Tehran, Iran - Iran's Revolutionary Guards launched naval drills on Wednesday near strategic Gulf islands controlled by Iran but claimed by the United Arab Emirates, state media said. The manoeuvres, which were being held mainly near Abu Musa island but also around Greater and Lesser Tunb, came two weeks after the...

New York, US - Wall Street stocks edged higher early Monday ahead of major economic reports and earnings releases later in the week, including from Apple and Amazon. After a strong first half of 2023, US equities have continued to trend higher in July behind hopes that the Federal Reserve will...

Washington, US - A Federal Reserve official left open the possibility on Monday of pausing or stopping interest rate hikes at the central bank's next policy meeting in September, saying "there's nothing off the table." "Thus far we're on the golden path and we've got to walk that line," Chicago Fed...

As part of this potential deal, Saudi Arabia would normalize relations with Israel, contingent on Israel making concessions to the Palestinians.

Revenues were recorded at $44.7 billion, up 25 percent.

The IMF said the global inflation picture has improved somewhat, with consumer prices now forecast to increase by 6.8 percent this year, down 0.2 percentage points from the previous forecast in April.

The social media network's website showed the company's new logo, but its URL was still showing as twitter.com and the blue "Tweet" button was visible, suggesting the rebrand was not yet finalized.Musk and the company's new chief executive Linda Yaccarino announced the rebranding Sunday, saying the company would be renamed...

Economic ties between China and the Gulf region's largest economies, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have surged since President Xi Jinping's attendance at the first Chinese-Gulf summit in Riyadh seven months ago.

Regional traders extended Monday's retreat sparked by disappointing second-quarter data out of Beijing that missed forecasts badly and highlighted the tough job officials face in getting the country's post-Covid recovery back on track. And while there is an expectation that fresh stimulus measures are in the pipeline, analysts warned that...

Demonstrators holding Israeli flags and chanting "democracy, democracy" also entered the stock exchange building in Tel Aviv and staged a rally there, an AFP correspondent said. Josh Drill, a spokesman for the protest movement, said pressure on the government would continue through "non-violent acts of civil disobedience".

Dubai, UAE - The United States has announced plans to bolster its military presence in the Middle East in response to Iran's recent actions involving the seizure and harassment of commercial shipping vessels in key waterways. Reuters reported on Monday.  The Pentagon will be sending additional F-35 and F-16 fighter...

Microsoft did not identify the targets but a US State Department spokesperson said the department had "detected anomalous activity" and had taken "immediate steps to secure our systems."

Customs spokesman Lyu Daliang also pointed to outside forces having a "direct impact" on Chinese trade, with Beijing engaged in a long-running stand-off with the United States on a number of issues including trade and technology.

New York, United States - Wall Street stocks mostly rose early Tuesday amid signs of greater broadening in the equity market beyond technology. Briefing.com analyst Patrick O'Hare pointed to greater momentum for industrials and other "cyclical" sectors tied to economic growth "suggesting that there was a rotation of money within the...

Commercial launch of self-driving vehicles is planned for 2026.

Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the UN's World Meteorological Organization, warned on Monday that El Nino "will greatly increase the likelihood of breaking temperature records and triggering more extreme heat in many parts of the world and in the ocean."

More than 10 million people have signed up to Threads, Meta's rival to Twitter, within the first few hours of its launch, the company's CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. The app went live on Apple and Android app stores in 100 countries at 2300 GMT on Wednesday, and will run with...

PARIS, FRANCE- Elon Musk spent the weekend further alienating Twitter users with more drastic changes to the social media giant, and he is facing a new challenge as tech nemesis Mark Zuckerberg prepares to launch a rival app this week. Zuckerberg's Meta group, which owns Facebook, has listed a new app...

Exhibitions are also scheduled to take place on Saturday in the north and center of the Gaza Strip, where people are normally forbidden to approach and photograph military sites.

Israel has approved buying a third squadron of advanced F-35 fighter jets manufactured by Lockheed Martin in a $3-billion deal, the defense ministry said. Israel is the only Middle East nation with F-35s which is stealth capable and can be used to gather intelligence, strike deep into enemy territory and...

The decision was made "to address extreme levels of data scraping" and "system manipulation" by third-party platforms, Musk said in a tweet Saturday afternoon, as some users quickly hit their limits. The company is limiting verified accounts to reading 10,000 tweets a day and non-verified users are limited to reading...

The Fed recently paused its aggressive cycle of rate increases after 10 consecutive hikes, to give policymakers more time to weigh the effects of existing moves on inflation. At the same meeting, a majority of members on the Fed's rate-setting committee indicated they see interest rates rising twice more before...

The US-based electric vehicle startup also files for bankruptcy.

The rules will apply from January 1, 2025, two years later than the 2023 deadline agreed under the reforms.

Iran said it was hoping indirect talks with the United States could lead to a "positive" outcome for a prisoner swap. Iran announced earlier this month that it was engaged in Oman-mediated talks with its arch-nemesis the United States over its nuclear deal and a possible prisoner exchange.

Wagner fighters, who had launched a mutiny to overthrow Russia's military leadership, are reported to be leaving the Voronezh region as they abandon their advance towards Moscow. The agreement that ended the mutiny involved Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin going into exile in Belarus, eliminating the immediate threat to Moscow.

