Author: ALJAZEERA

The US Supreme Court has refused to rescue TikTok from a law that required the popular short-video app to be sold by its Chinese parent company ByteDance or banned on Sunday in the United States on national security grounds – a major blow to a platform used by nearly half of all Americans. The justices unanimously ruled on Friday that the law, passed by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in Congress last year and signed by Democratic President Joe Biden, did not violate the US Constitution’s First Amendment protection against government abridgement of free speech. The justices affirmed a lower court’s…

‘It is my expectation that we will solve many problems together,’ the incoming US president says after a call with Xi Jinping.United States President-elect Donald Trump says he had a “good” phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, suggesting that Washington and Beijing will work to resolve various issues going forward. The call on Friday came three days before Trump — who has pledged to impose steep tariffs of up to 60 percent on Chinese imports — returns to the White House. Trump’s trade policies may deteriorate the already tense ties between the US and China. High tariffs on Chinese…

Plaintiff had accused CNN of his destroying his reputation by branding him a profiteer who exploited desperate Afghans.TV news provider CNN has reached a settlement with a United States Navy veteran who helped evacuate people from Afghanistan after the US military withdrew from the country in 2021, a judge has said, hours after a jury found the TV news outlet liable for defaming him. The six-person jury decided on Friday that CNN had to pay damages totalling $5m. The settlement will avert a second phase of the trial that would have determined any punitive damages. The verdict followed a two-week…

United States President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming national security adviser has said the new administration will keep TikTok alive in the US if there is a viable deal. “We will put measures in place to keep TikTok from going dark,” US Representative Mike Waltz told Fox News on Thursday. He noted that the law gives authority for a 90-day extension for the app’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to complete a divestiture. This is the case, said Waltz, “as long as a viable deal is on the table. Essentially that buys President Trump time to keep TikTok going.” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer…

Renowned short-seller Nate Anderson says his work has been ‘intense, and at times, all-encompassing’.Hindenburg Research, the muckraking research and investment firm known for betting against companies including India’s Adani Group, will shut down, its founder has announced. Nate Anderson, who founded the New York City-based firm in 2017, said on Wednesday that while there was no single reason for the decision, running the company had been “intense, and at times, all-encompassing”. “I often wake up from my dreams because I’ve thought of a new investigative thread to pull on in my sleep, or an edit that clarifies a point I…

Sydney, Australia – When Racheal Clayton was attending primary school in Sydney, Australia at the height of the 2007-2009 Global Financial Crisis, the Australian economy was the envy of governments around the world. Unlike every other major developed economy, Australia emerged from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression without going into recession. Today, Clayton, 22, is navigating the world of work instead of the classroom, and an economy whose star is shining much less brightly on the international stage. Far from being the envy of the developed world, Australia’s economy is growing at its slowest pace since the…

Exports rose 10.7 percent in 2024, beating economists’ forecasts, customs data shows.China’s exports hit a record high in 2024, state media has reported, a welcome boost for the world’s second-largest economy as United States President-elect Donald Trump’s promised tariffs threaten to dampen growth. Exports rose 10.7 percent year-on-year, customs data showed on Monday, comfortably beating economists’ forecasts. Imports, which were widely expected to decline, rose 1 percent, the strongest performance since July 2024, customs data showed. The stronger-than-expected figures come as Trump is set to return to the White House on January 20 armed with a populist economic agenda that…

Justices at the United States Supreme Court have signalled scepticism towards a challenge brought by the video-sharing platform TikTok, as it seeks to overturn a law that would force the app’s sale or ban it by January 19. Friday’s hearing is the latest in a legal saga that has pitted the US government against ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, in a battle over free speech and national security concerns. The law in question was signed in April, declaring that ByteDance would face a deadline to sell its US shares or face a ban. The bill had strong bipartisan support, with lawmakers…

Conservative groups have denounced the programmes and threatened to sue companies over them.Facebook owner Meta Platforms and Amazon are winding down diversity programmes ahead of Republican Donald Trump’s return to the United States presidency, amid growing conservative opposition to such initiatives. Some of the US’s biggest businesses have been scaling back their diversity initiatives, years after pushing for more inclusive policies in the wake of protests that followed the police killings of George Floyd and other Black Americans in 2020. Meta is ending its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programmes, including those for hiring, training and picking suppliers, it said…

Minutes of the December meeting show a division on decision to cut rates and the 0.25 percent cut was a ‘close call’.United States Federal Reserve officials at their meeting December 17-18 expected to dial back the pace of interest rate cuts this year in the face of persistently elevated inflation and the threat of widespread tariffs and other potential policy changes. Minutes from the meeting, released on Wednesday after the typical three-week lag, also showed clear division among the Fed’s 19 policymakers. Some expressed support for keeping the central bank’s key rate unchanged, the minutes said. And a majority of the…