Category: 2. World

In the overcrowded, rubble strewn streets of Gaza City, there was little surprise at the announcement that UN-backed experts believed the scenes of desperation could now be formally described as a famine.

“This is something we have been saying for months now, and we have witnessed this and we have been living this and suffering this. We feel very powerless and very sick and very tired,” said Amjad Shawa, the director of the Palestinian NGO Network, who has been in Gaza City throughout the 22-month war.

On Friday, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a globally recognised organisation that classifies the severity of food insecurity and malnutrition, found that three key thresholds for a declaration of famine had been met in the once bustling commercial and administrative hub.

Only four famines have been declared by the IPC since it was established in 2004, most recently in Sudan last year. “This famine is entirely man-made, it can be halted and reversed,” the report said. It warned of an exponential increase in deaths if “a ceasefire is not implemented … and essential food supplies and basic … services are not restored immediately”.

It is the most vulnerable among the Palestinians now living in Gaza City, thought to be between 500,00 and 800,000 people, that are most at risk, especially elderly people, the young, sick or socially isolated, aid officials have said.

“I have nothing to cook and no money to buy firewood for cooking. We eat a little food in the morning to stop our hunger and a little more at night. I eat just some za’atar [spice mix], cheese or just salt with bread, no vegetables, nothing cooked,” said Sabah Antaiz, 55, who was displaced from the Tuffah neighbourhood in eastern Gaza City by recent Israeli offensives.

Antaiz has hypertension, diabetes and a heart condition. Her husband, 60, is very ill and cannot work or collect food. “We have no one left, no one to support me or even bring us food. I lost about 10 members of my family in an airstrike on Tuffah neighbourhood: my father, mother, nephews and nieces, the children of my brothers and sisters,” Antaiz said.

Israeli authorities tightened their existing blockade of Gaza at the beginning of the conflict in October 2023 and imposed a two-month total ban on supplies in March and April. More has reached Gaza in recent weeks, though only a fraction of what is needed, aid agencies say. The price of sugar has gone from about $100 (£74) for a kilogram to about $7, but much else remains too expensive for the 90% of people who have no income. Tomatoes cost $30 a kg.

Ibtisam Saleh, 50, who lives in a tent in Gaza City after being displaced 20 times, said she had no food and no source of income. “What we have now comes only from aid or gifts. Before the war, I used to receive $100 each month from the Qatari embassy because I was divorced and had a son. But since the war began, we have not received anything,” Saleh said.

Saleh eats one meal a day, usually lentils, though earlier this week a neighbour gave her a small bag of rice. “I do not have the strength to stand in line waiting to get my share [of any food aid]. One time I fainted while waiting. The sun was very hot and I am hypertensive. Because of the heat, my blood pressure dropped and I lost consciousness,” Saleh said.

Along with the sick and elderly people, there are those who are destitute. After almost two years of displacement and deprivation, few in Gaza City have any physical or financial reserves.

“This is a population that has been stripped of any resilience … They have absolutely nothing. There is no safety margin at all. They are right on the very edge,” said one UN aid official with oversight of operations across Gaza.

There are deep concerns about the very north of Gaza, where thousands still live among ruins in the worst humanitarian conditions anywhere in the battered territory, though data there was insufficient for the IPC to make a judgment on the category of the crisis.

In Gaza City, families sleep in the open on streets without shelter or pack into crowded, damaged apartments or tented camps where flies, mosquitoes and infectious diseases are rife. Rubbish piles up everywhere and choking smoke from plastic burning on fires causes chronic coughs. In recent weeks, temperatures have soared.

Riham Kraiem, 35, lives in a tent in Gaza City with her unemployed husband and their 10 children aged between two and 18. They had to leave their home in Beit Hanoun, a now flattened northern town, three months ago. An Israeli military assault near the school where they were sheltering initially pushed them to Gaza City.

“For the past three months, we haven’t received any money or aid. We no longer have money to buy anything, even though prices have come down,” Kraiem said. “My children ask for many things … They want me to make them sweets but I can’t because we have no money. We eat only two meals a day, one in the morning and one in the evening. This morning, I cooked a can of lentils and we ate that. In the evening, we usually eat thyme or cheese with bread and sometimes just bread alone.”

Kraiem said she had no food supplies left. “We left some behind in our home when we fled, and the house was destroyed,” she said. “Yesterday, my son went to look for aid and got one kilogram of pasta and a can of tomato sauce. He was given it by a young man who had got it from a food distribution site. He came back feeling like he was flying from happiness.”

