Author: ALJAZEERA

Tech giants’ shares surge after stronger-than-expected earnings.Google and Microsoft have reported double-digit profit increases, buttressing the case for the tech giants’ heavy investment in artificial intelligence (AI). The quarterly results announced on Thursday by Google parent Alphabet and Microsoft came in ahead of expectations, sending their shares 11 percent and 4 percent higher, respectively, in after-market trades. Alphabet reported a profit of $23.7bn in the first three months of the year, a rise of 57 percent. The Silicon Valley giant also announced its first-ever dividend, at $0.20 per share. Google chief Sundar Pichai said AI text-to-image model Gemini had helped…

Read More

Another day, another tragedy in Gaza. At the time of writing, rescuers were pulling bodies out of the rubble after an Israeli air strike on a residential building in southern Gaza’s Rafah city. Meanwhile, a few miles away in Khan Younis, the grisly effort of digging up bodies buried in mass graves on the grounds of the Nasser Hospital continues. The Palestinian death toll is now more than 34,000 and 1.1 million people in Gaza are experiencing catastrophic levels of food insecurity. The world is also on edge, as many fear a wider regional war after Iran sent a retaliatory…

Read More

Washington, DC – Chants of “free Palestine” were interrupted by ululating and cheers as dozens of Georgetown University students arrived at a protest at the neighbouring George Washington University (GW) campus in the heart of the US capital city. Students, professors and activists from across the Washington, DC, area gathered on Thursday to show solidarity with Palestinians amid the war on Gaza and demand an end to what they call their colleges’ complicity in Israel’s human rights abuses. Students at GW had set up a protest encampment on campus, joining the pro-Palestinian demonstrations sweeping colleges across the country. “We’re here…

Read More

As an Israeli ground assault on Gaza’s last ‘safe zone’ looms, two children in Rafah brace for it.“We’re afraid people will resort to killing each other for food,” 11-year-old Husam says as he recounts his daily battle to secure basic necessities like food, water and sanitation in Rafah during the Israel-Hamas war. Husam is one of more than 600,000 children who have sought refuge in the city, the designated “safe zone” in southern Gaza. But since March, the Israeli government has threatened to extend a military invasion there, too, casting a shadow of fear that has been building for months.…

Read More

Outcry after the discovery of mass graves in two Gaza hospitals.Hundreds of bodies have been found in mass graves in Gaza after Israeli forces withdrew from the Nasser and al-Shifa medical compounds they had besieged for weeks, according to Palestinian authorities. The Palestinian Civil Defence says there is evidence the Israeli army committed crimes against humanity by carrying out summary executions. Israel said claims that Israeli forces buried the bodies were unfounded. The United Nations and European Union are calling for urgent, independent investigations. The United States says it wants answers, too. How will Israel respond? And how will it…

Read More

TikTok owner ByteDance would prefer shutting down its loss-making app rather than sell it if the Chinese company exhausts all legal options to fight legislation to ban the platform from app stores in the United States, Reuters reported citing four sources. The algorithms TikTok relies on for its operations are deemed core to ByteDance overall operations, which would make a sale of the app with algorithms highly unlikely, the sources, who are close to the parent, said on Thursday. TikTok accounts for a small share of ByteDance’s total revenues and daily active users, so the parent would rather have the…

Read More

A new study has found climate change caused by fossil fuel emissions is the likely reason for the extreme weather events.Global warming caused by fossil fuel emissions “most likely” exacerbated the intense rains that lashed the UAE and Oman last week, causing deaths and widespread flooding, an expert group of scientists has found. The World Weather Attribution (WWA), an international group of scientists that investigates extreme weather events, said climate change caused by fossil fuel emissions is the probable reason but cannot be pinpointed “with certainty”. The study compiled by 21 international researchers found extreme rainfall in El Nino years…

Read More