Author: ALJAZEERA

There is no place more important for the world’s oil supply than the Strait of Hormuz, which links the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf. But recent global tensions could threaten it. Dareen Abughaida presents this new digital series, Pinch Point, where geography and politics collide.

The US alleges that for years millions of American children under 13 have been using TikTok and the site ‘has been collecting and retaining’ their data.The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) has filed a lawsuit against TikTok and parent company ByteDance for failing to protect children’s privacy on the social media app The government said on Friday TikTok violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) that requires services aimed at children to obtain parental consent to collect personal information from users under age 13. The lawsuit is the latest US action against TikTok and its Chinese parent over…

Nominees include a Western-friendly diplomat as foreign minister and a female urban development minister.Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has nominated a moderate diplomat as foreign minister and a female official as urban development minister as he presented his new cabinet. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf announced on Sunday the names of the 19-member cabinet presented by the president during an assembly session broadcast live on state television. The nominations appear in line with the hopes that the election of Pezeshkian last month, to replace the hardline Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May, could lead to a thaw…

The case depicted Google as a technological bully that methodically thwarted competition to protect its search engine.A judge in the United States has ruled that Google spent billions of dollars to create an illegal monopoly for its search engine, exploiting its dominance to squash competition and stifle innovation. Monday’s landmark decision that Google broke antitrust law marks the first major success for US authorities taking on the dominance of Big Tech, which has come under fire from across the political spectrum. “The court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its…

Mina Hamid*, who hails from Kabul, Afghanistan, and moved to the Netherlands at the age of 11, says she will never forget the first time she sent money to help her family members back home. “I was in my late teenage years, and Afghanistan was reeling under the impact of natural disasters and conflicts, making it hard for my extended family members to afford basic necessities. So I began sending between 20 and 30 euros [$21 to $32] occasionally – money I earned from my student job – seeking to support them,” Hamid told Al Jazeera. The 36-year-old, who now…

Brands had been wary of rapid changes initiated on X under Elon Musk’s ownership.Elon Musk’s social media platform X has sued a global advertising alliance and several major companies, including Mars and CVS Health, accusing them of unlawfully conspiring to boycott the site and causing it to lose revenue. X filed the lawsuit on Tuesday in federal court in Texas against the World Federation of Advertisers, Unilever and Danish renewable energy company Orsted, in addition to Mars and CVS Health. The lawsuit said (PDF) advertisers, acting through a World Federation of Advertisers initiative called Global Alliance for Responsible Media, collectively withheld…

Tensions boiled over when Ethiopia agreed to lease 20km (12 miles) of coastline from Somaliland in exchange for recognition of its independence.The Somali and Ethiopian foreign ministers will meet in Ankara next week to discuss disagreements over a port deal Ethiopia signed with the breakaway region of Somaliland this year, Turkey’s foreign minister says. “Tensions between Somalia and Ethiopia would come to an end with Ethiopia’s access to the seas through Somalia as long as Ethiopia’s recognition of Somalia’s territorial integrity and political sovereignty is secured,” Hakan Fidan said at a news conference in Istanbul on Friday. Turkey is mediating…

FTX has committed to a bankruptcy liquidation that will repay customers whose deposits were locked during its late 2022 collapse.A United States court has ordered bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX to pay $12.7bn in relief to its customers, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has said. FTX drew customers in with “an illusion that it was a safe and secure place to access crypto markets,” then misappropriated their customer deposits to make its own risky investments, CFTC Chairman Rostin Behnam said in a statement on Thursday. The repayment order implements a settlement between the CFTC and the bankrupt crypto exchange, which has…

Palestinian Foreign Ministry slams Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich for saying starving Palestinians may be ‘moral’.The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich for saying it may be “justified and moral” to starve Palestinians in Gaza. In a statement on Thursday, the Foreign Ministry described Smotrich’s comments as an “explicit admission of adopting and bragging about the policy of genocide”. “The Ministry further affirmed that such [a] statement is considered a direct disregard for international legitimacy decisions and international consensus on protecting civilians…

Hopes that interim government under Muhammad Yunus can restore stability and address country’s inequalities.The student protests that have rocked Bangladesh since July 1 and led Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to flee in the middle of the night in a helicopter to New Delhi have battered the domestic economy, with losses estimated at billions of dollars. Now, even as Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus prepares to guide an interim government in Dhaka, businesses are struggling with the unprecedented nature of recent events and what comes next. “Very few expected the situation to turn the way it had,” Vina Nadjibulla, vice president of…