Sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson has addressed her recent domestic violence arrest in a video on social media and issued an apology to her boyfriend Christian Coleman.
Richardson posted a video on her Instagram account Monday night in which she said she put herself in a “compromised situation”. She issued a written apology to Coleman on Tuesday morning.
“I love him & to him I can’t apologize enough,” the reigning 100-meter world champion wrote in all capital letters on Instagram, adding that her apology “should be just as loud” as her “actions”.
“To Christian I love you & I am so sorry,” she wrote.
Richardson was arrested on July 27 on a fourth-degree domestic violence offence for allegedly assaulting Coleman at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. She was booked into South Correctional Entity in Des Moines, Washington, for more than 18 hours.
Her arrest was days before she ran the 100 metres at the US championships in Eugene, Oregon.
In the video, Richardson said she’s practising “self-reflection” and refuses “to run away but face everything that comes to me head on”.
According to the police report, an officer at the airport was notified by a Transportation Security Administration supervisor of a disturbance between Richardson and her boyfriend, Coleman, the 2019 world 100-metre champion.
The officer reviewed camera footage and observed Richardson reach out with her left arm and grab Coleman’s backpack and yank it away. Richardson then appeared to get in Coleman’s way, with Coleman trying to step around her. Coleman was shoved into a wall.
Later in the report, it said Richardson appeared to throw an item at Coleman, with the TSA indicating it may have been headphones.
The officer said in the report: “I was told Coleman did not want to participate any further in the investigation and declined to be a victim.”
A message was left with Coleman from The Associated Press.
Richardson wrote that Coleman “came into my life & gave me more than a relationship but a greater understanding of unconditional love from what I’ve experienced in my past”.
She won the 100 at the 2023 world championships in Budapest and finished with the silver at the Paris Games last summer. She also helped the 4×100 relay team to an Olympic gold.
An American paediatrician who volunteered in the Gaza Strip says the injuries inflicted on Palestinian aid seekers at sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) suggest that Israeli forces there shot the men and boys deliberately, by targeting and maiming specific body parts on specific days.
Ahmed Yousaf made the comments to Al Jazeera from the Jordanian capital, Amman, on Tuesday, hours after returning from Gaza, where he had spent two and a half weeks working at Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Deir el-Balah and al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
The doctor said he witnessed “mass casualty incidents” from Israeli shootings at the food distribution points run by the United States-backed GHF on an almost daily basis.
The boys and young men came in with very specific injuries, “almost like a daily pattern”, he said.
“Meaning on a given day, say Monday, we’d get 40,60 patients coming in at a given time, and they would all be shot in the legs, or in the pelvic area, or the groin on a given day, just kind of a similar pattern. And the next day, we would see upper body, chest, thoracic pattern, and then there were days we saw only head wounds, upper neck bullet wounds. And what it felt like, at least for me, the position that I went with, was that somebody behind the gun that day was going to choose the way they were either going to maim or decide to kill people,” he said.
“It was age indiscriminate.”
Yousaf’s comments are the latest by medical staff in Gaza that accuse Israeli forces and US contractors of targeted and indiscriminate violence at the GHF sites.
Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF, said last week that the GHF-run food distributions in famine-stricken Gaza have become sites of “orchestrated killing and dehumanisation“, while Human Rights Watch said the shootings amount to serious violations of international law and war crimes.
On Tuesday alone, at least 19 aid seekers were killed at GHF sites in Gaza, while many more were wounded, according to medics and witnesses.
At least 1,838 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid, and another 13,409 have been wounded since the GHF began its operations in late May, official figures show.
Israel and the GHF deny the killings.
‘All of Gaza is a death trap’
Yousaf, the US paediatrician, said the victims at the sites were mainly boys and young men, as they are often the ones taking the risk to try to get food for their families, “given the dynamic of the risk associated with trying to carry a 5-pound [2.3kg] bag of flour, maybe kilometres, sometimes”.
“The people would tell us they were sometimes at the site, or around the area, or they were trying to leave… and they were shot indiscriminately; it was like they were being sprayed. It seemed quite obvious to them and to us, from a pattern-recognition perspective, in terms of who came to the ER [emergency room], that on a given day, whoever was making the decision behind the trigger was choosing a very specific pattern of fire,” he said.
The doctor went on to describe all of Gaza as a “death trap”.
“It is a cage in which people are being marked for death. It almost feels like there is a quota for the number of people that need to be killed on a given day,” Yousaf said.
On the days that Palestinians stayed away from the GHF sites, because Israel allowed in more aid trucks, there would be more intense air attacks, he said.
