Category Archives: World News

Wall Street Journal editorial calls Trump tariffs ‘dumbest trade war in history’

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Some US business leaders reacted neutrally, while JP Morgan CEO says tariff threats can be used effectively

US business leaders are offering a mixed reaction to the steep trade tariffs that Donald Trump’s administration has imposed on Canada, Mexico and China, as the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal called it “the dumbest trade war in history”.

Donald Trump hit Canada and Mexico with a 25% tariff on imports, and China with 10%, on Saturday in a move that launched a new era of trade wars between the US and three of its largest trading partners. The tariffs against Canada tax oil and energy products at 10%.

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Trump warns Americans that tariffs may cause ‘pain’– US politics live

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US president says measures against Mexico, Canada and China will ‘all be worth the price’

After Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Volkswagen, Germany’s largest carmaker, said that tariffs would have a “harmful economic impact” on American consumers, as well as the international automotive industry.

German automakers say the tariffs will cause inflation for consumers.

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Salman Rushdie set to testify as attempted murder trial gets under way

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Hadi Matar, 26, accused of stabbing author 10 times in case likely to draw world’s media to tiny upstate New York town

A man accused of attacking Salman Rushdie as he was being introduced at a literary lecture in New York state in 2022 is going on trial this week in a case likely to create global headlines.

The trial could upend life in the tiny upstate New York village of Mayville, whose population of less than 1,500 is not accustomed to finding itself at the center of a media circus covering the attempted assassination of one of the world’s most famous writers.

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Trump’s order targeting pro-Palestinian protests mirrors rightwing blueprint

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New fact sheet bears similarity to Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, which aims to quash US support of Palestine

Critics warn that a new executive order from Donald Trump’s administration purporting to “combat antisemitism”, and a corresponding fact sheet suggesting deporting international students who protest Israel, could chill political speech on campuses.

The fact sheet released before Trump signed the order on Wednesday quoted the president as saying: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

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Luis Rubiales to go on trial in Spain over Jenni Hermoso kiss at World Cup

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Spanish football federation’s former president is accused of sexual assault and coercion over incident in 2023

Spain’s former football chief Luis Rubiales will go on trial in Madrid on Monday over the unsolicited kiss he planted on the World Cup winner Jenni Hermoso, a gesture that stunned millions of TV viewers and unleashed a backlash against sexism in sport.

Rubiales, 47, is accused of sexual assault as well as coercion after allegations that he tried to force Hermoso, 34, into publicly declaring that the kiss, which occurred as she celebrated her team’s victory in the 2023 World Cup in Australia, was consensual.

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‘Very retaliatory’: the federal workers caught up in Trump’s DEI purge

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Employees condemn ‘unprecedented and scary’ effort to push out those who had worked on diversity programs

Jeremy Wood thought he was safe from the shuttering of federal government diversity initiatives that he expected to start as soon as Donald Trump was sworn in.

A Raleigh, North Carolina-based career civil servant in the US agriculture department, Wood had been among those tasked with implementing policies ordered by Joe Biden to curtail discrimination on the basis of race, sexual orientation and gender identity in the federal government.

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Pressure grows on EU to freeze minerals deal with Rwanda over DRC fighting

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Belgium leads calls for suspension of agreement after Rwanda-backed rebels captured city of Goma

The EU is under mounting pressure to suspend a controversial minerals deal with Rwanda that has been blamed for fuelling the conflict in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Calls to freeze the agreement have grown after fighters from the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group captured the city of Goma in the eastern DRC, escalating a decades-old conflict and raising fears of a regional war.

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Exonerated environmental defenders to face murder retrial in El Salvador

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Critics decry ‘politically motivated’ decision to revisit civil war-era charges against leaders of anti-mining campaign

Five Salvadorian environmental defenders who were exonerated of bogus civil war charges will face retrial this week amid growing evidence of political interference.

Miguel Ángel Gámez, Alejandro Laínez García, Pedro Antonio Rivas Laínez, Antonio Pacheco and Saúl Agustín Rivas Ortega, were acquitted in October over the alleged killing of an army informant in 1989. The court in Cabañas in northern El Salvador ruled that the state had failed to prove a crime had taken place, or that the defendants, former leftwing guerrilla fighters, were linked to any wrongdoing.

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Syrian leader meets Saudi crown prince for first official foreign visit

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Ahmed al-Sharaa in Riyadh on trip that highlights reset of regional alliances after end of Iran-backed Assad regime

Syria’s transitional president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, met the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, in Riyadh on Sunday in his first foreign trip as Syrian leader, in a sign of the major shifts under way in regional alliances.

Sharaa assumed power as transitional president last week, after leading a rebel campaign that ousted the longtime Iran-backed leader Bashar al-Assad, whose ties with the rest of the Arab world were strained throughout the nearly 14-year Syrian war.

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Trump aid spending freeze halts leading malaria vaccine programme

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Global collaboration with US researchers likely to be set back by years, including on spread of drug-resistant HIV

A flagship programme to create malaria vaccines has been halted by the Trump administration, in just one example of a rippling disruption to health research around the globe since the new US president took power.

