At least 10 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza after the US announced the start of phase 2 of the ceasefire deal. Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum explains what’s been happening.
Seoul, South Korea – Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner walked into an all-white hall dressed as the physical embodiment of yin and yang. Sinner, in all black, and Alcaraz, in a white top and black bottoms, were greeted with thunderous applause at the Hyundai Card headquarters in Seoul last week.
While their contrasting styles of play and on-court demeanour make the tennis rivals stand out as a modern-day example of the famous Chinese philosophy, the two superstars had plenty in common as they shared wide smiles and looks of astonishment in front of a large contingent of reporters, photographers and close to 100 employees in the South Korean capital.
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Once seated, Alcaraz turned to his right, glanced at his great rival and mouthed the word “wow”.
Four years on from their first ATP tour meeting in France, the duo steal the limelight and headlines wherever they go.
It’s a far cry from what Alcaraz had imagined when Sinner said, in November 2021, that he hoped to face his opponent in many more matches.
“I was sure that we were going to play more [after that match], but probably at the beginning of tournaments – the first, second rounds”, Alcaraz told Al Jazeera in Seoul.
The Spaniard believes that over the years, the pair has “pushed each other to be better” and helped each other reach a level where their meetings are usually reserved for the tail-end of major tournaments.
“It is a gift that we are playing in the semifinals, the finals in the majors, in the biggest tournaments of the world,” Alcaraz said.
“Having a look back, seeing everything we have achieved … we both pushed each other to be better, to be 100 percent [at our game]. It was a great moment that match, that moment we had at the net, and everything we’ve been through over the years”.
“Sincaraz” – as Alcaraz and Sinner have come to be known – have dominated the men’s tour for two years, splitting the sport’s biggest titles and trading the No 1 rank between themselves.
When asked to recall his thoughts from their meeting in Paris, where their rivalry first began, Sinner responded with modesty.
“When I said that ‘I hope we can play some more matches,’ it was more of a hope for me because I was very sure [Carlos] would arrive at the stage where he is right now. But I was not sure if I could ever be in the position where I am in right now,” the Italian said.
“But it turned out to be a great rivalry between us, and it also goes off the court because we have a good relationship.”
In a sport defined by individual excellence, relationships between elite players have always fascinated fans and helped generate interest in the sport.
Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe represented emotional extremes; Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi embodied restraint versus rebellion; Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal offered contrasting aesthetics and physicality. At the height of their rivalry, Federer and Nadal toured the world together, playing exhibitions and supporting charities across Europe and Africa.
In Seoul, Alcaraz and Sinner offered a glimpse of a similar dynamic.
Over four days, the pair were almost inseparable.
After their opening news conference, Alcaraz and Sinner moved to the lobby, where cheering employees watched the pair laugh their way through a friendly table tennis match.
In keeping with the marketing needs of the time, Sincaraz filmed playful short videos, completed trending challenges and fielded light-hearted questions. One clip, in which Sinner laughed as Alcaraz attempted to say “Hi, I’m Carlos Alcaraz” in Korean, went viral in no time.
The relaxed mood carried into their exhibition tennis match.
Following in the footsteps of legends such as Maria Sharapova, Venus Williams, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, Alcaraz and Sinner played in front of a sold-out crowd.
Both players took time to find rhythm early, with Alcaraz committing several unforced errors in his first appearance since November.
But as the spectacle took over, the Spaniard began unleashing “tweener” winners.
The opponents repeatedly turned towards the crowd fielding Spanish and Italian flags and responded to shouts of “I love you” and “You’re handsome” with fist bumps and finger hearts.
At one point, Sinner – the one less accustomed to exhibition theatrics – invited a young boy from the front row to play a point with Alcaraz while he sat among the fans and cheered him on.
The intensity rose sharply in the second set, particularly in the tiebreak, when a pair of high-speed serves from Alcaraz helped set up match point.
When Sinner’s final forehand found the net, the two met with an embrace, just the way they have in all “Sincaraz” matches until now.
“Jannik, we finished the [last] season playing together, we [have] started the season playing together”, Alcaraz said to his contemporary after the match.
“So hopefully this season is going to be a good one like last year. Hopefully see you on [championship] Sundays.”
In the concourses outside the arena, the fans were evenly split between the top two players.
“My personal favourite is Sinner, but it seems like there’s more hype with Alcaraz in the country due to his flashy playing style,” Choi In-sik, who travelled 40km (25 miles) from Seoul to Incheon to watch the match with his girlfriend, told Al Jazeera.
“The two seem to go back and forth every time they play, but I think Sinner has shown he is stronger on hard courts. So, I think he will three-peat at the Australian Open later this month”.
Kim Ju-hee attended with a friend from her tennis club and said the match had dominated conversations all week.
“But compared to the Big 3 [Federer, Nadal and Novak Djokovic], Sinner and Alcaraz are not there yet,” she said. “They’re just getting started now.”
