For purposes of probing war crimes, the Hind Rajab Foundation is using the social media accounts of Israeli soldiers. Hind Touissate, a founder of Al Jazeera, spoke with the organization to explain how numerous complaints against Israeli military personnel have been made in more than 10 nations.
The Taishitun Town Elderly Care Center in the Miyun district, one of the hardest hit areas of Beijing this week, was the site of 31 fatalities, according to officials on Thursday.
The Communist Party secretary for Miyun, Yu Weiguo, expressed his condolences and said it was a “bitter lesson,” noting that the senior center had been in the town’s center for a while and was safe.
According to Yu, “This demonstrated that our contingency plan had shortcomings and that our understanding of extreme weather was insufficient.”
69 people were residing in the care center, of which 55 were functionally disabled. According to local media outlet Caixin, the facility was perched on low-lying ground close to a river that had flooded after the unusually heavy rains.
Torrential rains started a week ago, peaking on Monday in Beijing and the provinces that surround it.
Rainfall totaling up to 573.5mm (22.6 inches) fell in the hilly Miyun district in the northeast of the capital in just a few days. In Beijing, the average annual precipitation is around 600mm (23. 6 inches).
The largest reservoir in northern China, the Miyun Reservoir, experienced record-breaking water levels during the rains.
When the disaster struck, Yu said, the Qingshui River, a normal small stream that flows through Taishitun and enters the reservoir, was flowing at 1,500 times its normal volume.
Caixin reported that the 87-year-old mother of a Beijing resident was able to leave the elder care facility in Miyun.
The woman’s daughter cited her mother’s roommate’s inability to escape and drown, noting that she managed to climb onto the windowsill.
At least 44 people have died in Beijing over the past week, according to Beijing’s deputy mayor Xia Linmao at a news conference on Thursday.
More than 24 000 homes, 242 bridges, and 756 kilometers of roads have been damaged as a result of the rain and flooding in the capital, according to Xia, citing preliminary data.
Authorities in the Hebei province that are neighboring announced an additional eight deaths on Thursday and 16 deaths overall this week.
According to authorities, Beijing and Hebei province have at least 31 missing people.
Authorities in northern Shanxi province reported on Wednesday evening that 10 people had died after a minibus carrying farm workers had sat in heavy rain.
Three days after the bus went missing, a statement from the city government stated that four people were still missing as the rescue effort progressed.
After artificial intelligence triumphant Nvidia, Microsoft is now the second company to ever have a market valuation of more than $4 trillion.
Microsoft, which trades under the ticker “MSFT,” is up 4.6 percent as of Thursday’s noon in New York City (16:00 GMT) from the market open.
The technology ghetto announced that it will invest $30 billion in capital to meet growing demand for artificial intelligence (AI) for the first quarter of the current fiscal year. Microsoft also reported strong sales growth for its cloud computing business, Azure, on Wednesday.
Despite the high cost of AI capital expenditures, lead portfolio manager, Stonehage Fleming Global Best Ideas Equity Fund, Gerrit Smit, said, “It is in the process of becoming more of a cloud infrastructure business and a leader in enterprise AI. It is doing so very profitably and cash generatively.”
Microsoft, headquartered in Redmond, Washington, broke the $1 trillion mark for the first time in April 2019.
Its move to $3 trillion was more measured than that of tech giants Nvidia and Apple, with AI-bellwether Nvidia clinching the $4 trillion milestone before any other company on July 9 and tripling its value by almost a year.
Revenue surpassed $76.4 billion in its earnings report.
In a note to Al Jazeera, senior analyst at Wedbush Securities, Dan Ives, senior analyst at Microsoft, stated that “this was a slam-dunk quarter for Microsoft,” “with cloud and AI driving significant business transformation across every sector and industry.”
Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI has turned out to be a game-changer, boosting the company’s Office Suite and Azure offerings with cutting-edge AI, and increasing the stock’s value by more than double since ChatGPT’s late-2022 debut.
Its largest capital expenditure forecast ever for a single quarter indicates that it is on track to potentially outspend its rivals over the coming year.
According to Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft, “We closed out the fiscal year with a strong quarter, highlighted by Microsoft Cloud revenue reaching $46.7 billion, up 27 percent]up 25 percent in constant currency] year-over-year.”
However, the tech giant’s wave of layoffs overshadows Microsoft’s rise in market value. The business doubled on AI while firing 9, 000 workers, or 4 percent of its global workforce, earlier this month.
