Category World News

US House to vote on full release of Epstein files next week, Johnson says

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The United States House of Representatives will hold a vote to force the full disclosure of files related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Speaker Mike Johnson has said.

Johnson told reporters on Wednesday that the House would hold a vote next week to require the Department of Justice to release all documents related to the disgraced financier.

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Johnson added that he wanted to “remind everybody” that the GOP-led Oversight Committee had been “working around the clock” on its own investigation into the case.

Johnson made the comments after Democratic lawmaker Adelita Grijalva, who was sworn in as the newest member of Congress on Wednesday, signed a petition to compel a House vote on the issue.

The bipartisan discharge petition – a mechanism allowing a majority of lawmakers to bypass the House leadership – was put forward by Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie and California Democrat Ro Khanna.

Grijalva won a special election to fill the Arizona seat held by her late father, Raul Grijalva, in September.

Johnson had refused to swear in the lawmaker as the chamber has been out of session since September 19, prompting a lawsuit by Arizona’s attorney general.

Grijalva and other Democrats said the delay was intended to prevent her from adding her signature to the Epstein petition.

Immediately after being sworn in, Grijalva signed the petition, giving it the required 218 signatures to progress.

Her co-signatories included all 214 House Democrats and four House Republicans – Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace.

Republicans have a narrow majority in the House, with 219 members.

In a speech on the House floor after taking her seat, Grijalva promised to continue her father’s legacy of advocating for progressive policies and ensure Congress provided a “full and check and balance” to President Donald Trump’s administration.

“We can and must do better. What is most concerning is not what this administration has done, but what the majority of this body has failed to do,” she said.

Grijalva’s second act in a busy first day on Capitol Hill was to vote with the majority of her Democratic colleagues to reject the Senate-passed legislation to reopen the government.

Lawmakers voted 222 to 209 in favour of moving the funding package to Trump’s desk for his signature, ending the longest federal government shutdown in history.

Jim McGovern, the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee, had previously said he expected voting on the Epstein bill to take place in early December.

Johnson’s announcement of an earlier-than-expected vote hinted at growing frustration among Republican lawmakers, many of whom are facing growing scrutiny from within their own party, Democratic lawmakers and the American public over accusations they are protecting child abusers.

Tennessee Republican Tim Burchett told reporters on Wednesday that he was “tired of messing around” with the issue.

“The Democrats have had the Epstein files for four years, and now we’ve got it for nine months, and it’s going to be dragged into a bunch of nonsense. Let’s just take it to the floor. Let’s vote on it. Let’s get on with it,” he said.

A push on Wednesday by Burchett to force an expedited vote to release the files was blocked for not following proper legislative procedure.

In a video on X, Burchett blamed Democrats for blocking his efforts and accused them of “gamesmanship” over Epstein.

The vote also comes amid renewed scrutiny of Trump’s relationship with Epstein, after Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released new emails appearing to further link the pair on Wednesday.

In one such communication, Epstein told his former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year jail sentence for sex trafficking, that Trump had “spent hours” at his house with one victim.

The email, reportedly sent to Maxwell two years after Epstein had spent 13 months in prison for his sex crimes, also said, “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.”

It was unclear what Epstein was referring to with his comments.

Epstein said Trump “knew about the girls” in another email sent in 2019.

Writing on his Truth Social platform, Trump dismissed the emails as a “hoax”, accusing Democrats of being willing to “do anything at all to deflect on how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown”.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also dismissed the emails, saying they “prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong”.

China’s AI is quietly making big inroads in Silicon Valley

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China’s AI models are quickly gaining traction in Silicon Valley, becoming integral to the operations of American companies and earning the praise of a growing list of tech leaders.

Their rapid ascent has highlighted the competitive edge that Chinese developers such as Alibaba, Z.ai, Moonshot, and MiniMax have been able to gain by offering so-called “open” language models at much lower costs than their rivals in the United States.

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The trend has also cast a critical glare on the US’s efforts to stunt China’s tech sector with export controls on advanced chips, which have not stopped Chinese developers from approaching the capabilities of Silicon Valley’s tech giants.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky generated headlines in October when he revealed that the short-term rental platform had opted for Alibaba’s Qwen over OpenAI’s ChatGPT, praising the Chinese model as “fast and cheap”.

Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya revealed the same month that his company had migrated much of its work to Moonshot’s Kimi K2 as it was “way more performant” and “a ton cheaper” than models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Programmers on social media also recently highlighted evidence that two popular US-developed coding assistants, Composer and Windsurf, were built on Chinese models.

