Middle Eastern Politics Headlines at 5:19 p.m. GMT
Lawsuit accuses State Department of creating loopholes for Israel on military aid and human rights
Lawsuit accuses State Department of creating loopholes for Israel on military aid and human rights
TikTok CEO Shou Chew appealed to Donald Trump’s ego in a video statement on the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the TikTok ban. “I want to thank President Trump for his commitment to work with us to find a solution that keeps TikTok available in the United States,” he said. “This is a strong stand for the First Amendment and against arbitrary censorship.” Trump said that he had “a warm spot” for the app during a December meeting with Chew, who was sure to mention Trump’s popularity on the app
Nvidia's chief executive Jensen Huang said on Friday he will not be attending U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration, but will instead be "on the road" celebrating the Lunar New Year with employees and their families. Asked by reporters outside Nvidia's new year party in Taipei whether he had talked with the incoming Trump administration about the new artificial intelligence export control rules the outgoing Biden administration unveiled this week, Huang said, "not yet". He also said he had met C.C. Wei, the chairman of Nvidia's main supplier TSMC for lunch where they talked about ramping up production of Nvidia's most advanced AI chips Blackwell.
Billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates reflected on a recent dinner he had with President-elect Trump in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, saying he was “impressed” by the former president. “I had a chance, about two weeks ago, to go have a long and actually quite intriguing dinner with him,” Gates told…
Donald Trump has fired a defiant riposte to Joe Biden’s parting warning that a tech titan oligarchy is threatening America’s democracy. The president-elect has invited the world’s wealthiest billionaires to join his family and former U.S. presidents in prime positions on the dais for Monday’s inauguration ceremony. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Shou Zi Chew will take pride of place outside the Capitol in a clear show of money power behind the new administration.
An armed assailant fatally shot two notorious Iranian judges inside the Islamic Republic’s supreme court on Saturday.
Mel Gibson is just as surprised as you are. The controversial Hollywood star apparently found out about his new diplomatic posting at the same time as the rest of the world when President-elect Donald Trump announced he would be appointing actors Sylvester Stallone, Jon Voight, and Gibson as his “special ambassadors” to Hollywood. In true Trump fashion, he said the new roles were part of his effort to the American film industry “bigger, better, and stronger than ever before.”
Taiwan carried out its first execution in five years late on Thursday, upsetting both rights groups and the European Union which called on the government to maintain its de facto moratorium on the death penalty. Despite Taiwan's reputation as Asia's most liberal democracy, the death penalty remains broadly popular according to opinion polls, though in recent years it has only rarely been carried out and violent crime is relatively low. In September, Taiwan's constitutional court ruled that the death penalty is constitutional but only for the most serious crimes with the most rigorous legal scrutiny, after considering a petition brought by 37 people who were then on death row.
The US Trade Representative said Thursday that its probe into China's practices in the shipbuilding, maritime and logistics sectors found that Beijing's undermining of fair competition warranted "urgent action.""Beijing's targeted dominance of these sectors undermines fair, market-oriented competition, increases economic security risks, and is the greatest barrier to revitalization of US industries," USTR Katherine Tai said in a statement.
The Dutch government excludes billions of euros of sales by technology company ASML to China from disclosures on sensitive goods exports, it has told Reuters, following a policy decision that has not been previously reported. The move is of interest because disclosure of exports of "dual use" goods with potential military applications had previously been routine in the Netherlands, and experts who rely on public data to understand states' military capabilities, including parliament, may no longer have the full picture. Computer chip equipment maker ASML itself releases sales data for China - around $7 billion worth in the first nine months of 2024 - but it does not specify the type of machinery it sells by region.
It was just past 11 on a freezing December morning on the outskirts of Brussels, but already workers at the city's Audi factory were cracking open frosty cans of beer. They had just finished a long night shift - not on one of the production lines at a plant that has produced 8 million cars since 1949, according to a huge sign on its exterior wall - but on a picket line outside. Pallets and old furniture were added to roaring fires in the middle of a road. Hand-painted signs raged, in French, aga
Diaz surprised co-star with her jab at tech billionaire’s friendship with Trump
Malaysia plans to strengthen three-decade old anti-dumping legislation in the coming weeks to clamp down on a deluge of cheap goods from countries like China, according to a high-ranking trade official.
A South Korean lawmaker said Seoul's intelligence showed some 3,000 North Korean troops have been wounded or killed in Kursk.
The chief executive of a Greenland hotel where Donald Trump Jr. hosted a lunch in for MAGA supporters has claimed that the attendees did not actually know who Don Jr. was and were just looking for a free lunch. “[Trump Jr.] had just met them in the street and invited them for lunch, or his staff did. But I don’t think they knew who they were inviting,” Jørgen Bay-Kastrup, the chief executive of Hotel Hans Egede in Nuuk, Greenland, told the Guardian in an interview published Thursday. “That of co
The president-elect's new eyebrow-raising photo spurred a lot of conversations online. Experts think his expression and pose reveal a lot.
Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency struggled to answer straightforward questions about science. At his confirmation hearing on Thursday, former Rep. Lee Zeldin faced scrutiny of his limited environmental experience. For one senator, Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, this took the form of a science pop quiz—asking, in his words, “really basic no-tricks questions about climate change.” Whitehouse started off with a softball: “First, as a matter of law, is carbon dioxide a p
The head of Taiwan's delegation to next week's inauguration of Donald Trump as U.S. president said on Saturday he was going there to extend the island's "highest blessings" to the United States. Taiwan, which China views as its own territory, enjoyed strong support from the first Trump administration, including regularising arms sales which have continued under President Joe Biden. Taiwan parliament speaker Han Kuo-yu, a senior member of the opposition Kuomintang party and who unsuccessfully ran for president in 2020, said at Taoyuan airport before leaving for Washington that many foreign leaders were also on their way even with the threatened heavy snow.
The portraits of the president-elect and the incoming vice-president "go hard" their press team said.
“This aggressive Russian action is not acceptable,” the French defense minister said
TikTok says it will "go dark" in the United States on Sunday, threatening access to the app for 170 million users, unless the government provides assurances that a law mandating its sale or ban won't be used to punish service providers.Late on Friday, however, TikTok said its US services would "go dark" unless the Biden administration "immediately provides a definitive statement to satisfy the most critical service providers assuring non-enforcement" of the law calling for the platform's ban.