In recent months, progress has been made in trade negotiations between the US and its trading partners in preparation for US President Donald Trump’s August 1st tariff deadline, which has helped to boost stocks and set new highs for the S&, P 500, and Nasdaq.
As a result of artificial intelligence’s supercharged expansion of its core advertising business, Meta Platforms forecasted a third-quarter revenue that was beyond Wall Street’s expectations.
The intelligence services of Iran have been accused of carrying out a wave of assassination plots, kidnappings, and intimidation campaigns against people living in Europe and North America in public by the United Kingdom and 13 allies.
Governments from the United States, France, Germany, and Canada called Tehran’s alleged extraterritorial operations a flagrant violation of national sovereignty in a joint statement released on Thursday.
The organization reaffirmed that “we are united in our opposition to Iranian intelligence services’ attempts to kill, kidnap, and harass people in Europe and North America in clear violation of our sovereignty,” the statement read.
The signatories urged Iranian authorities to stop these activities, which they claimed were increasingly carried out in partnership with international criminal organizations, as well as Albania, Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the UK.
Iranian intelligence operatives have been linked to at least 15 plots aimed at people in the UK since 2022, according to a recent UK parliamentary committee.
British authorities have taken stricter measures in response. Iran’s intelligence services cited “escalating aggression” as evidenced by the UK government’s announcement in March that it would be required to report any political influence inside the nation.
Seven Iranians were detained by UK police in May over alleged threats to Iran’s national security, which Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called “suspicious and unwarranted.”
Other regions of Europe have raised similar questions. Iranian officials claimed that Tehran was responsible for a foiled 2024 attempt to assassinate an Iranian dissident in the Netherlands, a charge Iran denied.
Authorities detained two suspects, one of whom is also connected to the shooting of Spanish politician Alejo Vidal-Quadras, a vocal supporter of the Iranian opposition.
Three European-based gang members and a senior Iranian official were later charged with plotting to kill an Iranian-American journalist by the US Department of Justice across the Atlantic. In addition to the two earlier this year, the third entered a guilty plea. The men allegedly acted against the Iranian government’s wishes. These statements were deemed “baseless” by the Iranian Foreign Affairs Ministry.
The allegations come as Iran’s nuclear program is at a high level. Iran’s dialogue with Western powers is still stalled. Iranian officials met with British, German, and French diplomats in Istanbul last week for “frank” discussions.
The meeting marked Israel’s first meeting since its mid-June airstrikes against Iran, which sparked a 12-day flare-up involving US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
Tehran maintains that its nuclear activities are for civilian purposes only, despite Israel’s claim that it is pursuing nuclear weapons covertly.
A lower court in the US has heard oral arguments over US President Donald Trump’s authority to impose new tariffs after it was determined that he had overstepped his bounds by imposing massive new import taxes.
The president’s claim to have emergency powers on the side of the appeals court on Thursday raised questions as to whether what Trump calls his “reciprocal” tariffs, which were announced in April, were justified.
Arguments are being heard by a panel of all the court’s active judges, which includes members of the Democratic and Republican presidents, who have been appointed eight and three each.
The judges on the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, DC, pressed government lawyer Brett Shumate to explain how Trump was able to impose tariffs as a result of the IEEPA, a 1977 law that was previously used to impose sanctions on enemies or freeze their assets.
Trump is the first president to impose tariffs through IEEPA.
Shumate was frequently interrupted by the judges, who repeatedly questioned his arguments in vain.
One of the judges claimed that “IEEPA doesn’t even mention tariffs” and that it doesn’t even mention them.
According to Shumate, the law grants “extraordinary” authority in times of need, including the ability to completely stop imports. He claimed that IEEPA permits tariffs because it “regulates” imports during a crisis.
The states and businesses that opposed the tariffs argued that the US Constitution grants Congress, and not the president, control over tariffs and other taxes, and that they are against IEEPA.
The government’s claim that the word “regulate” includes the ability to tax would be a vast expansion of presidential power, according to Neal Katyal, a lawyer for the businesses.
As customs duties in June quadrupled to a record amount, reaching $ 27 billion in revenue, and have over $ 100 billion through June for the fiscal year that ends on September 30, the federal government is starting to realize this revenue. In a Trump-supported bill that was passed and signed into law this month, that income might be crucial to making up for lost revenue from extended tax cuts.
Trump wrote in a social media post on Thursday that “taxes are making America GREAT & RICH again.” Good luck in today’s significant case in America, to all of my excellent attorneys who have worked so hard to save our country.