The assistants’ developers, Cursor and Cognition AI, have not publicly confirmed their use of Chinese technology and did not respond to requests for comment, though Z.ai has said the speculation aligns with its “internal findings.”

AI letters are shown on a laptop screen next to the logo of the Deepseek AI application in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on April 1, 2025 [Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP]

Nathan Lambert, a machine learning researcher who founded the Atom Project, an initiative to promote open models in the US, said such public examples were the “tip of the iceberg”.

“Chinese open models have become a de facto standard among startups in the US,” Lambert told Al Jazeera.

“I’ve personally heard of many other high-profile cases, where the most valued and hyped American AI startups are starting training models on the likes of Qwen, Kimi, GLM or DeepSeek,” Lambert said, adding that many US firms have been reluctant to publicly disclose their use of Chinese technology.

While it is not possible to precisely quantify the usage of different AI models, industry data points to the rising popularity of Chinese offerings.

Chinese AI tools, including MiniMax’s M2, Z.ai’s GLM 4.6 and DeepSeek’s V3.2, took up seven spots among the 20 models with the most usage last week, according to data from OpenRouter, a platform that connects developers with AI models.

Among the top 10 models used for programming, four were developed by Chinese firms, according to OpenRouter.

In the open model space, China’s clear lead is evident, with cumulative downloads surpassing 540 million as of October, according to an Atom Project analysis of data from hosting platform Hugging Face.

Rui Ma, the founder of Tech Buzz China, said Chinese models are particularly attractive to fledgling startups, while “high-resource organisations” have gravitated towards premium US models.

“These are typically cost-conscious early-stage companies that experiment widely, and many of them will not survive,” Ma told Al Jazeera.

Unlike leading US platforms such as ChatGPT, China’s open-weight large language models make their trained parameters – called weights – publicly available.

While open-weight models do not generate licensing or subscription fees, running them at enterprise scale requires large amounts of computing power, which creators can offer to users at a cost.

Developers such as Beijing-based Z.ai and Hangzhou-based DeepSeek have reported using older-generation chips that are not subject to US export controls, in relatively small quantities, dramatically reducing training and hardware costs compared with their Silicon Valley rivals.

“The success of these Chinese models demonstrates the failure of export controls to limit China,” Toby Walsh, an expert in AI at the University of New South Wales, told Al Jazeera.

“Indeed, they’ve actually encouraged Chinese companies to be more resourceful and build better models that are smaller and are trained on and run on older generation hardware. Necessity is the mother of invention.”

With lower input costs, Chinese firms have been able to offer their services far more cheaply than their US peers.

In an analysis published by AllianceBernstein in February, DeepSeek’s pricing for its models at the time was estimated to be up to 40 times cheaper than OpenAI’s, for instance.

Alibaba
The logo of Chinese technology firm Alibaba is seen at its office in Beijing, China [File: Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo]

“I do think China’s AI progress has been underestimated, partly because the signal is fragmented,” Greg Slabaugh, a professor who studies AI at Queen Mary University of London, told Al Jazeera.

“Much of the uptake of Chinese models is in China. China’s scale in AI publications and patents has long been visible; the emergence of open-weight models simply makes that capability more globally consumable.”

Some industry analysts have likened China’s approach to AI to the strategy undertaken by Chinese firms in other industries, such as solar panels, that flooded markets with cheap goods.

“This is the solar panel playbook running on software,” Poe Zhao, a Beijing-based tech analyst, wrote last week in his Substack newsletter, Hello China Tech.

But while Chinese AI models have made inroads with their low cost, US tech giants are in a strong position to dominate the high-end market and highly regulated sectors where considerations such as national security are paramount, according to analysts.

Ma, the Tech Buzz China founder, said the development of AI could end up following a similar trajectory to the Android and iPhone platforms, the former of which has about three times as many users worldwide.

“Over the longer term – likely faster than what we saw in the mobile era – it’s entirely possible that AI adoption might follow similar economic dynamics. There are simply more users in the world who prioritise affordability than those who choose premium options,” Ma said.

“But that doesn’t mean the greatest margins or market capitalisation will exist at the low end; value may still concentrate where differentiation, performance and trust command a premium.”

“In Fortune 500 and regulated sectors, widespread adoption is probably not imminent,” said Slabaugh, the Queen Mary University of London professor, referring to the uptake of Chinese models.