“The last four days that we were there, when there was a bit more aid access via food trucks that were allowed in, the risk profile changed and them going to the food distribution sites wasn’t nearly worth the risk because there was some food elsewhere, we saw a significant uptick in bomb blasts on the streets, homes, vehicles. So the pattern of the MCIs – the mass casualty incidents – changed from bullet wounds, mostly boys and young men, to just indiscriminate bombings. We saw women and children, elderly, on the days the bombs come in,” he told Al Jazeera.
The doctor described the Israeli atrocities in Gaza as a “genocide”.
One clear aspect of this, he said, was Israel’s refusal to let him and his colleagues take in medical supplies or baby formula.
“When we were screened by the [Israeli military] at the border, the vast majority of us had things confiscated from our bags. Things like food and multivitamins and antibiotics and medical supplies, like stethoscopes, everything you can imagine, that we wished we could have to treat the people on the ground in Gaza,” he said.
South Korean cryptocurrency mogul Do Kwon has pleaded guilty to fraud in the United States in a case tied to the $40bn collapse of the TerraUSD and Luna tokens.
Kwon, the cofounder of Singapore-based Terraform Labs, entered the plea at the Southern District of New York on Tuesday, according to court filings.
Kwon admitted to one count of conspiring to commit commodities fraud, securities fraud and wire fraud, and one count of committing wire fraud.
As part of his plea, the crypto entrepreneur agreed to forfeit more than $19m in proceeds from his crimes, according to prosecutors.
Kwon had in January entered a plea of not guilty to nine counts in the case, including securities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy.
“Do Kwon used the technological promise and investment euphoria around cryptocurrency to commit one of the largest frauds in history,” US Attorney Jay Clayton said.
“Kwon attracted tens of billions in funds to Terraform’s ecosystem by promising a self-stabilising stablecoin. By the time the markets discovered the ecosystem was unstable, it was too late: the system collapsed, and investors around the world suffered billions in losses.”
Kwon, who is due to be sentenced on December 11, faces a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison.
The administration of United States President Donald Trump has circulated plans for its $175bn “Golden Dome” missile defence system, revealing a possible new missile field in the Midwest and details of the project’s plans to shoot down missiles in space, the Reuters news agency reports.
According to a series of slides, titled “Go Fast, Think Big!”, presented to some 3,000 defence contractors in Huntsville, Alabama, last week, Reuters says that plans for the Golden Dome include three layers of missile interceptors, radar arrays and lasers, in addition to its space-based defences.
While the presentation highlighted that the US “has built both interceptors and re-entry vehicles” for space-based missile interception before, the plans also acknowledged that the US has never built a vehicle that can handle the heat of reentry while targeting an enemy missile, according to Reuters.
Trump has estimated his Golden Dome could cost $175bn.
So far, Congress has appropriated $25bn for the system in the president’s tax and spending bill passed in July. Another $45.3bn is earmarked for the Golden Dome in Trump’s 2026 presidential budget request.
“They have a lot of money, but they don’t have a target of what it costs yet,” a US official cited by Reuters said.
Plans for the dome included a map showing that a new large-scale missile field, with systems built by Lockheed Martin, could be located in the US Midwest, Reuters reported.
The site would be in addition to two similar missile fields that already exist in southern California and Alaska.
Lockheed Martin has described the Gold Dome as “a defence system that shields America from aerial threats, hypersonic missiles and drone swarms with unmatched speed and accuracy”.
“Thanks to President Trump’s vision, Golden Dome will make this a reality, securing our future,” Lockheed Martin wrote in a post on social media in March.
Reuters said the slides did not include any references to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which was part of a bid for Golden Dome contracts, alongside the software maker Palantir and defence systems manufacturer Anduril.
Trump campaigned on building “a missile defence shield around our country,” in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election. At an earlier campaign event in July 2024, Trump compared his plans with Israel’s Iron Dome.
The Iron Dome is Israel’s missile defence system, which detects an incoming rocket, determines its path and intercepts it. The system was developed with more than $1bn in funding from the US.
Days after taking office on January 27, Trump signed an executive order to “immediately begin the construction of a state-of-the-art Iron Dome missile defence shield, which will be able to protect Americans”.
Although Trump secured $25bn for the system in his tax and spending bill, which also included significant cuts to federal funding for other programmes, including Medicaid, the project still faces a significant funding shortfall.
Trump suggested in May that the shortfall could be partly made up by Canada paying $61bn towards the project.
Thousands of people have evacuated, schools have closed, and hundreds of flights have been cancelled as Typhoon Podul approaches southern Taiwan with wind gusts as strong as 191kph (118 mph).
