Economy

United States President Donald Trump has fired off a social media message calling on the head of the US technology firm Intel to resign from his post as chief executive officer.

Trump’s decision to denounce Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan on Thursday morning sent the company’s stocks tumbling, amid the uncertainty about the future of its leadership.

“The CEO of INTEL is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately,” Trump wrote. “There is no other solution to this problem. Thank you for your attention to this problem!”

Trump’s post appeared to be a response to reports that Tan has invested nearly $200m in Chinese technology manufacturing and chip firms, including some with links to the country’s military.

But the president’s social media message also raises concerns about his apparent willingness to get involved in the affairs of private companies, even calling for dramatic changes in leadership and direction.

Scrutiny on Tan’s ties to China

Tan, a longtime technology investor, is relatively new to his post. He was appointed as Intel’s CEO on March 12, and he also serves on the company’s board of directors.

Previously, Tan served in leadership positions at the software company Cadence Design Systems, and he was a founding partner for the venture capital firm Walden Catalyst Ventures.

His personal investments — and the investments of the venture funds he manages — caught the public’s attention shortly after his appointment at Intel, though.

In April, the news agency Reuters reported that, between March 2012 and December 2024, Tan invested in Chinese firms that create technology for the People’s Liberation Army, China’s armed forces.

For some US politicians, that raised a conflict of interest.

On Wednesday, for instance, Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas posted a letter on social media written to the chairman of Intel’s board of directors, Frank Yeary.

In it, he demanded more information about Tan’s hiring and his investments in China.

Cotton pointed out that, on July 28, Cadence Design Systems agreed to plead guilty to federal charges concerning the sale of technology and intellectual property to China’s National University of Defense Technology.

That plea deal resulted in criminal and civil penalties of more than $140m.

“I write to express concern about the security and integrity of Intel’s operations and its potential impact on US national security,” Cotton wrote in his letter to Yeary.

“Mr Tan reportedly controls dozens of Chinese companies and has a stake in hundreds of Chinese advanced-manufacturing and chip firms. At least eight of these companies reportedly have ties to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.”

In an accompanying message to his social media followers, Cotton added that Intel “owes Congress an explanation”. Intel and Tan have yet to respond to the concerns.

Trump pushes ‘America First’ plan

For years, the US and China have been locked in tense competition for economic and political dominance, and the US has repeatedly accused China of attempting to poach American innovation and spy on its technology firms.

China, meanwhile, has denied such allegations, describing them as part of a US smear campaign.

Founded in 1968, Intel has long been a flagship US technology firm, known for producing computer parts like microprocessors. But in recent decades, the company has struggled to keep pace with its competitors, particularly as artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed Silicon Valley, Intel’s longtime home.

Trump, however, has sought to bolster domestic manufacturing with his “America First” economic agenda, which leverages tariffs to discourage the import of products from abroad.

On Tuesday, the Republican leader even said he planned to impose 100-percent tariffs on foreign chips and semiconductors sold in the US.

But Trump has faced criticism for testing the boundaries of his executive power — and, in some cases, seeking to impose his will on the running of private companies.

Since taking office for a second term, for instance, Trump has withheld federal funds from private universities in order to extract guarantees that those institutions would eliminate their diversity initiatives and implement disciplinary reforms, among other demands.

In an interview with Reuters, analysts appeared split over whether Trump was overplaying his hand.

“Many investors likely believe that President Trump has his hand in too many cookie jars, it’s just another signal that he’s very serious about trying to bring business back to the US,” said David Wagner, the head of equity and a portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors, which has invested in Intel.

Meanwhile, Phil Blancato, the CEO of Ladenburg Thalmann Asset Management, told Reuters that Trump ousting Tan could have a chilling effect on US business.

“It would be setting a very unfortunate precedent,” Blancato said. “You don’t want American presidents dictating who runs companies, but certainly his opinion has merit and weight.”

It is unclear how Trump’s pressure campaign against Tan may affect Intel’s future.

Last year, Intel received $8bn in subsidies under the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, to build further chip manufacturing plants in the US.

Italy has approved a $15.5bn suspension bridge which will connect the mainland to the island of Sicily.

Italy has given final approval to a long-delayed plan to construct the world’s longest suspension bridge, connecting the mainland to Sicily in a project worth €13.5bn ($15.5bn).