Israel has rejected the findings of the IPC report, saying there is no famine in Gaza and that the findings were based on “Hamas lies laundered through organisations with vested interests”.

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump on Friday announced the US government has secured a 10 percent stake in struggling Silicon Valley pioneer Intel in a deal that was completed just a couple weeks after he was depicting the company’s CEO as a conflicted leader unfit for the job.

“The United States of America now fully owns and controls 10 percent of INTEL, a Great American Company that has an even more incredible future,” Trump wrote in a post.

The US government is getting the stake through the conversion of $11.1 billion in previously issued funds and pledges. All told, the government is getting 433.3 million shares of non-voting stock priced at $20.47 apiece — a discount from Friday’s closing price at $24.80. That spread means the US government already has a gain of $1.9 billion, on paper.

The remarkable turn of events makes the US government one of Intel’s largest shareholders at a time that the Santa Clara, California, company is in the process of jettisoning more than 20,000 workers as part of its latest attempt to bounce back from years of missteps taken under a variety of CEOs.

Intel’s current CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, has only been on the job for slightly more than five months, and earlier this month, it looked like he might be on shaky ground already after some lawmakers raised national security concerns about his past investments in Chinese companies while he was a venture capitalist. Trump latched on to those concerns in an August 7 post demanding that Tan resign.

But Trump backed off after the Malaysian-born Tan professed his allegiance to the US in a public letter to Intel employees and went to the White House to meet with the president, leading to a deal that now has the US government betting that the company is on the comeback trail after losing more than $22 billion since the end of 2023. Trump hailed Tan as “highly respected” CEO in his Friday post.

In a statement, Tan applauded Trump for “driving historic investments in a vital industry” and resolved to reward his faith in Intel. “We are grateful for the confidence the President and the Administration have placed in Intel, and we look forward to working to advance US technology and manufacturing leadership,” Tan said.

Intel’s current stock price is just slightly above where it was when Tan was hired in March and more than 60 percent below its peak of about $75 reached 25 years ago when its chips were still dominating the personal computer boom before being undercut by a shift to smartphones a few years later. The company’s market value currently stands at about $108 billion — a fraction of the current chip kingpin, Nvidia, which is valued at $4.3 trillion.

The stake is coming primarily through US government grants to Intel through the CHIPS and Science Act that was started under President Joe Biden’s administration as a way to foster more domestic manufacturing of computer chips to lessen the dependence on overseas factories.

But the Trump administration, which has regularly pilloried the policies of the Biden administration, saw the CHIPs act as a needless giveaway and is now hoping to make a profit off the funding that had been pledged to Intel.

“We think America should get the benefit of the bargain,” US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said earlier this week. “It’s obvious that it’s the right move to make.”

About $7.8 billion had been been pledged to Intel under the incentives program, but only $2.2 billion had been funded so far. Another $3.2 billion of the government investment is coming through the funds from another program called “Secure Enclave.”

Although US government can’t vote with its shares and won’t have a seat on Intel’s board of directors, critics of the deal view it as a troubling cross-pollination between the public and private sectors that could hurt the tech industry in a variety of ways.

For instance, more tech companies may feel pressured to buy potentially inferior chips from Intel to curry favor with Trump at a time that he is already waging a trade war that threatens to affect their products in a potential scenario cited by Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics for the Cato Institute.

“Overall, it’s a horrendous move that will have real harms for US companies, US tech leadership, and the US economy overall,” Lincicome posted Friday.

The 10 percent stake could also intensify the pressure already facing Tan, especially if Trump starts fixating on Intel’s stock price while resorting to his penchant for celebrating his past successes in business.

Nancy Tengler, CEO of money manager Laffer Tengler Investments, is among the investors who abandoned Intel years ago because of all the challenges facing Intel.

“I don’t see the benefit to the American taxpayer, nor do I see the benefit, necessarily to the chip industry,” Tengler said while also raising worries about Trump meddling in Intel’s business.

“I don’t care how good of businessman you are, give it to the private sector and let people like me be the critic and let the government get to the business of government.,” Tengler said.

Although rare, it’s not unprecedented for the US government to become a significant shareholder in a prominent company. One of the most notable instances occurred during the Great Recession in 2008 when the government injected nearly $50 billion into General Motors in return for a roughly 60 percent stake in the automaker at a time it was on the verge of bankruptcy. The government ended up with a roughly $10 billion loss after it sold its stock in GM.

The US government’s stake in Intel coincides with Trump’s push to bring production to the US, which has been a focal point of the trade war that he has been waging throughout the world. By lessening the country’s dependence on chips manufactured overseas, the president believes the US will be better positioned to maintain its technological lead on China in the race to create artificial intelligence.

