MOSCOW: King Salman of Saudi Arabia will visit Russia on Thursday, senior Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov was quoted by the TASS news agency as saying.

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“We are awaiting the king’s visit on Thursday,” Ushakov said Monday, without elaborating. The visit comes a month before members of the OPEC oil cartel, of which Saudi Arabia is the biggest producer, are due to meet with the other nations that have joined them in cutting crude output, including Russia, to discuss extending the pact that has helped prop up prices.

OPEC and its allies agreed from the beginning of 2017 to cut their production by around 1.8 million barrels per day for six months. It was subsequently extended through March 2018. The pact has helped reduce the glut of crude supplies on the market and the price to climb to around $55 per barrel currently. Saudi Arabia and Russia are heavily dependent on oil exports and the plunge of the price of crude that began in 2014 lashed both of their economies.

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While Russia and Saudi Arabia are now allies on the global oil market, they are on the opposite sides in the Syria conflict. Moscow supports the regime of President Bashar al-Assad while Riyadh supports the opposition. At least 3,000 people including 955 civilians were killed in September, the deadliest month of the conflict this year, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said on Sunday.

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NAGPUR: Australia skipper Steve Smith has blamed his team’s poor decision making under pressure after their demoralising 4-1 loss to India in the five-match ODI series.

The visitors suffered a seven-wicket thrashing in the final ODI in Nagpur on Sunday to slip to third in the world rankings. They started the series in second spot.

The latest defeat was Australia’s 12th loss in their last 15 ODIs away from home — a worrying loss of form for the team just two months ahead of a home Ashes series against England.

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“We’re just not taking our words out in the middle and doing it with actions. We have glimpses of it and we play well in periods and then we just get ourselves in trouble,” Smith told reporters in Nagpur. “Probably from poor decision making under pressure, that’s what I probably put it down to. That’s something that we need to improve on because it’s not good enough.”

Australia, who came to India off the back of a disappointing Test series in Bangladesh that ended 1-1, failed to capitalise on favourable positions throughout their four losses.

The visitors allowed India to reach 281-7 after having them reeling at 87-5 in the first ODI. The Australian batsmen also faltered against India’s wrist spinners.

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“Probably lacking consistency with the bat I’d say … I think we’re losing wickets in clumps very consistently and that’s not good enough,” said Smith. “We probably didn’t adapt as well as we would have liked.”

Top Australian batsmen were guilty of not converting their starts into bigger scores, costing the visitors against a formidable Indian side.

Smith’s own form with the bat was not up to his usual high standards in the five matches, scoring 142 runs with two half-centuries. David Warner and Aaron Finch were the only Australian batsmen to make centuries.

“I wasn’t feeling great at the start of the series to be honest. I wasn’t holding the bat the way I would have liked to,” said Smith. “As the leader of the team it’s been disappointing but I guess sometimes that’s cricket. You have those periods where you’re not getting the scores you like. It’s something hopefully I can turn around and hopefully contribute in the T20Is.”

Smith played his 100th ODI in the series, having made his debut back in 2010.

Australia now head to Ranchi for the three-match Twenty20 series starting Saturday. The second and third T20s will be played on October 10 and 13 in Guwahati and Hyderabad.

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SAN FRANCISCO: Google announced on Sunday that subscription news websites would no longer have to provide users three free articles per day or face less prominence in search results, relaxing its rules following complaints from media giants like News Corp that their sales were suffering.

For the last decade, Google’s “first click free” policy helped ensure that non-subscribers wouldn’t be stifled by paywalls when they clicked on news articles from searches. Google, the largest component of Alphabet Inc, had contended that free samples would lead to increased subscriptions. But apart from a few publications, online subscriptions haven’t taken off as intended, and media companies such as Wall Street Journal parent News Corp. increasingly complained that freeloading users were cutting into sales.

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This year, the Wall Street Journal stopped abiding by Google’s policy, corresponding to a drop in search rankings but an increase in subscriptions.

“Over the last year, we got clear indications that, yes, it was going to be important for publishers to grow subscription revenues,” said Richard Gingras, Google’s vice president for news.

He said the number of news outlets with paywalls had reached
a critical mass in the last year, to the point that it made sense for Google to start developing tools for them. Google is now counting on the relaxed rules and subscription software that is under development to stop the Wall Street Journal and other publishers from holding back valuable content.

From hereon, publishers will be able to choose how many, if any, free articles they want to offer to Google searchers. Google also plans to launch free software in the coming months for publishers that enables users to pay for content with credit card information that they’ve previously supplied to the search giant.

The goal is to facilitate fast purchases that could take as little as a single click, Gingras said. Customers’ names and emails would be shared with the publishers. A separate tool would give publishers data on how to maximize sign ups with personalized offers. Gingras said Google hasn’t determined whether it may charge a fee to recoup costs of that program.

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“Google search is valuable because there’s a rich ecosystem
out there,” Gingras said. “To the extent the web is healthy,
that’s very good for our core business. Our objective is not for this to be a new line of business.” Facebook, Alphabet’s top rival in online advertising, is working on similar subscriber registration tools. Apple released support for subscriptions within its News app last year.

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TOKYO: A wild boar spread havoc in a peaceful residential area in southern Japan, upending a man in a wheelchair, biting two pensioners and smashing into both a motorbike and a car, police said.

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At least three people were injured in Sunday’s rampage in Sasebo city before the boar, measuring 1.2 metres (3.6 feet), was stopped by a local man wielding a golf club and, eventually, police shooters. During the wild animal’s eight-hour reign of terror it charged at a motorbike, attacked a 59-year-old wheelchair-bound man, and bit an 89-year-old woman on her left thumb and arm, Sasebo police official Yasutaka Urago told AFP.

It also “smashed into a small car, and before getting caught late in the afternoon, bit a 78-year-old man”, a member of the local hunting club who tried to stop the beast. The woman and the man in a wheelchair both suffered broken fingers. A local man then set about the animal with a golf club before police shot it dead.

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“I hit it hard” with an iron club, said the local hero. “I came out to help when I saw the animal biting her on her arm,” he told public broadcaster NHK.

Wild boars have increasingly been sighted in Japan’s mountainous countryside cities, as observers say the over-development of the mountains has deprived them of their habitat.

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Original Post: Raging wild boar wreaks havoc in Japan, injuring three