Transport Minister Matteo Salvini hailed the Strait of Messina Bridge as “the biggest infrastructure project in the West” after a key government committee cleared the path on Wednesday. He said the project would generate 120,000 jobs annually and revitalise southern Italy through wider investment in infrastructure.

Preliminary work could begin as early as October, pending a green light from Italy’s court of audit, with construction expected to start in 2026. Salvini estimated the bridge could be completed by 2033.

With a span of 3.3km, the bridge would surpass Turkey’s Canakkale Bridge and carry six lanes of traffic and two railway lines, cutting the current 100-minute ferry crossing to just 10 minutes by car.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said the bridge would become “an engineering symbol of global significance”.

The project, first proposed in 1969, has stalled repeatedly due to environmental objections, mafia fears and seismic risks. The design is inspired by Turkiye’s Canakkale structure, featuring a wing-shaped deck meant to improve stability in high winds.

Defence or development?

Rome says the bridge could help it meet NATO’s defence spending goals by classifying it as “dual-use” infrastructure, a designation that has caused controversy.

More than 600 academics warned that such a move would require further military safety assessments and could make the bridge a potential target.

Salvini said it was up to the defence and economy ministries to decide, but insisted “keeping organised crime out of the project is the top priority”.

Environmental groups, meanwhile, have raised complaints with the European Union, warning of potential disruption to migratory birds and a lack of proof that the project meets public interest thresholds.

The bridge contract was awarded to Webuild, the same firm that won the initial bid in 2006 before the plan was cancelled. The company says its design will withstand earthquakes, pointing to similar bridges in Japan and California.

“The bridge will be transformative for the whole country,” said Webuild CEO Pietro Salini.

Even as the United States slaps India with a 50 percent tariff, the highest among all countries so far and one that will push their relationship to its lowest moment in years, one thing is clear: US President Donald Trump is more interested in onshoring than friend-shoring, experts say.

On Wednesday, the US announced an additional 25 percent tariff on India over its import of Russian oil, taking the total to 50 percent. The move caught most experts by surprise as New Delhi was one of the first to start trade negotiations with Washington, DC, and Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have repeatedly admired each other in public statements and called each other friends. Brazil is the only other country facing tariffs as high as India’s.

“The breakdown of the trade negotiations was a surprise,” said Vina Nadjibulla, vice president of strategy and research at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.

“This is a very difficult moment, arguably the worst in many, many years in their relationship and puts India in a very small group of countries that find themselves without a deal and with the highest tariff rates. They now need some pragmatic path forward and need to find a way to rebuild trust,” Nadjibulla said.

While the 50 percent tariffs, set to kick in in three weeks, have come as a shock, there has been a series of events in the past few weeks that hinted at disagreements between the two countries.

Just last week, Trump threatened that he would penalise New Delhi for buying Russian oil and arms, venting his frustration over an impasse in trade talks and referred to both countries as “dead economies”.

Negotiations deadlock

Last year, bilateral trade between India and the US stood at approximately $212bn, with a trade gap of about $46bn in India’s favour. Modi has said in the past that he plans to more than double trade between the two countries to $500bn in the next five years.

As part of the tariff negotiations, New Delhi had offered to remove levies from US industrial goods and said it would increase defence and energy purchases, the Reuters news agency reported. It also offered to scale back taxes on cars, despite a strong auto lobby at home pressuring it not to.

But it refused to remove duties from farm and dairy products, two politically sensitive sectors that employ hundreds of millions of predominantly poor Indians, and a stance similar to some other countries like Canada.

There are also geopolitical layers to what was supposed to be a trade conversation, pointed out Farwa Aamer, director of South Asia Initiatives at the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York.

A very public one was the difference in perception on how the latest clash between India and archenemy Pakistan in May was brought to an end. Trump has repeatedly said that he mediated a ceasefire. India has repeatedly said that Trump had no role in bringing about a truce and has said that Modi and Trump never spoke during the conflict.

Pakistan, on the other hand, has said it will nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize and has so far walked away with deals with the US to explore its reserves of critical minerals and oil as its efforts to reset ties with the US play out after years of ambivalence under former US President Joe Biden, said Aamer.