Even before gaining the 10 percent stake in Intel, Trump had been leveraging his power to reprogram the operations of major computer chip companies. The administration is requiring Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, two companies whose chips are powering the AI craze, to pay a 15 percent commission on their sales of chips in China in exchange for export licenses.

 

COLOMBO:

Former Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who led the country during a devastating economic crisis, was arrested and remanded in custody on Friday over allegations he misused state funds while in office, police said.

Wickremesinghe, 76, who lost power in a 2024 election, had been investigated over a visit he made to Britain to attend a special graduation lunch as part of the celebrations of his wife’s honorary professorship at a university there, local media reported.

Police confirmed his arrest for alleged misuse of public funds. “Former President Ranil Wickremesinghe has been arrested and produced in court. He will be in remand custody till August 26,” police spokesman FU Wootler told Reuters.

An ally from his United National Party (UNP) proclaimed his innocence and suggested the case was politically motivated. “Ranil Wickremesinghe has never misused public funds or state funds,” UNP member Nishantha Sri Warnasinghe told reporters

“He was the person who stepped up and accepted the challenge to save this country when the economy collapsed,” Warnasinghe said. “That is the person who is being treated like this today by this government,” she told reporters outside the Colombo court where Wickremesinghe appeared.

Political family

Wickremesinghe, a lawyer and the UNP head, who also served as Sri Lanka’s prime minister a record six times, became the president in 2022 at the height of the Indian Ocean island nation’s debilitating financial crisis.

Wickremesinghe took over after widespread protests caused by an economic meltdown forced his predecessor Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country and later resign.

New Delhi, India – Five years ago, United States President Donald Trump was being welcomed in India, and China condemned.

In February 2020, Trump addressed a massive rally titled “Namaste Trump!” in Ahmedabad, on his first visit to India as US president, as bilateral ties and trade soared, and the American leader’s personal bonhomie with Prime Minister Narendra Modi was on public display.

By June that year, relations with China, on the other hand, came crashing down: 20 Indian soldiers were killed in clashes with Chinese troops in Galwan Valley in the Ladakh region. India banned more than 200 Chinese apps, including TikTok, and Indian and Chinese troops lined up along their disputed border in an eyeball-to-eyeball standoff. New Delhi also expanded defence and strategic cooperation with the US and the Quad grouping, officially the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, which also includes Japan and Australia.

As recently as May this year, India treated China as its primary adversary, after Pakistan used Chinese defence systems during its four-day war with India after a deadly attack in Indian-administered Kashmir.

But Trump’s tariff wars, especially against India – which has been slapped with a 50 percent duty on its imports – and rapid geopolitical shifts have led to a thaw in New Delhi’s relations with Beijing.

The White House under Trump, meanwhile, political analysts say, is undoing decades of diplomatic and strategic gains foundational to its influence in Asia, home to more than 60 percent of the world’s population.

“Dragon-Elephant tango”

Earlier this week, Prime Minister Modi sat down with China’s top diplomat, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, as he hailed “respect for each other’s interests and sensitiveness” and “steady progress” in bilateral relations.

On his two-day visit to New Delhi, Wang also met with Indian Foreign Minister S Jaishankar and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval to discuss the countries’ disputed border in the Himalayan mountains.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the countries have entered a “steady development track” and should “trust and support” each other. In their meetings, both sides announced confidence-building measures: resumption of direct flights, easier visa processes and border trade facilitation. In June, Beijing allowed pilgrims from India to visit holy sites in Tibet. The two countries also agreed to explore an “early harvest” settlement of parts of their long, contested border, which is the biggest source of historical tensions between them, including a war they fought in 1962.

Modi also formally accepted an invitation from Chinese President Xi Jinping to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin – a regional grouping led by China and Russia that many analysts view as aimed at countering US influence in Asia – scheduled for late this month. It will be Modi’s first visit to China in more than seven years.

“The setbacks we experienced in the past few years were not in the interest of the people of our two countries. We are heartened to see the stability that is now restored in the borders,” Wang said Monday, referring to the Galwan clashes, in which four Chinese soldiers were killed as well.

Earlier this year, President Xi called for Sino-Indian ties to take the form of a “Dragon-Elephant tango” – a reference to the animals often seen as emblems of the two Asian giants.

Sana Hashmi, a fellow at the Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation, told Al Jazeera that the efforts to minimise tensions and differences between India and China have been under way for some time.

