tactics tainted electionAmazon warehouse workers in Alabama may get a second chance to form the company’s first union, after a US labor board official recommended a rerun of a landmark vote that failed to pass in April.An official at the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) determined Amazon’s tactics against unionization tainted the election sufficiently to warrant a do-over. Workers had voted by a margin of 2-1 not to form a union in what was viewed as a huge blow to labor advocates seeking to organize Amazon, the second-largest employer in the country. Continue reading...
My father, Bob Hamilton, who has died aged 94, was a computer software designer in the industry’s early years, working in the US on the Saturn 4B rocket programme which led to Saturn 5, the launch rocket for the 1969 moon landing.Bob was born in London. His mother, Edith, died when he was seven; he and his older sister, Margot, were brought up by his father, James, who worked for a legal firm, and, at times, by various aunts and uncles. Continue reading...
by Dan Sabbagh Defence and security editor on (#5MWAA)
Human rights activist David Haigh targeted in attack suspected to have been ordered by DubaiA British human rights campaigner and lawyer who was fighting to free Dubai’s Princess Latifa had his mobile phone compromised by Pegasus spyware on 3 and 4 August 2020, according to a forensic analysis carried out by Amnesty International.David Haigh is the first confirmed British victim of infiltration by Pegasus software, an attack suspected to have been ordered by Dubai, because of his connection with the 35-year-old princess, a daughter of the emirate’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed, and the Free Latifa campaign of which he was part. Continue reading...
Secretive gangs are hacking the computers of governments, firms, even hospitals, and demanding huge sums. But if we pay these ransoms, are we creating a ticking time bomb?They have the sort of names that only teenage boys or aspiring Bond villains would dream up (REvil, Grief, Wizard Spider, Ragnar), they base themselves in countries that do not cooperate with international law enforcement and they don’t care whether they attack a hospital or a multinational corporation. Ransomware gangs are suddenly everywhere, seemingly unstoppable – and very successful.In June, meat producer JBS, which supplies over a fifth of all the beef in the US, paid a £7.8m ransom to regain access to its computer systems. The same month, the US’s largest national fuel pipeline, Colonial Pipeline, paid £3.1m to ransomware hackers after they locked the company’s systems, causing days of fuel shortages and paralysing the east coast. “It was the hardest decision I’ve made in my 39 years in the energy industry,” said a deflated-looking Colonial CEO Joseph Blount in an evidence session before Congress. In July, hackers attacked software firm Kaseya, demanding £50m. As a result, hundreds of supermarkets had to close in Sweden, because their cash registers didn’t work. Continue reading...
This expansion pack to the ever-popular simulation game is a friendly chance to experience The Good Life, complete with crops, cows and very nosy neighboursLike a lot of people at the end of the Covid-19 restrictions, I made the mistake of checking out a few self-catering holiday sites to try to book a late break for the family. I could almost hear the online availability calendars laughing at me. Anything that was still available would have required me to re-mortgage our own house and sell the car. Sadly, it looks like I won’t be spending a week lounging around in a tiny, leaky Dorset cottage, living on a diet of cream teas and fish suppers. It’s almost unconscionable.With amazing good timing, however, Electronic Arts has just released its Cottage Living expansion pack for Sims 4, the latest themed addition to the long-running life simulation series. As ever, you create a sim character then build a house for them, but now there are lots of design components drawn from idealised English country house architecture. Stable doors, stone-trimmed windows, ancient oak floors and decorative country pub signs allow you to indulge your cottagecore fantasies. You can also choose to be off grid, meaning you have to grow all your own vegetables – and you can keep cows and chickens for your milk and eggs, and llamas for wool – although they are incredibly demanding, requiring regular feeding, cleaning and treats. I had to abandon my career to look after them, like a modern simulation of The Good Life – which is why I designed my sims to resemble Tom and Barbara. Continue reading...
Tabletop gaming, based on a mix of science fiction and fantasy worlds, has seen sales surge during lockdownIt started in a small flat in west London, with three friends selling board games and a fanzine via mail order; now Games Workshop is worth more than Marks & Spencer and Asos and is more profitable than Google.This week the Nottingham-based company, which produces the Warhammer fantasy role-playing brand, announced all of its workers would get a £5,000 bonus after sales and profits surged during the pandemic. Continue reading...
The Australian government is refusing to adopt technology used overseas that could speed up notification of close contactsThe federal government is in discussions to tweak its CovidSafe app to pick up more fleeting contacts due to the more infectious Delta variant, but is refusing to adopt technology used overseas that could speed up notification of close contacts.As England and Wales experience what is being called a “pingdemic” – with more than 600,000 isolation alerts sent to users of its NHS app in one week earlier this month – Australia’s CovidSafe app has managed to identify just 17 close contacts who were not picked up by other means since it launched in April last year. Continue reading...