The mid-strength Typhoon Podul is expected to make landfall later on Wednesday, and was reported to be intensifying as it approached Taiwan’s southeastern city of Taitung, weather officials said.
Podul “is strengthening”, Taiwan’s Central Weather Administration (CWA) forecaster Lin Ting-yi said, with the typhoon on track to hit the sparsely populated Taitung County at about noon local time (04:00 GMT).
After making landfall, the storm is expected to hit Taiwan’s more densely populated western coast before moving into the Taiwan Strait and towards China’s southern province of Fujian later this week.
As much as 600mm (almost 24 inches) of rain has been forecast in southern mountainous areas over the next few days, the CWA said, while nine cities and counties announced the suspension of work and school, including the southern metropolises of Kaohsiung and Tainan.
Taiwan’s government said that more than 5,500 people had been evacuated in advance of the typhoon’s arrival, and all domestic flights – a total of 252 – as well as 129 international routes have been cancelled, the transport ministry said.
Typhoon Podul lashed Orchid Island with gusts of up to 155 kph at around 8 a.m. Wednesday, contributing to a power outage that hit 258 households in the island’s Tungching Village. Winds and rain were also intensifying in Taitung. pic.twitter.com/qaeCwFg9Vu
Taiwan’s two main international carriers, China Airlines and EVA Air, said their cancellations were for routes out of Kaohsiung, with some flights from the island’s main international airport at Taoyuan stopped as well.
In the capital, Taipei, which is home to Taiwan’s financial markets and is being spared the typhoon so far, residents reported clear skies and some sunshine.
Typhoon Danas, which hit Taiwan in early July, killed two people and injured hundreds as the storm dumped more than 500mm (19.6 inches) of rain across the south over a weekend, causing widespread landslides and flooding.
That was followed by torrential rain from July 28 to August 4, with some areas recording more than a year’s worth of rainfall in a single week. The week of bad weather left five people dead, three missing, and 78 injured, a disaster official said previously.
For Kalpesh Patel, Diwali, the festival of lights celebrated across India, might well mark lights out for his eight-year-old diamond cutting and polishing unit.
The 35-year-old employs about 40 workers who transform rough diamonds into perfectly polished gems for exports at the small factory in Surat, a city located in the western Indian state of Gujarat.
His business has survived multiple speed bumps in recent years. But United States President Donald Trump’s mammoth 50 percent tariffs on imports from India might be the final nail in the coffin for his unit, part of an already struggling natural diamond industry, he said.
“We still have some orders for Diwali and will try to complete them,” he told Al Jazeera.
Diwali, arguably India’s single biggest festival, scheduled for late October this year, usually sees domestic sales of most goods soar. “But we might have to shut the business even before the festival, as exporters might cancel the orders due to high tariffs in the US,” Patesh said.
“It is becoming increasingly difficult to pay the salaries and maintain other expenses with falling orders.”
He is among the 20,000-odd small and medium traders in Surat, known as the “Diamond City of India”, which together cut and polish 14 out of every 15 natural diamonds produced globally.
The US is their single largest export market. According to the Gem and Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC), India’s apex body for the industry, the country exported cut and polished gems worth $4.8bn to the US in the 2024-25 financial year, which ended in March. That is more than one-third of India’s total exports of cut and polished diamonds, at $13.2bn over the same period.
Dimpal Shah, a Kolkata-based diamond exporter, told Al Jazeera that orders have already started getting cancelled. “Buyers in the US are refusing to offload the shipped products, citing high tariffs. This is the worst phase of my two-decade-old career in diamonds.”
Kalpesh Patel, who runs a diamond cutting and polishing business in Surat, Gujarat, fears that he may not be able to continue his business for long, because of US tariffs on Indian imports [Photo courtesy of Kalpesh Patel]
US imposes penalty
A 25 percent reciprocal tariff on all Indian goods, which Trump announced on April 2, came into effect on August 7, after talks between the two countries failed to yield a trade deal by then. Negotiations are continuing.
Meanwhile, on August 6, Trump announced an additional 25 percent tariff, taking the total tariff rate to 50 percent. He termed the additional tariff that would come into effect from August 27 as a penalty for India’s continued buying of Russian oil, as the US president tries to push Moscow into accepting a ceasefire in Ukraine.
For the gems industry, which already faced a pre-existing 2.1 percent tariff, the effective tariff now amounts to 52.1 percent.
Ajay Srivastava, the founder of Global Research Trade Initiative (GTRI), a trade research group, termed the Trump government’s additional hike as an act of “hypocrisy”, citing how the US itself continues to trade with Russia, and how China – Russia’s biggest oil buyer – faces no similar penalty.