For Lee Gew-chon, who says tennis has grown enormously in South Korea since he first picked up a racquet 15 years ago, the event was unforgettable.
“It’s not easy at all to see the world’s two top players in your home country, but it’s also not easy to see them at a Grand Slam where tickets are hard to come by,” he said. “Even with tickets, both players would have to make the finals for you to see them clash.”
Broadcasters in Spain, Italy and the United States streamed the match live, while within the region, India and Japan also streamed the event.
An initial report by Italian newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport claimed that both players received a $2.3m appearance fee, but a representative from event organiser SEMA Sports Marketing quashed the report. The South Korean daily No Cut News put the amount closer to $1.35m for each player, referring to its own industry source.
Over the past 18 months and two Grand Slam seasons, Alcaraz and Sinner have traded the No 1 rank and split eight Grand Slam titles between them, meeting in three consecutive major finals.
Alcaraz leads their head-to-head 10-6, but Sinner won their most recent encounter at the 2025 Nitto ATP Finals in Turin.
As a result, the Seoul exhibition was widely viewed as a preview of a potential Australian Open final. Alcaraz is chasing his first title at the event to complete his career Grand Slam, while Sinner has his own opportunity to do so later this year at Roland Garros in Paris.
Despite their friendly exchanges in South Korea, the players were mindful of the competitive nature of their relationship.
“Today’s game is helpful to see if Jannik changes something in his game,” Alcaraz quipped after the exhibition match. “I wouldn’t say [he did today],” he added, hinting that both are careful not to reveal too much to each other.
“I wouldn’t take anything from today’s match. We will see in Australia. I will watch his matches for sure.”
In addition to paying close attention to “the small details” of his rival’s game, Sinner also stressed that the two rivals’ dominance offers little margin for complacency.
“At the moment, there are many other great players. So, if we drop [our level] just a little bit, they’re going to take our place,” the defending Australian Open champion said. “So, it’s great to have [Carlos] push me to the limit. Hopefully, I can improve every time when we play.”
Only a small group of players have beaten either man in recent years.
The United Kingdom’s No 1, Jack Draper, defeated Alcaraz in the semifinals of Indian Wells – the so-called “fifth grand slam” – last season, while attention in Melbourne will again fall on Novak Djokovic, the 24-time Grand Slam champion chasing an 11th Australian Open title.
United States President Donald Trump has claimed that unearthing and ending fraud nationwide would eliminate the country’s deficit.
In particular, Trump has highlighted alleged public services fraud by Somalis in Minnesota and also said there is fraud in “many other places”.
“If we stop this fraud, this massive fraud, we’re going to have a balanced budget,” Trump said on Tuesday during a speech at the Detroit Economic Club.
In Minnesota, investigators have identified fraud involving federal money for housing programmes, autism services and child nutrition. Federal prosecutors charged dozens of defendants beginning in 2022 – before Trump’s current term – and have filed more charges since Trump took office a year ago.
So far, the Minnesota fraud charges involve a minimum of hundreds of millions of dollars. Assistant US Attorney Joe Thompson, who led Minnesota fraud prosecutions, said in December that Medicaid fraud in the state could reach $9bn although not all of that would be federal money. Thompson resigned on Tuesday.
But adding the dollars lost to fraud in Minnesota to federal losses elsewhere – which have been estimated as high as $521bn annually – would not bring the total close to the amount of the federal deficit. The fiscal year 2025 deficit – that year’s difference between revenues and spending – was $1.775 trillion.
“You can’t balance the books on waste, fraud and abuse,” said Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a group that tracks the federal budget. “It’s important to root it out, but the only way you get anywhere close to a balanced budget is fiscal restraint.”
The White House did not immediately respond to an inquiry for this article.
In April 2024, during the tenure of former President Joe Biden, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) produced what it called a “first-of-its-kind, government-wide estimate of federal dollars lost to fraud”.
The office estimated $233bn to $521bn lost in fraud per year, based on 2018 to 2022 data from agency inspectors general and fraud reports submitted to the Office of Management and Budget.
The GAO’s topline figure included not only official fraud findings from legal proceedings but also estimates based on individual agencies’ findings of fraud. The agency also extrapolated figures it believed represented undetected fraud.
The estimated annual losses amounted to 3 percent to 7 percent of what the government spent on average in those years.
Joshua Sewell, director of research and policy at Taxpayers for Common Sense, previously cautioned that the GAO report is filled with caveats, including its overlap with the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in increased spending.
Still, “it’s very, very unlikely that there is enough fraud in the federal government to balance the budget,” said Chris Towner, policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscally hawkish group. “For the $1.775 trillion deficit for that year to have been due to fraud, it would mean that one-quarter of federal spending was fraudulent, or some combination of fraudulent lost tax revenue and federal outlays totalled that amount.”
Another challenge is that fraud is not easy to root out entirely. Historically, “only a small percentage of tax dollars lost to fraud are ever actually recovered by the government,” said Bob Westbrooks, a fraud and corruption risk expert who served as executive director of the federal government’s Pandemic Response Accountability Committee.