However, according to economists, the duties could cause US consumers to see higher prices and lower corporate profits. Trump’s “on-again, off-again” tariff threats have shook the world’s financial markets and hampered US companies’ ability to control supply chains, production, staffing, and prices.
The tariffs are a “regressive tax,” according to Oregon attorney general Dan Rayfield, one of the states that are challenging the levies.
Companies ranging from Stellantis to American Airlines temporarily suspended their financial guidance after Trump started imposing his wave of tariffs, which has since been revised down. Companies from a variety of industries, including Procter and Gamble, the largest consumer goods brand in the world, made the announcement this week that it would need to raise prices for a quarter of its products.
In his second term, the president has aggressively used tariffs as leverage in trade negotiations and to counteract what he has termed unfair practices, making them a key component of his foreign policy.
Trump has claimed that the US’s most restrictive trade agreements from April are a result of persistent US trade imbalances and declining US manufacturing power. He’s used them, however, to put pressure on non-trade issues in recent weeks.
He imposed 50% tariffs on Brazil in response to Jair Bolsonaro’s prosecution, a key Trump ally who is accused of staging a coup after losing the 2022 presidential election.
Trump also threatened to sue Canada for refusing to recognize a Palestinian state, calling for a “very difficult” trade agreement.
He claimed that because China, Canada, and Mexico were not doing enough to stop fentanyl from crossing US  borders, tariffs against them was appropriate. That claim has been refuted by the nations.
The Democratic states and small businesses that are challenging Trump were joined on May 28 by a three-judge panel of the US Court of International Trade.
It claimed that tariffs on long-standing trade deficits were not permitted by IEEPA, a law intended to address “unusual and extraordinary” threats during national emergencies. The administration’s appeal has been considered, and the appeals court has allowed the tariffs to continue in effect. The court’s decision will come at an uncertain time, and the losing party will likely file an US Supreme Court appeal quickly.
The case won’t have an impact on tariffs levied by more traditional legal bodies, such as steel and aluminum duties. Following shorter-term trade agreements with Britain, Indonesia, and Vietnam, the president recently announced trade agreements that would set tariff rates on goods from the European Union and Japan.
According to Trump’s Department of Justice, limiting the president’s ability to impose tariffs could stifle ongoing trade talks, while other Trump officials claim that negotiations have continued without much change following the initial setback in court. Trump has set a Friday deadline for raising tariffs against nations that haven’t reached new trade agreements.
According to a new poll that highlights a shift in perceptions, only 40% of Americans think that Black and Hispanic people are subject to “quite a bit” or “a great deal” of discrimination.
Only 10% of those surveyed believed that white people were discriminated against, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released on Thursday. 30% of those surveyed also felt the same way about Asian people.
Since an AP-NORC poll conducted in April 2021, there has been a decline in the number of people saying that Asians and Black people are subject to significant discrimination, according to a statement posted on the NORC website.
Donald Trump’s poll comes as he continues to criticize initiatives that promote diversity at universities and the workplace and to impose restrictions on institutions that don’t align with his political goals in an effort to combat left-wing ideas.
In the spring of 2021, over 60% of respondents in the polls said that Black people in the US are “quite a bit” or “a great deal” of discrimination in response to the massive protests against racial injustice following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The percentage has now dropped to less than 50%.
Only 39 percent of white respondents said that Black people face significant discrimination, while about 74 percent of Black respondents claim that their communities continue to experience significant discrimination.
Additionally, Americans are more skeptical of corporate initiatives to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion, frequently referred to as DEI. Numerous large corporations have begun to halt these initiatives.
Deiving indefinitely was not a factor in the majority of cases, and a quarter of respondents predicted it would lead to further discrimination against minorities.
When a Black girl is seen in an engineering course or is in a space that other people are expected to be, they are only expected to get there because of those things, says Compton, California’s 48-year-old Black Democrat. Someone saying, “You’re only here to meet a quota,” negates it. “
The Trump administration has gone beyond debating DEI efforts to put pressure on institutions and organizations he sees as opposed to his political goals. For instance, the president has threatened to withhold federal disaster aid from states that don’t support his efforts to repeal anti-discrimination laws and launch investigations into businesses that use DEI policies, which he has portrayed as racist against white people.
The Trump administration’s policy of mass deportations, which have sparked concern in immigrant communities across the country, is also supported by a majority of those polled.
The majority of people, according to AP-NORC, believe that immigrants without legal status also face discrimination, which is the highest level of any identity group. According to “four in ten people who live legally in the United States are subject to this level of discrimination.”