Last October, Modi and Xi broke the ice with a meeting in Kazan, Russia, after avoiding each other for years, even at multilateral forums.

“However, Trump’s policies on tariffs and [favourable approach towards New Delhi’s rival] Pakistan have left India with little choice but to reduce the number of adversaries, including China,” she said.

The US has twice hosted Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir, this year, including for an unprecedented White House meeting with Trump. The US president has also repeatedly claimed that he brokered the ceasefire that ended the fighting between India and Pakistan in May, despite New Delhi denying that Washington played a mediator.

“For Beijing, the outreach [towards India] appears largely tactical, while for New Delhi, it stems more from uncertainty and the shifting geopolitical landscape,” Hashmi said.

While there are no visible signs that Trump is seeking to isolate China, Hashmi said the White House “is certainly trying to isolate a key strategic partner, India.”

Trump has imposed an additional 25 percent tariff – on top of another 25 percent – on India’s goods, citing its continued imports of Russian oil. He has not imposed such tariffs against China, the largest buyer of Russian crude.

Biswajit Dhar, a trade economist, said that the Trump tariffs are causing a realignment in Asia. “The pace of improvement [in India-China relations] has certainly hastened over the past few months,” he said.

“There seems to be a genuine shift in the relations,” he added, “which is here to stay.”

Asian trade bloc?

Political and economic experts also noted that if India-China ties were to get warmer, that could soften the blow of US tariffs for both.

With Washington raising barriers on key Indian exports, access to Chinese markets, smoother cross-border trade and collaborative supply chain networks would help New Delhi reduce its reliance on the US market.

In 2024-25, India recorded a trade deficit of $99.2bn with China, backed by a surge in imports of electronic goods. Beijing is India’s largest trading partner after the US – yet, India’s trade deficit with China is roughly double that with the US.

China is attempting to woo India and has indicated that it will provide greater market access for Indian goods, said Hashmi, of the Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation. “This could offer India some relief from Trump’s tariffs and mitigate the impact of strategic and economic vulnerabilities and also help reduce the significant trade imbalance India currently has with China,” she said.

For China, winning India over would also be a major strategic gain for its influence in the Asia Pacific, Hashmi said. “New Delhi has been a key pillar of the US-led Indo-Pacific strategy, so closer ties with India would allow China to demonstrate that it, rather than the US, is a reliable economic and security partner,” she added.

Both in India and China, there is a realisation that they have lost too much geostrategically due to their tense relationship, said Ivan Lidarev, a visiting research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Institute of South Asian Studies, specialising in India-China relations.

“China realised that it has pushed India way too close to the US, and New Delhi realises that its close relations with the US now cost it to a great extent,” he said.

“The China-India rapprochement creates greater space for Asia-led trade blocs that are independent from Washington,” Lidarev said, adding that there could be an increase in the bilateral trade between India and China.

However, Hashmi pointed to limitations that she suggested were in-built into how closely India and China could cooperate. India, like several other countries, has been trying to derisk its supply chains by reducing overdependence on any one source. That, she said, “is proving ineffective without a strong response to the growing dependence on China”. And for India, “this challenge has only deepened with the new US tariffs”.

“A thaw in relations may help normalise bilateral ties, but it is unlikely to transform them, as competition and conflict will persist,” she told Al Jazeera. “[And the] global trade dependence on China will continue, as countries rush to normalise economic relations with Beijing amid Trump’s tariffs.”

Quad, minus the edge

Since the George W Bush presidency, India has been framed in Washington as a democratic counterweight to China. Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia” gave New Delhi a central role in balancing Beijing’s rise – that only grew sharper with the creation of the Quad, which includes the US and India alongside Japan and Australia.

For the US, the Quad became a centrepiece of its Asia Pacific strategy, steering billions of dollars into Asia Pacific infrastructure, supply chain resilience and critical technologies. Experts noted that the Quad allowed the US to project influence without relying solely on formal alliances, while still embedding New Delhi in a cooperative security and economic framework.

Since the Cold War era, New Delhi has pursued a foreign policy premised on strategic autonomy – it will partner with different countries on specific issues, but will not join any military alliance and will not ideologically position itself in a bloc against other major powers.

Still, in Washington, the underlying assumption was that closer US-India ties, coupled with historical distrust between New Delhi and Beijing, would turn India into a critical pillar against China. To keep India on board, successive US administrations steered clear of pressuring New Delhi too much over its traditional friendship with Moscow, a major weapons supplier to the South Asian nation over the past half-century. That policy continued during Russia’s war on Ukraine, and the US, in fact, encouraged India to buy Russian oil that Western nations were boycotting, to keep global crude prices under check.