Rear Admiral John Mauger told reporters in Boston that analysis showed debris found on the seafloor, 1,600 feet (500 meters) from the bow of the Titanic, was consistent with the implosion of the sub's pressure chamber. "On behalf of the United States Coast Guard and the entire unified command, I...

A senior US Federal Reserve official said that additional interest rate hikes are needed to tackle historically high inflation. "I believe that additional policy rate increases will be necessary to bring inflation down to our target over time," Fed governor Michelle Bowman told a conference in Cleveland, Ohio, according to...

Musk, one of the world's richest men, said that Modi was "pushing us to make significant investments in India, which is something that we intend to do, and are trying to figure out the right timing".

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA - Hyundai Motor said on Tuesday it aims to sell two million electric vehicles a year by 2030, raising its target from the 1.87 million it set last year as the market for clean-energy vehicles continues to soar. It also announced plans to invest a total of 109.4 trillion...

Following more than 15 years of discussions, UN member states finally agreed on the text for the treaty in March after a flurry of final, marathon talks. The text, since frozen, has been pored over by the UN's lawyers and translators to make sure it matches in the body's six...

US Securities and Exchange Commission did not specify how many of Binance's US customers are affected, nor the value represented by these funds. Earlier this month the SEC charged the crypto giant with securities law violations that it said amounted to "an extensive web of deception" and "calculated evasion of...

WASHINGTON, US - Consumer inflation in the United States cooled for an 11th straight month in May, the Labor Department said on Tuesday, in an encouraging sign for policymakers seeking to rein in price increases. The consumer price index (CPI), a key gauge of inflation, jumped 4.0 percent from a year...

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND - The world's nuclear powers, and China in particular, increased investment in their arsenals for a third consecutive year in 2022 amid swelling geopolitical tensions, two reports showed Monday. The world's nine nuclear-armed states jointly spent $82.9 billion on their arsenals last year, with the United States accounting for...

Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine last year, economic sanctions have seen a significant cut in its oil and gas exports to the EU and US. However Pakistan, in the midst of an economic downturn worsening a long-running energy shortage, in May confirmed it had struck a deal with Moscow...

The 37 counts of the indictment -- released on Friday and focused on his alleged mishandling of classified materials -- set the former president up for a far more severe legal reckoning than the charges of personal, political and commercial misconduct he has largely ridden out in the past.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to China next week, rescheduling a visit that was canceled in February, US officials said Friday. Blinken is expected to arrive in Beijing on June 18, the first trip by a top US envoy to China since his predecessor Mike Pompeo in...

Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan, in a joint press conference with Blinken, played down talk that the oil-rich kingdom was moving away from Washington in favour of its giant rival, Beijing. "I don't ascribe to this zero-sum game," Prince Faisal said in Riyadh. "We are all capable of having...

Dubai, UAE - Iran’s pivot to Russia and China has been driven by various factors, most notably the United States' withdrawal from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on May 8, 2018, says a study published by Middle East Institute.  Quoting Iran’s foreign ministry statement "the world is...

US-based PGA Tour and Europe's DP World Tour have partnered with LIV's Saudi sponsors to form a new jointly-owned, profit-oriented entity, inviting mixed reactions from Golf world.

WASHINGTON, US- The United States placed sanctions on Tuesday on several Chinese and Hong Kong firms it said were supplying Iran's ballistic missile program. The US Treasury said the Chinese companies shipped centrifuges for producing fuels, non-ferrous metals with potential military use, electronics and gyroscopes to already-sanctioned Iranian government bodies and...

"The United States has a real national security interest in promoting normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. We believe we can and indeed we must play an integral role in advancing it," Blinken told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobby.

The last truce was agreed to allow desperately needed humanitarian aid and safe passages into areas of Sudan ravaged by the fighting, but like all that preceded it was routinely violated by both sides.

Three major chemical manufacturers announced that they will pay nearly $1.2 billion to settle claims that they contaminated water sources across the United States with harmful "forever chemicals" known as PFAS. Chemours, DuPont and Corteva said that they had "reached an agreement in principle to resolve all PFAS-related drinking water...

The key deadline is June 5 -- when, according to Treasury estimates, the government will no longer have the funds required to pay all its debts and bills.

Campaigns on both sides of the political divide are likely to harness this technology -- which is cheap, easily accessible and whose advances have vastly outpaced regulatory responses -- for voter outreach and to churn out fundraising newsletters within seconds. But technologists also warn of bad actors exploiting AI to...

President Joe Biden and Republican leader Kevin McCarthy announced a deal to raise the debt ceiling, dragging the United States back from the precipice of default with only a few days to spare. Congress will vote on the deal to extend the government's borrowing authority on Wednesday, just shy of...

WASHINGTON, US - President Joe Biden said that Democratic and Republican negotiators were on the verge of resolving a debt ceiling standoff, as the deadline for a potentially catastrophic US default was pushed back to June 5. "It's very close and I'm optimistic," Biden told reporters at the White House on...

The signing of the UAE-Japan defense cooperation agreement aims to promote transfer of technology, cooperative research, development, and production projects.

DOHA, QATAR- Thousands of cryptocurrency industry developers have left the United States because of its negative stance towards the sector, the head of one of the pioneer exchanges told an international forum on Thursday. Despite a "wild year" of scandal and failure in 2022 when the FTX exchange and a...