All of this has caused unease for New Delhi, which is now trying to navigate a tough road. “This will test India’s foreign policy,” said Aamer, “and the question is if we will see it grow with the US even as it maintains its ties with Russia,” its longstanding defence and trade partner.

New Delhi has called Wednesday’s tariff “unfair, unjustified and unreasonable” and said its imports of Russian oil are based on its objective of securing the energy needs of its nation of 1.4 billion people.

But beyond that, “India doesn’t want to look weak”, said Aamer. “India has this global standing, and Modi has this global standing, so it has to hold its own. It will maintain its stance that its national security is driving its foreign policy.”

Robert Rogowsky, a professor of international trade at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, said he expected “very creative diplomacy” in the “near term” as India and the US try to reset ties despite tensions.

“Strong-arming individuals like Modi will inevitably lead to shifts and counter-shifts,” he told Al Jazeera.

Adding instability

For now, India can focus on strengthening its bilateral trade agreements, said Aamer, such as the one it signed with the United Kingdom last month and another with the European Union, which is currently in the works.

India is also trying to stabilise relations with China –  just as Australia, Canada and Japan have done in recent months since Trump took office and hit allies with tariffs. Modi is planning to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit at the end of the month. It would be his first visit to China since the two countries had a face-off in 2020 in the Galwan River valley.

But the trade blow from the US also comes at a time when India has been trying to position itself as a manufacturing hub and as an option for businesses that were looking to add locations outside China.

In April, Apple, for instance, said all iPhones meant to be sold in the US would be assembled in India by next year. While electronics are exempt for now from the tariffs, a country with a 50 percent tariff tag on it is hardly attractive for business, and this just “adds to the instability and uncertainty that businesses were already feeling” because of all the Trump tariffs, Nadjibulla said.

“Trump has made it clear that he’s interested in onshoring rather than friend-shoring.”

Novo Nordisk’s outgoing CEO, Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen, has warned that layoffs at the Danish pharmaceutical giant could be unavoidable as competition heats up against its blockbuster obesity drug Wegovy amid rising pressure from rival Eli Lilly.

Novo Nordisk – which became Europe’s most valuable company, worth $650bn, last year on booming sales of Wegovy – is facing a pivotal moment as the medicine loses market share and sees sales growth slow, especially in the United States.

It has warned of far slower growth this year, in part due to compounders who have been allowed to make copycat drugs based on the same ingredients as Wegovy due to shortages. Novo Nordisk, which according to its website has 77,000 employees, cut its full-year sales and profit forecasts last week, wiping $95bn off its market value since.

The slide is a vast and abrupt turnaround for the firm that has been one of the world’s hottest investment stories, which led to a rapid expansion of manufacturing and sales capacity. Now the company is eyeing potential cost-cutting measures.

Layoffs loom

“We probably won’t be able to avoid layoffs,” Jorgensen told Danish broadcaster DR. “When you have to adjust a company, there are some areas where you have to have fewer people, some [areas] where you have to be smaller.”

He added, though, that any decision on layoffs would be in the hands of the incoming CEO, company veteran Maziar Mike Doustdar, who takes over on Thursday.

On a media call, Jorgensen said the market for copycat versions of Wegovy’s class of drugs – known as GLP-1 receptor agonists – was of “equal size to our business” and compounded versions of Wegovy were sold at a “much lower price point”.

In May, Novo Nordisk said it expected many of the roughly one million US patients using compounded GLP-1 drugs to switch to branded treatments after a US Food and Drug Administration ban on compounded copies of Wegovy took effect on May 22, and it expected compounding to wind down in the third quarter.

However, finance chief Karsten Munk Knudsen said on Wednesday that more than one million US patients were still using compounded GLP-1s and that the company’s lowered outlook has “not assumed a reduction in compounding” this year.

“The obesity market is volatile,” Knudsen told analysts when asked under what circumstances the company could see negative growth in the last six months of the year. The low end of the firm’s new full-year guidance range would be for “unforeseen events”, such as stronger pricing pressure in the US than forecast, he said.

The lower end of the range would imply sales around 150 billion Danish krone ($23bn) in the second half of 2025, compared with 157 billion krone ($24.5bn) in the same period last year.