US knew Israeli officials discussed use of human shields in Gaza: Report

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The United States had evidence last year that Israeli officials discussed how their soldiers sent Palestinians into tunnels in Gaza that the Israelis believed were potentially lined with explosives, two former US officials have told the Reuters news agency.

The information was shared with the White House and analysed by the intelligence community in the final weeks of former President Joe Biden’s administration, the officials said.

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International law prohibits the use of civilians as shields during military activity.

Israel’s use of Palestinians as human shields in Gaza and the occupied West Bank has been documented on multiple occasions, but Wednesday’s Reuters report is a rare acknowledgement that Washington collected its own evidence on the subject.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive national security information, did not provide details on whether the Palestinians referenced in the intelligence were prisoners or civilians.

Reuters could not determine whether the Biden administration discussed the intelligence with the Israeli government.

Responding to the report, the Israeli military said in a statement that it “prohibits the use of civilians as human shields or coercing them in any way to participate in military operations”.

It added that the Military Police Criminal Investigation Division is investigating “suspicions involving Palestinians in military missions”.

In May this year, seven Palestinians who had been used as human shields in Gaza, as well as the occupied West Bank, shared testimonies in a report published by The Associated Press.

In June 2024, video footage verified by Al Jazeera showed Israeli soldiers tied a wounded Palestinian man, Mujahed Azmi, to the front of a military jeep and drove him past two ambulances during a raid on the city of Jenin, in the occupied West Bank.

The Israeli military claimed at the time that the soldiers involved violated protocol, while a US State Department spokesperson described reports and video of the incident as “disturbing” and “a clear violation” of Israel’s “orders and procedures”.

Israel quizzed at UN over torture allegations

Israel was questioned at the United Nations on Tuesday and Wednesday over multiple reports alleging the torture of Palestinian detainees, in particular since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023.

“The committee has been deeply appalled by the description we have received, in a large number of alternative reports, of what appears to be systematic and widespread torture and ill-treatment of Palestinians, including children,” the body’s rapporteur, Peter Vedel Kessing, said.

Twenty-eight Israeli officials appeared in front of a panel of 10 UN experts on torture in Geneva.

The experts asked the Israeli team: “Does Israel have a law against torture?”

The answer from the Israeli delegation was no.

“Does Israel apply the agreements it has signed against torture in Gaza and the West Bank?” the question continued, to which the answer was also no.

The committee confronted Israel with multiple reports and a long list of violations against Palestinians. The Israeli delegation denied most of them. In some instances, the delegation said, soldiers had acted in “self-defence”.

Israel has repeatedly been accused of using torture during its two-year war on Gaza.

In one instance, a video leaked from its infamous Sde Teiman military prison appeared to show Israeli soldiers raping a Palestinian detainee.

In addition, dozens of dead bodies of Palestinian detainees that have been returned to Gaza since the start of a ceasefire have exhibited signs of torture.

US House passes spending bill to end longest gov’t shutdown in history

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BREAKING,

The House of Representatives has passed a federal government spending package, clearing the final hurdle and bringing an end to the longest government shutdown in United States history – at least for now.

In a vote held late on Wednesday evening in the Republican-held House, the bill was backed by 222 lawmakers – including six Democrats – while 209 voted against it, including two Republicans.

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The long-delayed bill will now be passed on to President Donald Trump to sign into law.

On Monday night, the upper chamber of Congress had approved the spending package by a vote of 60 to 40 to fund the US government through January 30, reinstating pay to hundreds of thousands of federal workers after six gruelling weeks.

All but essential government services had ground to a halt amid the shutdown.

The breakthrough came following negotiations last weekend that saw seven Democrats and one independent agree to back the updated spending package and end the shutdown, which entered its 42nd day on Tuesday.

Crucially, however, the deal has not resolved one of the shutdown’s most central issues – healthcare subsidies for 24 million Americans under the Affordable Care Act, which the Trump administration planned to cut.

For weeks, Democrats repeatedly blocked the bill’s passage in Congress, saying the measure was necessary to force the government to address escalating healthcare costs for low-income Americans.

Shortly before Wednesday’s vote, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson accused his Democratic colleagues of using American citizens as “leverage” in their “political game”, as he denounced them for preventing the resolution’s passage in September.

“Since that time, Senate Democrats have voted 14 times to close the government. Republicans have voted a collective 15 times to open the government for the people, and the Democrats voted that many times to close it,” he said.