“Trump is targeting India out of frustration as it refused to toe the US line on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and for its refusal to open its agriculture and dairy sector,” he added, referring to broader ongoing trade talks and differences over US demands for greater access to critical Indian economic sectors.
Yet, whatever the reasons for Trump’s tariffs, they are hurting a diamond industry already bleeding from multiple hits.
India supplies almost all of the world’s cut and polished diamonds, produced in small units across the state of Gujarat [Photo courtesy Ramesh Zilriya, president of the state’s Diamond Workers Association]
Diamond sector badly hit
More than 2 million people are employed in diamond polishing and cutting units in Surat, Ahmedabad and Rajkot cities in Gujarat — and many have already suffered salary cuts in recent years, first because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and then Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“The pandemic led to economic slowdown affecting the international markets in Hong Kong and China,” Ramesh Zilriya, the president of Gujarat’s Diamond Workers Union, told Al Jazeera. The “Western ban on rough diamond imports from Russia due to the Russia-Ukraine war and the G7 ban on Russia also affected our business”, he added.
Russia has historically been a major source of raw diamonds.
Zilriya claimed that 80 diamond workers have died by suicide over the past two years because of this economic crisis.
“The situation in the international market led to the wages of the workers getting halved to approximately 15,000-17,000 rupees ($194) per month, which made survival difficult in the face of rising inflation,” he said.
Once the Trump tariffs fully kick in, Zilriya fears that up to 200,000 people in Gujarat may lose their livelihoods.
Already, more than 120,000 former diamond sector workers have applied for benefits. A 13,500-rupee ($154) allowance per child, to support their families, was promised in May by the state government to those who have lost jobs due to the tumult in the sector in recent years.
But the tariffs, pandemic and war are not alone to blame for the crisis: Lab-grown diamonds are also slowly eating into the market of their natural counterparts.
“Unlike natural [diamonds], the lab-grown diamonds are not mined but manufactured in specialised laboratories and priced at just 10 percent of the natural ones. It is difficult even for a seasoned jeweller to identify the natural and lab-grown with a naked eye. The taste of consumers is now shifting to lab-grown [diamonds], as they are cheap,” said Salim Daginawala, the president of the Surat Jewellers Association.
A worker checks the polishing of a lab-grown diamond in Surat, India, Monday, February 5, 2024 [Ajit Solanki/AP Photo]
Decline in exports
In the 2024-25 financial year, India imported rough diamonds worth $10.8bn, marking a 24.27 percent decline from the $14bn imported in 2023-24, as per the statistics by the GJEPC.
The exports of cut and polished natural diamonds similarly witnessed a 16.75 percent decline, with exports declining to $13.2bn in 2024-25 as compared with $16bn in the preceding year.
“This move [the tariffs] would have far-reaching repercussions on the Indian economy that might disrupt critical supply chains, stalling exports and threatening thousands of livelihoods. We hope to get a favourable reduction in tariffs; otherwise, it would be difficult to survive,” said Kirit Bhansali, the chairman of the GJEPC.
The tariffs could also hurt US jewellers, warned Rajesh Rokde, the chairman of the All India Gems and Jewellery Domestic Council (GJC), a national trade federation for the industry.
“The US has around 70,000 jewellers who would also face a crisis if the jewellery becomes expensive,” Rokde added.
A salesperson shows a diamond ring to a prospective buyer at a jewellery shop in Ahmedabad, India, on April 14, 2025 [Ajit Solanki/AP Photo]
A domestic solution?
Traders say that the need of the hour is to increase domestic demand for diamonds and diversify to new markets.
A stronger domestic market “would not only contribute to the local economy, but would also create jobs for several thousands of people”, said Radha Krishna Agrawal, the director of Narayan das Saraf Jewellers in Varanasi city, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
The tariffs, he said, could prove a “blessing in disguise” if they end up reducing the dependence of India’s gems industry “on other countries”.
Bhansali said that the domestic gems and jewellery market was growing, and expected to reach $130bn in the next two years, up from $85bn at the moment. The industry is also looking for new markets, including Latin America and the Middle East.
Gold already offers an example of a strong domestic market, cushioning the impact of hits on exports, said Amit Korat, the president of the Surat Jewellery Manufacturers Association.
But for now, the diamond sector in India has no such shield. It needs to be saved, urgently, said Patel, the Surat business owner on the cusp of shutting down his polishing and cutting unit.
![Gujarat [Photo courtesy Ramesh Zilriya, president of the state's Diamond Workers Association]](https://i0.wp.com/www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IMG-20250805-WA0035-1755048666.jpg?w=696&ssl=1)