The companies also announced a vaccine mandate for all employees who will eventually return to officesMajor tech firms are reversing plans to return to in-office work in coming weeks, as Covid cases in the US rise due to the emergence of a highly transmissible variant of the virus.Uber, Twitter, Google, Apple and Netflix have delayed planned returns to in-person work recently, while other companies have announced employees can continue remote working indefinitely. The changes come amid the spread of the Delta variant, which now accounts for more than 80% of new coronavirus cases in the US. Continue reading...
by Bethan McKernan Middle East correspondent on (#5MQKC)
Officials visit offices near Tel Aviv as Israeli defence minister meets French counterpart in ParisIsraeli authorities have inspected the offices of the surveillance outfit NSO Group in response to the Pegasus project investigation into abuses of the company’s spyware by several government clients.Officials from the defence ministry visited the company’s offices near Tel Aviv on Wednesday, at the same time as the defence minister, Benny Gantz, arrived for a pre-arranged visit to Paris in which the Pegasus revelations were discussed with his French counterpart. Continue reading...
Relatable jokes about trauma can help people feel less alone, but questions remain over how therapeutic they can truly beWhen, more than a decade ago, I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, I turned to the internet to learn more about my condition.Back then, the effects of trauma weren’t exactly unknown, but they weren’t making headlines, either. Most of the information I found was on psychology websites, but it wasn’t until I went to the doctor and received my diagnosis that I fully understood what was happening to me. Public awareness of the condition was low – or at least, it wasn’t something that people spoke openly about. I felt very alone. Continue reading...
The writer’s new essay collection covers 200 years of women and science, from Mary Shelley to AI. She discusses burning books and the ensuing Twitter storm, the end of her marriage, and why a move into politics could be nextThere’s a disconcerting silence outside Jeanette Winterson’s London pied-a-terre. It’s the morning after the night before, when she travelled across London after dinner with her publisher to scenes of football fans setting the city alight with their cup final fervour. “It was uproar,” she says, “We saw cars on fire.” Her flat is in the East End district of Spitalfields in a Georgian house, which she bought 25 years ago, complete with a little shop that she ran for years as an organic grocer and tea room until the rates got too high, and she let it out to an upmarket chocolatier.It’s as if a scene from Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop has been dropped into a satire about prosperity Britain: the quaint old shopfront is still intact, while outside it a lifesize sculpture of a rowing boat full of people sits surreally in the middle of the street, and a little further along, a herd of large bronze elephants frolics. These public artworks only arrived a few weeks ago, Winterson explains, as part of a grand plan to pedestrianise the area, and make it more buzzy, just at the moment that the sort of well-heeled office workers who bought upmarket chocolates are abandoning it owing to the Covid pandemic. Continue reading...
The 14th annual iPhone photography awards offer glimpses of beauty, hope and the endurance of the human spirit. Out of thousands of submissions, photojournalist Istvan Kerekes of Hungary was named the grand prize winner for his image Transylvanian Shepherds. In it, two rugged shepherds traverse an equally rugged industrial landscape, bearing a pair of lambs in their arms. Continue reading...
Henry is a fixture in millions of homes – including 10 Downing Street – despite almost no advertising. Meet the man behind a curiously British success storyIn March this year, photos of the government’s glitzy new briefing room, where Boris Johnson’s new media chief was set to host daily press conferences, leaked to the media. The centrepiece of a “presidential” approach to communications, it was already controversial for its cost to taxpayers of £2.6m. With its gaudy blue backdrop, giant union flags and imposing podium, it looked like the stage for a US political or legal TV show: The West Wing with a touch of Judge Judy.What the briefing room needed was something to suck the pomposity out of it. What it needed, it turned out, was a cameo appearance from a 620-watt anthropomorphic vacuum cleaner. The stocky red and black appliance was barely visible in the wings, stage left, yet instantly recognisable. Turned away from the podium, his chrome wand propped casually against a varnished dado rail, the Henry vacuum cleaner looked almost as if he were rolling his eyes. Continue reading...
Tech options to deter would-be intruders, and let you monitor your house from anywhereWith the prospect of trips out and holidays finally on the cards, over the next few weeks many of us will be leaving our houses unattended for the first time in months. So now is the time to think about making your home a bit more secure.In addition to the basics, there is a range of DIY tech that may help to deter would-be intruders and allow you to keep an eye on your home from almost anywhere in the world. Continue reading...
