Author: ALJAZEERA

New York Police Department releases CCTV stills showing a man wearing a hooded jacket with his face clearly visible.Police in the United States have released new images of a “person of interest” in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a New York City hotel. The CCTV stills released by the New York Police Department (NYPD) on Thursday show a man wearing a hooded jacket with his face clearly visible. Previous images released by police showed a man with most of his face concealed by a mask. Thompson, 50, was shot dead on Wednesday in an early morning ambush…

It is a tumultuous time for Gautam Adani, the billionaire chairman of one of India’s biggest corporate conglomerates, the Adani Group, and one of the richest people in the world. The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has accused Adani and others of conspiring to pay about $265m in bribes to Indian government officials to obtain contracts and develop India’s largest solar power plant project. US prosecutors unveiled in November an indictment of Gautam Adani, his nephew Sagar Adani and five others. The Adani Group has rejected these claims, calling them baseless. Amid all this, Adani remains defiant. “This…

A United States federal appeals court has upheld a law requiring Chinese-based ByteDance to divest itself of its popular short video app TikTok in the US by early next year or face a ban. The decision is a complete win for the Department of Justice and opponents of the app and a devastating blow to ByteDance. The ruling now increases the possibility of an unprecedented ban in just six weeks on a social media app used by 170 million Americans. The ruling is likely to be appealed to the Supreme Court. Free speech advocates immediately criticised the decision. The American…

International development organisation says sum will be deployed to support 78 countries that ‘need it most’.The World Bank has announced that it has raised close to $24bn to provide loans and grants for some of the world’s poorest nations, which it can leverage to generate a record $100bn in total spending power. Donor countries committed $23.7bn to replenish the bank’s concessional lending arm, known as the International Development Association (IDA), a World Bank spokesperson told the AFP news agency, marking a slight increase from the roughly $23.5bn pledged during the last fundraising round three years ago. The bank can use…

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – In one of his first appearances of the year, South Korean President Yoon Seok Yeol pledged to boost confidence in the country’s stock market, which is famed for being undervalued compared with its peers. As the curtain closes on 2024, Yoon has achieved the opposite, rattling markets with a short-lived declaration of martial law that has thrown Asia’s fourth-largest economy into its biggest political crisis in decades. “South Korea is supposed to be the bulwark,” Geoffrey Cain, the author of Samsung Rising and a managing partner at Alembic Partners, told Al Jazeera, describing the country as…

Mashinsky was one of several crypto moguls charged with fraud after a slump in prices in 2022 caused firms to collapse.Alex Mashinsky, the founder and former CEO of cryptocurrency lender Celsius Network, has pleaded guilty in the United States to two counts of fraud. Mashinsky, 59, was indicted on July 13, 2023, on seven counts of fraud, conspiracy and market manipulation charges. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan said he misled Celsius customers to persuade them to invest, and artificially inflated the value of his company’s proprietary crypto token. He pleaded not guilty later that day. On Tuesday, during a hearing before…

Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger has been forced out less than four years after taking the helm of the company, handing control to two lieutenants as the faltering United States chipmaking icon searches for a permanent replacement. Gelsinger resigned on December 1, according to a statement from the company on Monday. The resignation came after a board meeting last week during which directors felt Gelsinger’s costly and ambitious plan to turn Intel around was not working and the progress of change was not fast enough, the Reuters news agency reported, citing a person familiar with the matter. The board told…

Yerevan, Armenia – The rugged mountains of the southern Caucasus are not an obvious location for a thriving tech startup scene. Situated 7,000 miles from Silicon Valley, landlocked Armenia is buffeted by geopolitical headwinds from all sides. To the north and south, respectively, lie Russia and Iran, two of the most heavily sanctioned countries on the planet. To the east and west, it faces Turkiye and Azerbaijan, adversaries whose relations with Yerevan, respectively, are marked by tensions over the 1915-1916 Armenian genocide and armed conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Home to fewer than 3 million people, the ex-Soviet state…

The case is a part of a wave of lawsuits against OpenAI over data used to train generative AI systems.Five Canadian news media companies have filed a legal action against ChatGPT owner OpenAI, accusing the artificial intelligence company of regularly breaching copyright and online terms of use. The case, filed on Friday, is part of a wave of lawsuits against OpenAI and other tech companies by authors, visual artists, music publishers and other copyright owners over data used to train generative AI systems. Microsoft is OpenAI’s major backer. In a statement, Torstar, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press,…

Brushing snowflakes off her hair, Teagan Hickson walked into a Walmart Supercenter in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with hopes of picking up a few holiday deals on Black Friday. The first thing the mother of two spotted: a pallet stacked high with Gourmia digital air fryer ovens for $50 each. Her sister Jordan had been wanting one, she said, but money was tight right now for everyone in her family. She worried about expenses next year after reading posts on Facebook about price hikes if President-elect Donald Trump’s planned tariffs go into effect in January. “I’m trying to not spend too…