The USAid Malaria Vaccine Development Program (MVDP) – which works to prevent child deaths by creating more effective second-generation vaccines – funds research by teams collaborating across institutes, including the US university Johns Hopkins and the UK’s University of Oxford.

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Ukraine and Russia blame each other as missile kills at least four in Kursk school

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Ukraine armed forces say 84 people were rescued or had medical help after strike in Russian territory that Kyiv holds

Ukraine and Russia have traded blame for a deadly missile strike that killed at least four people in the dormitory of a boarding school situated in a part of Russia’s Kursk region held by Ukrainian forces.

Some of the war’s fiercest battles in recent months have been taking place in the Kursk region that borders Ukraine, where Kyiv forces have held swathes of the land since staging a major cross-border incursion last August.

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At least 770 killed in Goma, east DRC, in fighting with Rwanda-backed M23

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Rebels had captured the city in January in major escalation of 10-year-old conflict

At least 773 people were killed in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo’s largest city of Goma and its vicinity this week amid fighting with Rwanda-backed rebels who captured the city in a major escalation of a decade-long conflict, Congolese authorities have said.

The rebels’ advance into other areas was slowed by a weakened military that recovered some villages from them.

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USAid website offline as Trump moves to put agency under state department

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Move would threaten life-saving global humanitarian aid programs, from HIV/Aids treatments to clean water access

The website for the US Agency for International Development, or USAid, appeared to be offline on Saturday, as the Trump administration moves to put the free-standing agency, and its current $42.8bn budget for global humanitarian operations, under state department control.

A message stating that the “server IP address could not be found” appeared when attempts were made to access the website on Saturday.

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Major anti-corruption protests in Serbia add to pressure on President Vučić

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Tens of thousands rally against government and in memory of railway station roof collapse that killed 15

Serbia’s powerful populist leader Aleksandar Vučić was facing his biggest challenge yet as student-led demonstrations intensified at the weekend in what was being called the Balkan country’s greatest ever protest movement.

Three months to the day after a concrete canopy collapsed at the entrance of Novi Sad’s railway station, tens of thousands of protesters converged on the northern city, blockading its three bridges in commemoration of the 15 people killed in the accident. The tragedy has been blamed squarely on government ineptitude and graft.

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Rafah crossing reopening cannot be underestimated – it hints at success for Gaza ceasefire

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Border has been closed since May 2024 for even the most urgent medical cases and evacuations are significant first step

The Rafah terminal that marks the crossing between southern Gaza and Egypt straddles a complicated border. On the Egyptian side, a double arch marks the entry to the terminal buildings themselves, and beyond, Gaza.

Television cameras on the Egyptian side caught the moment on Saturday that the crossing, which has been closed since May, was reopened for medical evacuations showing one young girl, whose foot had been amputated, being loaded into an Egyptian ambulance.

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Dozens killed as opposition RSF forces attack open market in Sudan

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Assault by the Rapid Support Forces in city of Omdurman also leaves more than 150 people wounded

Fighters with the opposition Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have attacked an open market in the Sudanese city of Omdurman, killing 54 people.

The attack on Sabrein market also wounded at least 158 others, Sudan’s health ministry said.

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Hamas releases more Gaza hostages under ceasefire deal with Israel

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Two men handed over to Red Cross in southern Gaza Strip with a third due to be freed in Gaza City in exchange for jailed Palestinians

Middle East crisis live: Hamas release of more hostages under way

Three more Israelis – all male civilian hostages – were being released to Israel on Saturday as part of the continuing ceasefire agreement with Hamas in Gaza.

Hamas handed the first two hostages over to the Red Cross in the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday morning before they were received by the Israeli military a short while later.

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‘Are we dating the same guy?’: Women turn to Facebook to uncover cheating and violence

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Experts say use of groups to warn others about dangerous men is indictment on governments’ failure to keep women safe

“Any info on Chris* please? Thanks.” The words in a Facebook post, above three pictures of a man. In the comments, a woman replies: “He was also posted a few days ago by someone.”

Further down, a second woman replies: “I’m shaking, I’m his fiancee.”

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Russian spy ship fire exposes poor state of Mediterranean fleet, say experts

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Incident reveals Russia’s maritime presence in the area is in a state of disrepair and disarray, argue western sources

A fire onboard a Russian spy ship off the coast of Syria has underlined the poor state of the Russian navy as its toehold in the Mediterranean hangs in the balance, analysts and western security services say.

The 55-year-old Kildin got into trouble off the Syrian coast last Thursday, when flames and thick black smoke could be seen billowing from its funnel and it hoisted two black balls up its mast, signifying that the crew no longer had control of the vessel.

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Medical jet carrying six people crashes in Philadelphia, setting homes on fire

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Jet Rescue Air Ambulance said it could not ‘confirm any survivors’ aboard plane that went down near Roosevelt Mall

A medical transport jet carrying a child patient, her mother and four others including crew crashed into a north-east Philadelphia neighborhood on Friday evening, erupting in a fireball and setting several homes ablaze just 30 seconds after taking off.

“We cannot confirm any survivors,” said a statement from Jet Rescue Air Ambulance, which operated the Learjet 55. “Our immediate concern is for the patient’s family, our personnel, their families and other victims that may have been hurt on the ground.”

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