Category: 2. World

Shaye al-Zandani said the peace process was “almost frozen” because Tehran encouraged the Houthis to resist compromise.

“The Houthis do not show a desire for peace because they live on war,” he told the Saudi-owned newspaper, adding that “Iran’s role is very large in keeping them entrenched in these positions.”

The minister also said the United Nations Security Council was discussing new measures on Yemen, adding that some states believe Resolution 2216 – the main international framework for the conflict – is no longer workable.

In 2015, the UN Security Council adopted the resolution, imposing sanctions on people undermining Yemen’s stability and calling on all parties, especially the Houthis, to end violence.

Any new resolutions would likely complement it with steps “focused on unified measures against the Houthis,” he said.

Al-Zandani added that the international community had not dealt “seriously enough” with Iranian arms transfers, which he said had enabled the Houthis to acquire drones, ballistic missiles and even hypersonic weapons.

“Unless Iran changes its policies and accepts good neighborly relations, its continued interference in Yemen is not in its interest or the region’s,” he said.

Last week, US ambassador to the United Nations, Dorothy Shea, condemned Iran for the Houthi rebels’ continued attacks on civilian cargo vessels in the Red Sea during the UN Security Council briefing on Yemen.

“Iran’s defiance of this Council’s resolutions enables the Houthis to escalate regional tensions. Iran’s continued support for the Houthis also poses a threat to the people of Yemen and to freedom of navigation in the Red Sea,” she told the council.

“In that regard, the United States commends Yemeni government-aligned forces for their July seizure of at least 750 tons of Iranian weapons bound for the Houthis. We urge the UN Secretariat to facilitate an inspection of that seizure by the Yemen Panel of Experts as soon as possible.”

The Iran-backed group, which controls around two thirds of Yemen’s population in one third of the country, began a maritime blockade in the Red Sea in November 2023, following a call by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in a show of allegiance to Iran-backed Hamas in Gaza.

The Cambridge Dictionary has added over 6,000 new words including slang terms like “skibidi,” “tradwife” and “delulu.”

LONDON — What the skibidi is happening to the English language?

“Skibidi” is one of the slang terms popularized by social media that are among more than 6,000 additions this year to the Cambridge Dictionary.

“Internet culture is changing the English language and the effect is fascinating to observe and capture in the dictionary,” said Colin McIntosh, lexical program manager at Cambridge Dictionary, the world’s largest online dictionary.

“Skibidi” is a gibberish term coined by the creator of an animated YouTube series and can mean “cool” or “bad” or be used with no real meaning as a joke.

Other planned additions including “tradwife,” a contraction of “traditional wife” referring to a married mother who cooks, cleans and posts on social media, and “delulu,” a shortening of the word delusional that means “believing things that are not real or true, usually because you choose to.”

An increase in remote working since the pandemic has created the new dictionary entry “mouse jiggler,” a device or piece of software used to make it seem like you are working when you are not.

Concerns over climate change are behind the addition of “forever chemical,” a harmful chemical that remains in the environment for a long time.

Cambridge Dictionary uses the Cambridge English Corpus, a database of more than 2 billion words of written and spoken English, to monitor how new words are used by different people, how often and in what contexts they are used, the company said.

“We only add words where we think they’ll have staying power,” McIntosh said.

Hello and welcome to Trade Secrets. I’m back after a two-week break. In case you missed them, here and here are the excellent newsletters written by my colleagues Alice Hancock and Mercedes Ruehl while I was gone.

Now, what’s been going on in my absence? Ah yes, tariff chaos. Terrible news for Switzerland, Brazil and India; merely bad news for everyone else. Today I look at how India can respond, and also manage to tear myself away from President Donald Trump’s tariffs for a moment to check in on how that sweet, sweet deregulation we were promised in the UK is going. Charted Waters, where I look at the data behind world trade, is on global oil prices.

Trade policy à la Modi

I dunno, you build on a decades-long rapprochement with the US after more than half a century of hostility, you spend years creating a reputation as a strongman, you tell everyone you’re great friends with Trump, and what does he do? Turns round and clobbers you with some of the highest tariffs in the world. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not had a good few weeks.