Knudsen reiterated that the company was pursuing multiple strategies, including lawsuits against compounding pharmacies, to halt unlawful mass compounding.

Jorgensen said the company was encouraged by the latest US prescription data for Wegovy. While the drug was overtaken earlier this year by rival Eli Lilly’s Zepbound in terms of US prescriptions, that lead has narrowed in the past month.

Second-quarter sales of Wegovy rose by 36 percent in the US and more than quadrupled in markets outside the US compared to a year ago, Novo Nordisk said.

While Wegovy’s US pricing held steady in the quarter, the company expected deeper erosion in the key US market in the second half, due to a greater portion of sales expected from the direct-to-consumer or cash-pay channel, as well as higher rebates and discounts to insurers, Knudsen said.

He said Novo Nordisk was expanding its US direct-to-consumer platform, NovoCare, launched in March, and may need to pursue similar “cash sales” directly to patients, outside of insurance channels, in some markets outside the US.

Cost cuts

Novo Nordisk reiterated its full-year earnings expectations on Wednesday after last week’s profit warning.

Jorgensen said the company was acting to “ensure efficiencies in our cost base” as it announced it would terminate eight research and development projects.

“There seems to be a larger R&D clean-out than usual, but we do not know if this reflects a strategic re-assessment or just a coincidence,” Jefferies analysts said in a note.

Investors have questioned whether the company can stay competitive in the booming weight-loss drug market. Several equity analysts have cut their price targets and recommendations on the stock since last week.

Shares in Novo Nordisk plunged 30 percent last week – their worst weekly performance in over two decades. The stock has continued to tumble since the market opened in New York. As of 12pm local time (16:00 GMT), the pharmaceutical giant was down by more than 3.3 percent.

The government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has petitioned the World Trade Organization for consultations to help alleviate the steep tariffs imposed on Brazil by the United States.

Sources within the Brazilian government confirmed the petition on Wednesday to news outlets like AFP and The Associated Press, on condition of anonymity.

The aim is to seek relief from the 50 percent tariff that US President Donald Trump slapped on Brazilian exports in response to the country’s prosecution of a former far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro.

That tariff — the highest Trump has imposed on any country in August — took effect on Wednesday. India, meanwhile, is expected to face 50 percent tariffs later this month, unless a deal is struck beforehand.

A request for consultations is usually the first step in the World Trade Organization’s trade dispute process. The organisation functions as an international arbiter in economic disputes, though its procedures for negotiating settlements can be lengthy and inconclusive.

Brazilian Vice President Geraldo Alckmin has estimated that 35.9 percent of the country’s exports to the US will be subject to the stiff taxes. That equals about 4 percent of Brazil’s total exports worldwide.

Retaliation over Bolsonaro prosecution

Trump unveiled the current tariff rate on July 9, in a letter addressed to Lula and published online.

Unlike other tariff-related letters at the time, Trump used the correspondence to launch into a barbed attack on the Brazilian government for its decision to prosecute Bolsonaro, an ally, over an alleged coup attempt.

“The way that Brazil has treated former President Bolsonaro, a Highly Respected Leader throughout the World during his Term, including by the United States, is an international disgrace,” Trump wrote.

Just as Trump did after his 2020 electoral defeat, Bolsonaro had publicly cast doubt on the results of a 2022 presidential race that saw him lose to Lula.

But behind the scenes, police and prosecutors allege that Bolsonaro conspired with his associates to overturn the results of the election.

One possible scenario was to declare a “state of siege” during Bolsonaro’s final days as president, as a means of calling up the military and suspending civil rights. Then, a new election would have been called, according to prosecutors.

Another idea allegedly floated among Bolsonaro’s allies was to poison Lula.

But Trump, who likewise faced criminal charges in the past for allegedly attempting to subvert the outcome of a vote, has defended Bolsonaro, calling the prosecution politically biased.

“This trial should not be taking place,” he wrote in the July 9 letter. “It is a Witch Hunt that should end IMMEDIATELY!”

Several weeks later, on July 30, Trump followed up his tariff threat with an executive order that doubled down on his accusations.

Not only did Trump accuse Brazil of “politically persecuting” Bolsonaro, but he added that Brazil was guilty of “human rights abuses”, including the suppression of free speech, through its efforts to stem disinformation on social media.