As part of the deal breaking the impasse, Senate Republicans agreed to hold a vote on the issue by December, raising fears there could be another shutdown in January.

The agreement had also provoked anger among Democrats, who preferred to keep holding out, including Illinois Governor JB Pritzker – considered a contender for the 2028 presidential election – who called it an “empty promise” earlier this week.

David Smith, an associate professor at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre, also described the agreement as “just a stopgap arrangement”.

“The deal that they’ve reached means most of the government will shut down again in January if they can’t come to another agreement,” he told Al Jazeera earlier this week.

Democrats who supported the deal were Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin from Illinois, John Fetterman from Pennsylvania, Catherine Cortez Masto and Jackie Rosen from Nevada, Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen from New Hampshire, and Tim Kaine from Virginia.

Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,358

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Here is how things stand on Thursday, November 13:

Fighting

  • Russian forces launched 645 attacks on Ukraine’s Zaporizhia region in the past day, killing one person in the Polohivskyi district, Governor Ivan Fedorov wrote in a post on Telegram.
  • A Russian drone attack on a railway facility killed a security guard in Ukraine’s Kherson region, Governor Oleksandr Prokudin wrote in a post on Facebook.
  • Russian forces targeted Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region with drone attacks, killing a 47-year-old man in the Vasylkivska community of the Synelnyky district, the region’s military administration said in a post on Telegram.
  • A woman was killed in Ukrainian shelling on Vodyane village, in a Russian-occupied area of Zaporizhia, Russia’s TASS state news agency has reported, citing Russian-appointed local officials.

Ceasefire

  • Group of Seven (G7) foreign ministers, including United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio, met in Canada’s Niagara region on Wednesday to discuss ways to increase pressure on Russia to end the war in Ukraine.
  • European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas told the Reuters news agency on the sidelines of the meeting that the talks focused on putting more pressure on Russia “in order to make them have peace”.
  • “[The US] have had engagements [with Russia] and we have all welcomed their engagements … But to be very, very frank … their assessment is that Russia has no way changed its goals so it’s not genuine about the peace talks,” Kallas said.
  • Russia is ready to resume ceasefire negotiations with Ukraine in Istanbul, but “the ball is in Ukraine’s court”, Russian Foreign Ministry official Alexei Polishchuk told TASS.
  • TASS also published remarks from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that it said the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera had declined to publish following an interview. They included claims from Lavrov about the number of bodies of slain soldiers exchanged with Ukraine under previous agreements and the conduct of Russian forces.

Sanctions

  • Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand announced additional sanctions against Moscow on Wednesday, targeting Russia’s drone programme, liquefied natural gas entities and vessels from Russia’s shadow fleet, among others, according to a statement.
  • Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha praised Washington for new energy sanctions imposed on Russian oil companies last month, after he met with the G7 foreign ministers in Niagara on Wednesday.
  • “We need to continue to increase the cost of war for Putin and his regime, forcing Russia to end the war,” Sybiha wrote on X.

Corruption

  • Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for the dismissal of two cabinet ministers on Wednesday amid a probe into an alleged $100m corruption scheme involving nuclear agency Energoatom and other state enterprises.
  • Zelenskyy, whose former business associate from his comedy career is among the suspects, said in a video address that corruption in the energy sector – weakened by regular Russian air strikes on infrastructure – was “absolutely unacceptable”.
  • EU foreign policy chief Kallas, speaking at the G7 meeting in Canada, told Reuters the corruption scandal was “extremely unfortunate” and said that Ukrainian authorities were “acting very forcefully”.

Regional developments

  • The Moldova Metropolis, Moldova’s largest Orthodox church, has rejected being labelled a “Russian church”.
  • “The Orthodox Church of Moldova is not a ‘Russian church’ but rather a church of the entire people living in Moldova, made up of believers of different national groups,” the Moldova Metropolis said after a synod. “It is free and independent in its operations,” it added.

Eubank Jr vs Benn 2: Fight time, undercard, how to watch the boxing rematch

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EXPLAINER

The latest instalment in one of boxing’s most bitter and longstanding rivalries will play out when Chris Eubank Jr takes on Conor Benn in a rematch of their bout that took place in April.

The British fighters have boxing – and a mutual dislike – running through their blood as their fathers did years ago, making the bout titled “Unfinished Business” another eagerly-awaited fight night.

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Here’s what you need to know about the rematch:

When and where is the Eubank Jr vs Benn rematch?