Now, Trump is upending that equation and wants India to formally pick a side.

Referring to India’s foreign policy, White House Counsellor for Trade and Manufacturing Peter Navarro wrote in the Financial Times on August 18, “The Biden administration largely looked the other way at this strategic and geopolitical madness. The Trump administration is confronting it … If India wants to be treated as a strategic partner of the US, it needs to start acting like one.”

Indian officials, meanwhile, have signalled that New Delhi will not give up on its “strategic autonomy”.

Warming India-China ties would complicate US efforts to isolate China in global institutions, said BR Deepak, professor of Chinese studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi.

“If New Delhi were to align more closely with Beijing on issues like development financing, multilateral reform, de-dollarisation, or climate change, it would undercut Washington’s narrative of rallying democracies against China,” Deepak told Al Jazeera, adding that it lends legitimacy to Beijing’s push for an alternative global order.

Deepak said that a friendlier Beijing-Delhi line might temper India’s appetite for overtly anti-China positioning within the Quad, nudging the grouping towards a broader agenda of providing public goods in the Asia Pacific rather than functioning as a blunt counter-China bloc.

Lidarev, of the National University of Singapore, said that the India-China rapprochement will create “complications within the Quad that will undermine the mutual trust within the grouping and the sense of purpose”.

Still, Deepak said, the Quad’s “strategic relevance” will remain intact, especially over “shared goals such as resilient supply chains, emerging technologies, climate cooperation and maritime security”.

Hashmi pointed out that Trump had focused heavily on strengthening the Quad in his first term – but was now undermining its cohesion.

Right now, the Asia Pacific “doesn’t seem to be a priority” for the US president, she said. But if that changes, Washington will find an altered regional landscape too, she suggested: Convincing India to be a part of any anti-China coalition will prove difficult.

DUBAI:

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi and his French, British and German counterparts agreed on Friday to resume talks next week on nuclear issues, Iranian state media reported, as a threat by the European powers to re-impose sanctions looms.

The three countries have said they could re-activate United Nations sanctions on Iran under a “snapback” mechanism if Tehran does not return to negotiations on a deal to curb its disputed uranium enrichment programme.

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul confirmed talks next week and warned Iran that sanctions would snap back into effect unless it reached a verifiable and durable deal to defuse concerns about its nuclear ambitions. He reiterated that time was very short and Iran needed to engage substantively.

Iranian state media said Araqchi and the British, French and German foreign ministers agreed during a phone call for deputy foreign ministers to continue the talks on Tuesday. During the call, Araqchi “emphasised the legal and moral incompetence of these countries to resort to the (snapback) mechanism, and warned of the consequences of such an action”, Iranian media reported.

The European trio, along with the US, contend that Iran is using the nuclear energy programme to potentially develop weapons capability in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran says it seeks only civilian nuclear power.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog, has stated that Iran is nowhere near developing a nuclear bomb, and US national intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard testified in March that intelligence officials had not found evidence of Iran moving toward a nuclear weapon.

India is partnering with a French company to develop and produce fighter jet engines domestically, the defence minister said.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh in May approved the prototype of a 5th-generation Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA), calling it a “significant push towards enhancing India’s indigenous defence capabilities”.

Singh, in a speech at a conference in New Delhi on Friday, gave more details about developing fighter jet aircraft engines in the country.

“We are moving forward to manufacture aircraft engines in India itself,” Singh said, in comments broadcast by Indian media.

“We are collaborating with a French company to start engine production in India.”

Singh did not name the company, but Indian media widely reported the company to be Safran, which has been working in India for decades in the aviation and defence sectors.

There was no immediate confirmation.

India, one of the world´s largest arms importers, has made the modernisation of its forces a top priority and has made repeated pushes to boost local arms production.

The world´s most populous nation has deepened defence cooperation with Western countries in recent years, including the Quad alliance with the United States, Japan and Australia.

India signed in April a multi-billion-dollar deal to purchase 26 Rafale fighter jets from France´s Dassault Aviation.

It would join 36 Rafale fighters already acquired, and replace the Russian MiG-29K jets.

Singh has also promised at least $100 billion in fresh domestic military hardware contracts by 2033 to spur local arms production.

This decade, India has opened an expansive new helicopter factory, launched its first domestically made aircraft carrier, warships and submarines, and conducted a successful long-range hypersonic missile test.

New Delhi eyes threats from multiple nations, especially Pakistan. India was engaged with its neighbour in a four-day conflict in May, their worst standoff since 1999.