“Recent policies, practices, and actions of the Government of Brazil threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States,” Trump wrote.

“Members of the Government of Brazil have taken actions that interfere with the economy of the United States, infringe the free expression rights of United States persons, violate human rights, and undermine the interest the United States has in protecting its citizens and companies.”

Lula speaks out

The executive order, however, included an annex that indicated certain products would not be subject to the new US tariffs. They included nuts, orange juice, coal, iron, tin and petroleum products.

Lula has claimed that Trump is impeding attempts to negotiate a trade deal between their two countries, a sentiment he repeated in an interview on Wednesday with the news agency Reuters.

“The day my intuition says Trump is ready to talk, I won’t hesitate to call him,” Lula told Reuters. “But today my intuition says he doesn’t want to talk. And I’m not going to humiliate myself.”

The three-term, left-wing president explained that he saw Trump’s tariff threats as part of a long history of US intervention in Brazil and Latin America more broadly.

“We had already pardoned the US intervention in the 1964 coup,” Lula said, referencing the overthrow of a Brazilian president that sparked a two-decade-long military dictatorship

“But this now is not a small intervention. It’s the president of the United States thinking he can dictate rules for a sovereign country like Brazil. It’s unacceptable.”

Lula added that he plans to bolster Brazil’s “national sovereignty” by reforming its mineral extraction policy to boost the local economy.

With the US tariffs in play, Lula also explained that he would reach out to members of the BRICS economic trading bloc, named for its founding members: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Trump, however, has threatened any BRICS-affiliated country with an additional 10-percent tariff.

Lula has been on an English-language media blitz since Trump announced the latest his latest slate of tariffs in July, warning that consumers across the world will be penalised.

Late last month, for instance, Lula gave his first interview to The New York Times newspaper in nearly 13 years.

When the Times asked what his reaction would be to the tariffs taking effect, Lula expressed ambivalence.

“I’m not going to cry over spilled milk,” he said. “If the United States doesn’t want to buy something of ours, we are going to look for someone who will.”

Syria’s fledgling government has sought investment to reconstruct the country after its devastating yearslong civil war.

Syria has signed a series of investment deals with international companies, covering 12 major strategic projects in infrastructure, transportation and real estate valued at a total of $14bn, the latest lifeline aimed at reviving its war-ravaged economy.

The plans included a $4bn investment project for Damascus airport signed with Qatar’s UCC Holding and a $2bn deal with the United Arab Emirates national investment corporation to establish a metro in the Syrian capital, Talal al-Hilali, head of the Syrian Investment Authority, said during the ceremony at the presidential palace in Damascus on Wednesday.

It’s a welcome development for President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s new government as it has been grappling with the heavy fallout from sectarian violence that broke out on July 13 in the southern province of Suwayda between Bedouin and Druze fighters. Government troops were deployed to quell the conflict. The bloodshed worsened, and Israel carried out strikes on Syrian troops and also bombed the heart of the capital Damascus, under the pretext of protecting the Druze.

Other major developments on the investment front destined for Damascus include the $2bn Damascus Towers project signed with the Italian-based company UBAKO, a $500m deal for the Baramkeh Towers project and another $60m agreement for Baramkeh Mall.

Since the overthrow of longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad in December in a lightning rebel offensive, Syria’s new authorities have worked to attract investment for the reconstruction of infrastructure destroyed in the country’s devastating, nearly 14-year-long civil war.

The projects “will extend across Syria and represent a qualitative shift in infrastructure and economic life”, al-Hilali said on Wednesday, adding that the agreements were “a turning point” for Syria’s future.

Al-Sharaa and United States special envoy for Syria Tom Barrack were both present at the signing ceremony, Syria’s official SANA news agency reported on Wednesday.

Barrack congratulated Syrian authorities on “another great accomplishment”, saying they will witness the rise of a “new hub” in “trade and prosperity”.

The United Nations has put Syria’s post-war reconstruction costs at more than $400bn. Several deals have already been announced.

Last month, Saudi Arabia signed major investment and partnership deals with Syria, valued at $6.4bn.

Also in July, Syria signed an $800m deal with UAE-based company DP World to develop the port of Tartous, state media reported.