In recent weeks, Trump, a Republican, has spotlighted fraud in blue states, or states that generally vote Democratic, such as Minnesota. But there have been notable high-dollar fraud investigations in other states too.
In Mississippi, a solidly Republican state, a trial is under way in a welfare scandal that auditors said resulted in the loss of $100m in federal money from 2016 to 2020.
In 2024, the US Sentencing Commission pointed to the Southern District of Florida as the nation’s top district for fraud, adding that nationwide offences related to government benefits fraud had increased by 242 percent since 2020. Florida is also a red, or Republican, state.
This month, the US Department of Health and Human Services froze access to certain childcare and family assistance funds for California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York – all blue states – saying it was related to fraud concerns. A federal judge blocked it temporarily.
Trump said: “If we stop this fraud, this massive fraud, we’re going to have a balanced budget.”
The amount of fraud committed against federal programmes is large, but the dollar amount does not come close to equalling the dollar amount of the federal deficit.
The highest nationwide fraud estimate puts fraud losses at $521bn. If all of that could be recouped, it would still be less than one-third of the 2025 deficit.
The UN Security Council has held an emergency meeting in the wake of deadly protests in Iran and US threats to bomb the country. Iran’s deputy ambassador accused the US of trying to cover up its involvement in instigating unrest.
Taiwan and the United States have struck a trade deal that will see the island nation boost tech and energy investments in the US in exchange for lower tariffs.
In a statement announcing the deal late on Thursday, the US Commerce Department said Taiwan’s semiconductor and technology businesses will invest at least $250bn in the US. In exchange, it said Washington will reduce its general tariff on imports of Taiwanese goods from 20 percent to 15 percent.
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The deal illustrates an ongoing push by the US to improve access to Taiwan’s semiconductor industry. The island nation holds a dominant position in the supply of the chips used in advanced digital technology across the world and, therefore, a critical component in the global economy, but it faces Chinese claims over its sovereignty.
President Donald Trump announced a 32 percent tariff on Taiwanese goods as part of his sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs last spring, a rate he later lowered to 20 percent.
The Commerce Department said the “historic” deal “will strengthen US economic resilience, create high-paying jobs, and bolster national security”.
In addition to investing $250bn in building and expanding advanced semiconductor, energy, and artificial intelligence production and innovation capacity in the US, Taiwan will provide at least the same amount in credit guarantees for additional investment by its businesses in the US semiconductor supply chain.
Taiwan stressed that it would remain the world’s main semiconductor supplier.
The island’s chip industry has long been seen as a “silicon shield” protecting it from an invasion or blockade by China – which claims the island is part of its sovereign territory – and an incentive for the US to defend it.
“Based on current planning, Taiwan will still remain the world’s most important producer of AI semiconductors, not only for Taiwanese companies, but globally,” Economic Affairs Minister Kung Ming-hsin told reporters on Friday, the AFP news agency reported.
Production capacity for the advanced chips that power artificial intelligence systems will be split about 85-15 between Taiwan and the United States by 2030 and 80-20 by 2036, he projected.
Reacting to the accord, Beijing expressed its stern opposition.
Faced with new global challenges, the leaders of China and Canada have pledged to improve relations between their two nations after years of acrimony.
Xi Jinping told visiting Prime Minister Mark Carney on Friday that he is willing to continue working to improve ties, noting that talks have been under way on restoring and restarting cooperation since the two held an initial meeting in October on the sidelines of a regional economic conference in South Korea.
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“It can be said that our meeting last year opened a new chapter in turning China–Canada relations towards improvement,” China’s top leader said.
Carney, the first Canadian prime minister to visit China in eight years, said better relations would help improve a global governance system that he described as “under great strain”.
Addressing Xi in the Great Hall of the People, Carney said that “together we can build on the best of what this relationship has been in the past to create a new one adapted to new global realities”.
Engagement and cooperation would be “the foundation of our new strategic partnership”, he said.
“Agriculture, energy, finance, that’s where we can make the most immediate progress.”
The reference to new realities reflects in large part the so-called “America First” approach of United States President Donald Trump.
The tariffs he has imposed have hit both the Canadian and Chinese economies. Carney, who has met with several leading Chinese companies in Beijing, said ahead of his trip that his government is focused on building an economy less reliant on the US at what he called “a time of global trade disruption”.
No announcement was made on tariffs between China and Canada, which is a sticking point in the relationship.
Canada followed the US in putting tariffs of 100 percent on EVs from China and 25 percent on steel and aluminium under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Carney’s predecessor.
China responded by imposing duties of 100 percent on Canadian canola oil and meal and 25 percent on pork and seafood. It added a 75.8 percent tariff on canola seeds last August. Collectively, the import taxes effectively closed the Chinese market to Canadian canola, an industry group has said.
China is hoping Trump’s pressure tactics on allies such as Canada will drive them to pursue a foreign policy that is less aligned with the US.