Twelve essays drawing on years of research into artificial intelligence ask challenging questions about humanity, art, religion and the way we live and loveIn Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, a scientist creates life and is horrified by what he has done. Two centuries on, synthetic life, albeit in a far simpler form, has been created in a dish. What Shelley imagined has only now become possible. But as Jeanette Winterson points out in this essay collection, the achievements of science and technology always start out as fiction. Not everything that can be imagined can be realised, but nothing can be realised if it hasn’t been imagined first.Take artificial intelligence. For now AI is a tool that we train to address specific tasks such as predicting the next Covid wave, but plenty of people have imagined that it could be something categorically different: a multitasking problem-solver whose capacity to understand and learn is equal or superior to ours. Many labs are working on this concept, which is called artificial general intelligence (AGI), and it could be a reality within decades. That’s how far imagination in technology has brought us. What can the artistic imagination add? Continue reading...
by Presented by Michael Safi with Angelique Chrisafis on (#5MGBE)
After a week of stories about the abuse of private spyware by governments around the world, Michael Safi rounds off our mini-series by looking at the global impact of the Pegasus project and what could change as a resultAll this week Guardian journalists across the world have been reporting on a massive data leak: more than 50,000 phone numbers that, it is believed, have been identified as those of people of interest by clients of the spyware company NSO Group.The leak has made people realise that without us really noticing, the world changed. There are now 3.8bn smartphones globally. They hear our most intimate conversations, hold our deepest secrets – each one can be a microphone and a camera, waiting to be switched on. Continue reading...
by Peter Beaumont and Philip Oltermann on (#5MFR3)
Commission to review claims NSO’s Pegasus was misused by customers to target journalists and activistsAn Israeli commission reviewing allegations that NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware was misused by its customers to target journalists and human rights activists will examine whether rules on Israel’s export of cyberweapons such as Pegasus should be tightened, a senior MP has said.The move came as the French president, Emmanuel Macron, convened an emergency cybersecurity meeting after reports his mobile phone and those of government ministers appeared in the leaked list. An official in Macron’s Elysee Palace said that the president’s phone and phone numbers had been changed. Continue reading...
by David Smith in Washington and agencies on (#5MBWN)
Justice department charged four Chinese nationals with hacking as Washington accused Beijing of threatening national securityThe US has led allies in a sharp condemnation of China for “malicious” cyberattacks, including a hack of Microsoft Exchange email server software that compromised tens of thousands of computers around the world earlier this year.Related: UK and allies accuse Chinese state-backed group of Microsoft hack Continue reading...
Venomous snakebites cause tens of thousands of deaths each year. But homegrown apps are coming to the rescue – and protecting reptiles from reprisalsWhen 12-year-old Anay Sujith felt a sharp sting in his leg while asleep in his hut in a village in Kerala, “I started yelling and woke up my parents,” he recalls. They immediately sought help – not with a phone call, but through an app.A team from Kannur Wildlife Rescuers (KWR) reached the boy’s home, in Ramatheru village in the coastal city of Kannur, within minutes and he was admitted to hospital 20 minutes later. He had been bitten four times by a venomous Russell’s viper, one of the “big four” snakes in India responsible for the greatest number of venomous snakebites. Continue reading...
by Dan Sabbagh, Jennifer Rankin and Peter Walker on (#5MBRB)
British foreign secretary says Beijing will be held to account if it does not stop ‘systematic cyber sabotage’Britain has joined with the US and other allies in formally accusing Chinese state-based hacking groups of being behind the exploitation of an estimated 250,000 Microsoft Exchange servers worldwide earlier this year.The UK foreign secretary said the cyber-attack amounted to “a reckless but familiar pattern of behaviour”, in an announcement released on Monday. Continue reading...
With a new generation fuelling fashion, protest and popular culture, is it time for millennials like me to move over? A panel of young trailblazers give me a glow up – and some lessons in activismI am sitting cross-legged on the floor, wearing a bucket hat, trying to be chill. I rest my chin in my hands and try to think chill thoughts, which is hard, because I am wearing mint flatform Crocs, studded with pineapples and watermelons, and a fluffy green knit that feels more like a pet than a cardigan. But I do my best, because being chill is essential if I am to get into character.The term “chill” has come up a lot during this past week in which I – one of the world’s oldest millennials at 39 – am trying to be more generation Z. I’m learning the ways of the generation beneath mine, who, according to the US thinktank the Pew Research Center, were born between 1997 and 2012, and are taking over from millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) as the cohort in charge of the internet. Continue reading...