In May, Syria signed a $7bn energy deal with a consortium of Qatari, Turkish and US companies as it seeks to revive its crippled power sector.

The US and European Union have recently lifted sanctions on Syria in the wake of al-Assad’s ouster, opening the nation to further investment and trade deals.

The White House is expected to announce the new deal as early as Wednesday.

Apple will pledge $100bn for manufacturing in the United States that will focus on building more jobs across the country, the White House has said.

The investment is expected to be announced on Wednesday.

White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said Apple was likely to make an investment announcement on Wednesday, as he discussed the financial pledges made by companies and countries under US President Donald Trump.

“They’re moving here in droves. This is trillions and trillions of dollars of commitments for people to build new factories here. In fact, you’re likely to see one today from Apple,” Hassett said in an interview with Fox Business Network.

Hassett did not elaborate further.

The investment will help move key parts of the Cupertino, California-based tech giant’s supply chain to the US, Bloomberg News reported, but details on the specifics were sparse.

“Today’s announcement with Apple is another win for our manufacturing industry that will simultaneously help reshore the production of critical components to protect America’s economic and national security,” Assistant White House Press Secretary Taylor Rogers said in a statement.

The president is slated to make an announcement at 4:30pm in Washington (20:30 GMT), according to the White House, which gave no specifics about the deal with the tech giant.

The latest investment

Apple said in February that it would spend $500bn in US investments in the next four years, which would include a giant factory in Texas for artificial intelligence servers and the addition of about 20,000 research and development jobs across the country.

Apple has many times pledged investments in the US in the last decade. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, the company pledged $350bn. In 2021, under former President Joe Biden, Apple announced a $430bn investment.

The investment comes after Trump warned that he would hit Apple with a 25 percent tariff if it did not move its manufacturing efforts to the US. Analysts have said such a shift is not realistic.

Dan Ives at Wedbush Securities said in a note that it would take at least five to 10 years to shift production to the US, meaning consumers would pay as much as $3,500 for an iPhone.

“We believe the concept of Apple producing iPhones in the US is a fairy tale that is not feasible,” Ives had previously said.

Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In April, Apple had announced plans to move to India the assembly of the majority of the phones it sells to the US by the end of next year in an effort to reduce its reliance on China as the trade war between the US and China heats up. But Trump’s ire has now shifted to India and he has slapped the country with a 50 percent tariff over imports of Russian oil. It’s not clear if the latest developments will impact Apple’s India plans.

Apple’s stock surged on the looming US investment announcement. The company, which is traded under the ticker symbol APPL, is up more than 3.8 percent since the market opened as of 10:15am in New York (14:15 GMT) on Wednesday.

Donald Trump aims to rebalance the global trading system. The president has announced a new round of tariffs on many nations.

Trump’s trade experiment seems to be paying off better than most had expected, at least for now. He got his biggest trading partners to make deals that are closer to his demands than theirs.

Financial markets have shrugged off higher duties, and tariff revenues are pouring in. But economists say Americans will pay more for many goods they consume when the tariffs take effect.

What’s the impact of tariffs on Asia’s manufacturing hubs?

Plus, can global hunger be ended?

Commissioner’s recommendations for tech companies include measures that have been criticised on privacy grounds.

Australia’s internet watchdog has accused tech giants including Google and Apple of failing to take action against child sex abuse on their platforms.

In a report released on Wednesday, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said tech platforms were failing to implement various measures to protect children, including scanning cloud services for known abuse material and using language analysis tools to detect attempted sexual extortion in messaging services.

Grant said that Apple and YouTube, which is owned by Google, also failed to track reports of child sex abuse and could not say how long it took them to respond to the reports they received.

“It shows that when left to their own devices, these companies aren’t prioritising the protection of children and are seemingly turning a blind eye to crimes occurring on their services,” Grant said in a statement.

“We need to keep the pressure on the tech industry as a whole to live up to their responsibility to protect society’s most vulnerable members from the most egregious forms of harm and that’s what these periodic notices are designed to encourage.”

Grant added that the companies had taken few steps to improve their efforts since being asked three years ago, “despite the promise of AI to tackle these harms and overwhelming evidence that online child sexual exploitation is on the rise”.