A rapid rapprochement seems unlikely. Weekend press reports suggested talks between the two countries due later this month would be postponed. Modi on Friday struck a defiantly self-reliant tone in a speech, but did not mention the US. In any case, what could he offer? India has already given Elon Musk’s Starlink a licence to operate. The US’s traditional market access demand to India, agriculture, runs flat into the exceedingly well-organised objections of millions of farmers.

Modi has turned to China, an obvious diplomatic response. But economically, given his “Make In India” wheeze is essentially about turning the country into an east Asian-style low-cost goods exporter, he needs another source of final demand, not fellow mercantilist nations to compete with. One bright spot is that at least its leading position in assembling and exporting iPhones to the US is safe for the moment, thanks to Trump’s exempting of smartphones from the tariffs. But India should not count on that enduring indefinitely. 

New Delhi has just signed a trade deal with London, but the UK has too small an economy to fill the gap left by the US. It could accelerate the agreement it’s been negotiating with the EU, though the bloc isn’t a big net importer either. It could try to broaden its range of traded goods. But Modi’s continued use of tariffs and technical import restrictions, such as “quality control orders”, hampers the two-way flow of goods that facilitates diversification. 

The government is promising to simplify and lower the goods and services tax (GST), which should lift consumer spending. But India is a chronic fiscal and current account deficit country: it’s not going to replace export demand with domestic demand.

Countries often reform in crisis. But this shock doesn’t look bad enough to spark the widespread liberalisation that followed India’s 1991 balance-of-payments crunch. Arvind Subramanian, chief economic adviser to Modi’s government between 2014 and 2018, says: “They could invoke the 1991 moment and do a lot of reform that they should have done in any case, including trade reform. But viscerally they’re more protectionist than open.”

You see the problem. Modi has gone in hard on a model that substantially relies on the goods export market, especially the US. He wasn’t obviously wrong: India has long struggled to find a growth model that lifts large numbers of people out of poverty — and certainly, service exports by its IT industry weren’t enough. But India’s long-standing domestic constraints prevent it from diversifying more. Modi had better hope the iPhone exemption holds.

A porn in Britain’s game of regulatory chess

Back in February I wrote a column in praise of regulation, or at least against the kind of thoughtless deregulation Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government had adopted as a political narrative. The UK has also embraced a complementary vibes-driven policy that sees artificial intelligence as the solution to everything, encouraged by the tech-funded Tony Blair Institute, which has the ear of multiple people in government.

These now come right up against the Online Safety Act, legislation inherited from the Conservative party. Among other things, the requirement for age verification has caused a huge drop in the number of people visiting pornography websites such as Pornhub. (No particular reason, but here’s the great and recently deceased Tom Lehrer on that general subject.) Perhaps more injuriously to the provision of public goods, it’s also supposedly threatening Wikipedia. The UK has so far resisted pressure from the Trump administration and its tech buddies to undo the act. But who knows whether that will last? (The US is trying to get the EU to unpick its tech regulation, too.)

What’s going on here? Well, it transpires that deregulation is a lot harder than it looks, even discounting the costs the UK often incurs from diverging from EU rules across a range of areas. If you go in like a particularly clodhopping cavalry commander trumpeting “CUT THE RED TAPE”, you’re liable to stumble over technical and political problems. Turns out favouring children watching porn is a tough sell.

I don’t have a strong view on the technicalities of the act itself, but I will say that regulation often works this way. It’s proposed and introduced; there are unintended consequences; regulators work it out by adjusting the implementation or tweaking the original rules; everything settles down. I’m old enough to remember when the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation was going to prevent any social media happening in the bloc ever again. It’s now used as a basis for a lot of data protection rules around the world.

All in all, I’m happier with the way the Online Safety Act has been administered thus far than I would be with ministers hacking away at anything a corporate lobbyist told them to. I’m willing to bet that by the end of Starmer’s first term, the legislation is still on the statute book, Wikipedia is still available in the UK and the average British adult still has easy access to online porn. And let anyone try arguing that Britain is broken then.

Charted waters

An increase in supply from Opec and Trump’s rapprochement with Russian President Vladimir Putin are putting further downward pressure on the global oil price.

Trade links

• China is maintaining its grip over global supplies of rare earths by seeking to prevent foreign companies from stockpiling them.

• The ODI Global think-tank looks at the combined effects of tariffs and aid cuts on low- and middle-income countries.

• Emerging market banks and corporates are issuing debt at their fastest rate since 2021 because of a falling spread over US bonds.