Social media giants contribute to global conflicts and allow misinformation. How have they gained so much control, and what is that doing to our lives?It’s good to remember that every time Mark Zuckerberg claims that he founded Facebook in order to connect people or build communities, he is somehow forgetting that he first created the site in order to enable himself and his fellow dorm-dwellers to rate Harvard’s young women on their looks. But then, Zuckerberg has never been the sharpest tool in the box. He once said that Facebook wouldn’t interfere with Holocaust-denial on its service, because it was hard to impugn people’s motives for denying the Holocaust, before a couple of years later announcing that his “thinking” on the matter had “evolved” and Holocaust denial was now frowned upon. Well, evolution does work slowly.But as Charles Arthur’s coolly prosecutorial book shows, social-media algorithms don’t just allow people with nefarious interests to get together: they perform as active matchmakers. “Facebook was hothousing extremism by putting extremists in touch with each other,” concluded Facebook’s own internal investigations in 2016. Not only that, Facebook was “auto-generating terrorist content”: its “machine learning” systems created a “Local Business” page for “al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsula”. Continue reading...
Alliances are shifting as states led by China and Russia compete with the US and tech entrepreneursLiu Boming took in the dizzy view. Around him lay the inky vastness of space. Below was the Earth. “Wow,” he said, laughing. “It’s too beautiful out here.” Over the next seven hours Liu and his colleague Tang Hongbo carried out China’s second spacewalk, helped along by a giant robotic arm.Mission accomplished, the two taikonauts – China’s astronauts – clambered back into their home for the next three months: Beijing’s new space station. The core module of the station, named Tiangong, meaning “heavenly palace”, was launched in April. “There will be more spacewalks. The station will keep growing,” Liu said. Continue reading...
by Hannah Verdier, Hannah J Davies and Ella Mumby on (#5M8Q6)
TV doctors Chris and Xand consider the drastic differences in their weight – and health. Plus: Slate’s One Year takes us back to 1977, and more mind-changing action in You’re Wrong AboutA Thorough Examination With Drs Chris and Xand
Anonymous person will be replaced by 18-year-old recent high school graduate on New Shepard spacecraftThe anonymous winner of a ticket to join billionaire Jeff Bezos in space next week will no longer board the New Shepard spacecraft due to “scheduling conflicts”, Bezos’s Blue Origin company announced on Thursday.The winner, who paid $29.7m to join one of the world’s richest men in space, will instead be replaced by Oliver Daemen, a recent high school graduate. The 18-year-old took a gap year in 2020 to obtain his private pilot’s license and plans to study physics and innovation management at the Netherlands-based University of Utrecht in September. Continue reading...
• Social media company takes down 200 accounts• ‘Hallmarks of a well-resourced and persistent operation’Facebook said on Thursday it had taken down about 200 accounts run by a group of hackers in Iran as part of a cyber-spying operation that targeted mostly US military personnel and people working at defense and aerospace companies.The social media company said the group, dubbed “Tortoiseshell” by security experts, used fake online personas to connect with targets, build trust – sometimes over the course of several months – and drive them to other sites, where they were tricked into clicking malicious links that would infect their devices with spying malware. Continue reading...
Documents appear to show how Russian intelligence worked to install their preferred candidate as presidentPapers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White HouseIn January 2016, America was coming to terms with what had previously seemed incredible. Barring an unforeseen event, Donald J Trump was on course to become the Republican party’s presidential candidate. Some welcomed this giddy prospect, while others in the Republican establishment recoiled in horror.The man himself oozed confidence. “I have a feeling it’s going to work out, actually,” he told his rival Ted Cruz, at a Fox News debate. By 22 January, the polls had Trump well ahead, as a snowstorm nudged towards Washington. Continue reading...
Researchers say web domains masquerading as activist, health and media groups are used by governments to hack targetsAn Israeli company that sells spyware to governments is linked to fake Black Lives Matter and Amnesty International websites that are used to hack targets, according to a new report.Researchers from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, who worked with Microsoft, issued a report on Thursday about the potential targets of Candiru, a Tel Aviv-based firm marketing “untraceable” spyware that can infect and monitor computers and phones. Continue reading...
My father, Aladdin Bahrani, who has died aged 91, spent many years working as a senior engineer in his birthplace, Iraq, before becoming professor of manufacturing engineering at Queen’s University in Belfast, where he had trained just after the second world war.The eldest of 10 children, he was born in Baghdad, to Mohammed Saleem Bahrani, a landowner and farmer, and Bahija Abdul Hussan Al Shamma, a housewife. Once he had finished his schooling at Baghdad College, he left Iraq on a government scholarship to study engineering at Queen’s University from 1948 to 1953, graduating with a science master’s and meeting a young Belfast woman, Margaret Sawrey, who became his wife in 1952. Continue reading...
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