The rematch is scheduled for Saturday at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London, the United Kingdom.

When is the ringwalk, and what’s the fight start time?

The boxers are expected to make their ringwalk at 21:35 GMT, ahead of the 22:00 GMT fight start time.

Who won the last Eubank Jr vs Benn fight?

The rivals last met on April 26 at the same venue in a much-hyped grudge match, which Eubank Jr won on a unanimous points decision to hand Benn his first career defeat.

All three judges scored the fight 116-112 after a pulsating 12-round slugfest, with both men coming out hard from the start and going toe-to-toe in the dramatic fight.

Why are Eubank Jr and Benn fighting again?

A rematch between the pair was in the contract, and promoter Eddie Hearn made it clear after the April fight that it would happen.

Benn argued successfully that his consumption of eggs elevated his testosterone levels.

At their first media face-to-face before the April fight, Eubank pulled out an egg and smacked it on Benn’s face. The British Boxing Board of Control fined him $130,000.

Chris Eubank Jr, right, and Conor Benn will clash less than seven months after their first bout [File: Andrew Couldridge/Reuters]

Who is on the undercard?

  • Jack Catterall v Ekow Essuman – welterweight
  • Adam Azim v Kurt Scoby – light welterweight
  • Richard Riakporhe v Tommy Welch – heavyweight
  • Sam Gilley v Ishmael Davis – British and Commonwealth super-welterweight titles
  • Mikie Tallon v Fezan Shahid – super flyweight

What is the fight purse?

While the promoters haven’t announced the purse, it is reported to be the same as the previous fight: 18 million British pounds ($23.7mn)

Who is Chris Eubank Jr?

Son of British boxing great and former middleweight boxing champion Chris Eubank, Eubank Jr is a professional boxer from Hove, a southern seaside town in the UK.

Since making his professional debut in 2011, the 35-year-old has become the reigning middleweight champion of the International Boxing Organization (IBO), and has also previously held the IBO’s super middleweight title and the World Boxing Organization’s interim middleweight title.

Fighting with an orthodox stance, Eubank Jr is the top-ranked middleweight boxer in the UK and third in the world.

What’s Eubank Jr’s fight record?

  • Bouts: 38
  • Wins: 35 – by knockout: 25
  • Losses: 3 – by knockout: 1

Who is Conor Benn?

Benn, too, has boxing flowing through his blood, as his father Nigel Benn was a two-weight champion in the 1990s. Based in the East London suburb of Ilford, the 28-year-old turned professional in 2016.

Benn has faced a fair share of controversy after a failed a doping test in 2022. The then-rising star of British boxing was suspended by the UK’s anti-doping agency for using clomiphene, a fertility drug deemed prohibited. His suspension was lifted in November 2024.

What’s Benn’s fight record?

  • Bouts: 24
  • Wins: 23 – by knockout: 14
  • Losses: 1

Will both boxers adjust their weights for the fight?

The bout will be fought at middleweight – 160lbs (71.5kg) – similar to the previous bout, where Benn had to move up from his welterweight division – 147lbs (66kg). He went in lighter than expected at 156.4lbs.

Meanwhile, Eubank Jr fights at middleweight, but since the boxers cannot weigh more than 170lbs (77kg) on fight night, he will have to drop from his 180lbs (81kg).

Eubank Jr was fined $500,000 after hitting the scales half an ounce over the limit for the April fight.

Both fighters will have to monitor their weight as the rehydration clause does not allow them to put on more than 10lbs (4.5kg) during the time between the weigh-in and the day of the fight.

Why was the Eubank Jr-Benn fight cancelled three year ago?

The first bout was originally set for 2022, but was scrapped after Benn’s voluntary urine test showed trace amounts of the fertility drug clomiphene, a banned substance that boosts testosterone levels while burning fat.

What’s the history of the Eubank vs Benn rivalry?

Saturday’s bout is a battle of second-generation contenders, reviving the Benn v Eubank feud in which the rivals’ fathers battled it out in two ferocious contests in the early 1990s.

The pair’s first gruesome fight took place in November 1990, and Eubank won by total knockout in the ninth round. A much-anticipated rematch was set up three years later and ended in a draw, leading to both men retaining their respective belts.

How can I buy tickets for Eubank Jr vs Benn?

Tickets are still up for grabs on several online platforms, including the venue’s own website.

How to watch Eubank Jr vs Benn rematch?