• A proposed treaty on plastic pollution is the latest environmental initiative to collapse.

• Nigerian companies are sourcing more inputs locally in response to a fall in the naira.

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Trade Secrets is edited by Harvey Nriapia

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that Washington continues to closely watch developments between Pakistan and India, even after the ceasefire that ended the recent deadly clashes.

The secretary of state pointed to the relations between Pakistan and India while discussing how fragile ceasefire arrangements can be, highlighting the difficulties of sustaining truce agreements in conflict zones.

Speaking in an interview on Sunday, Rubio noted: “Every single day we keep an eye on what’s happening between Pakistan and India, what’s happening between Cambodia and Thailand. Ceasefires can fall apart very quickly, especially after a three-and-a-half-year [Russia-Ukraine] war like what we’re facing now.”

He added that while Washington continues to push for a truce in Ukraine, lasting peace can only be ensured through a negotiated settlement rather than temporary halt in hostilities.

Earlier this year, Pakistan and India narrowly averted a dangerous escalation. On May 7, Indian forces carried out airstrikes on Pakistani territory under the guise of “Operation Sindoor,” an act of aggression strongly condemned by Islamabad.

In a swift and decisive response, Pakistan launched “Operation Bunyan-um-Marsoos,” targeting multiple Indian military sites, downing six fighter jets — including three Rafales — and dozens of drones.

The confrontation, which lasted 87 hours, ended only after the United States intervened to broker a ceasefire. President Donald Trump later announced the truce on social media, crediting US diplomacy for defusing the crisis. While New Delhi sought to downplay Washington’s role, Pakistan openly acknowledged Trump’s efforts and even recommended him for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.

Security sources have since revealed that India has launched “Operation Mahadev” — a covert campaign to stage fake encounters and frame illegally detained Pakistanis as cross-border militants in a bid to cover up its battlefield failures and suppress the Kashmiri freedom movement.

CAIRO: Hamas negotiators in Cairo have received a new proposal for a ceasefire in Gaza, a Palestinian official said Monday, with the prime minister of key mediator Qatar also in Egypt to push for a truce.

Efforts by mediators Egypt and Qatar, along with the United States, have so far failed to secure a lasting ceasefire in the ongoing war, which over more than 22 months has created a dire humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.

The Palestinian official, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, said that the latest proposal from mediators “is a framework agreement to launch negotiations on a permanent ceasefire,” calling for an initial 60-day truce and hostage release in two batches.

The official said that “Hamas will hold internal consultations among its leadership” and with leaders of other Palestinian factions to review the text.

A source from Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian militant faction that has fought alongside Hamas in Gaza, told AFP that the plan involved a “ceasefire agreement lasting 60 days, during which 10 Israeli hostages would be released alive, along with a number of bodies.”

Out of 251 hostages taken during Hamas’s October 2023 attack that triggered the war, 49 are still held in Gaza including 27 the Israeli military says are dead.

According to the Islamic Jihad source, “the remaining captives would be released in a second phase, with immediate negotiations to follow for a broader deal” for a permanent end to “the war and aggression” with international guarantees.

The source added that “all factions are supportive of what was presented” by the Egyptian and Qatari mediators.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty, visiting the Rafah border crossing with Gaza on Monday, said that Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani was visiting “to consolidate our existing common efforts in order to apply maximum pressure on the two sides to reach a deal as soon as possible.”

Alluding to the dire humanitarian conditions for the more than two million people living in the Gaza Strip, where UN agencies and aid groups have warned of famine, Abdelatty stressed the urgency of reaching an agreement.

“The current situation on the ground is beyond imagination,” he said.

On the ground, Gaza’s civil defense agency said Israeli strikes and gunfire across the territory killed at least 11 people on Monday.

AFP has contacted the Israeli military for comment.

Media restrictions in Gaza and difficulties accessing swaths of the Palestinian territory mean AFP is unable to independently verify the tolls and details provided by the civil defense agency or the Israeli military.

Rights group Amnesty International meanwhile accused Israel of enacting a “deliberate policy” of starvation in Gaza and “systematically destroying the health, well-being and social fabric of Palestinian life.”

Israel, while heavily restricting aid allowed into the Gaza Strip, has repeatedly rejected claims of deliberate starvation.

Israel’s offensive has killed more than 61,944 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in Gaza which the United Nations considers reliable.