“No other consumer-facing industry would be given the licence to operate by enabling such heinous crimes against children on their premises, or services,” she said.

Google disputed the report’s findings, saying they were rooted in “reporting metrics, not online safety performance” and that more than 99 percent of abuse material on YouTube is automatically removed before being flagged.

“Child safety is critical to us,” a Google spokesperson said.

“We’ve led the industry fight against child sexual abuse material since day one, investing heavily in advanced technology to proactively find and remove this harmful content.”

Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Snap, and Discord, which were also included in the report, did not respond to requests for comment.

Tom Sulston, head of policy at Digital Rights Watch, said that while it was important for authorities to take action against online child abuse, some of the tools supported by the internet watchdog would raise serious civil liberties and privacy concerns.

Sulston said that scanning live calls and private messages would require platforms to abandon end-to-end encryption, which prevents communications from being viewed by anyone apart from the sender and receiver.

“That’s a gross invasion of privacy for all of the people making perfectly innocent and reasonable use of the service,” Sulston told Al Jazeera.

“It also has dangerous knock-on effects where the users of that service would be subject to surveillance from hostile actors – foreign governments, criminals, hackers. That’s a huge risk for civic society, activists, journalists and anyone who communicates on the internet.

Breaking encryption would be “disproportionate and dangerous,” Sulston added.

“We don’t expect the post office to open all letters and read them for illegal content – in fact, most countries have laws specifically against this,” he said.

US president says the Treasury secretary wishes to stay in his current role.

United States President Donald Trump has ruled out Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent as his pick to replace Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

Trump, who has repeatedly criticised Powell for not moving faster to lower interest rates, said on Tuesday that Bessent wished to continue in his current role.

“I love Scott, but he wants to stay where he is,” Trump said in an interview with CNBC, adding that Bessent was doing a “great job” and had told him as recently as Monday that he did not want the position.

Trump said he had four candidates in mind to replace Powell, whose term expires in May, including Kevin Warsh, who formerly served on the Fed’s seven-member board of governors, and Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council.

He said he could use the opportunity to replace Adriana D Kugler, who last week announced her early resignation as one of the seven governors, to put his pick for chair on the board in advance of Powell’s departure.

“I’m going to make the decision soon,” Trump said.

Trump’s repeated attacks on Powell, whom he has mockingly dubbed “too late”, have stoked concern about the US central bank maintaining its independence, which investors view as crucial to the health of the US economy.

Following reports last month that Trump had asked Republican lawmakers whether he should fire the Fed chair, the benchmark S&P 500 tumbled 0.7 percent.

US stocks swiftly recovered after Trump denied that he had any intention to remove Powell early.

Under legislation and US Supreme Court precedent, the president may only remove the Fed chair “for cause”, widely interpreted to mean proof of corruption or malfeasance.

Prosecutors say two men ‘knowingly and willfully’ used California-based company to evade export controls on AI chips.

Authorities in the United States have charged two Chinese citizens with shipping tens of millions of dollars’ worth of advanced Nvidia chips to China in breach of export controls.

Chuan Geng and Shiwei Yang are alleged to have “knowingly and willfully” exported the graphic processing units (GPUs) used to power artificial intelligence without authorisation from October 2022 to July 2025, the US Department of Justice said on Tuesday.

Export records indicate that Geng and Yang, both 28, organised at least 21 shipments through their El Monte, California-based company ALX Solutions Inc to companies in Singapore and Malaysia, the Justice Department said.

The exports included a December 2024 shipment of Nvidia H100 GPUs – described as the most powerful chip on the market – that was “falsely labelled” and had not obtained the necessary licence from the US Department of Commerce, the Justice Department said.

According to prosecutors, ALX Solutions received payments from firms in Hong Kong and China, including a $1m sum from a China-based company in January 2024, rather than the companies that accepted the shipments.

Prosecutors said a search of ALX Solutions’s office and Geng and Yang’s phones last week revealed “incriminating communications”, including communications about shipping chips to China through Malaysia to evade US export restrictions.

Geng and Yang face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison if convicted under the Export Control Reform Act.

Al Jazeera could not immediately locate the accused’s lawyers for comment.

Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia said the case showed that “smuggling is a nonstarter”.

“We primarily sell our products to well-known partners, including OEMs [original equipment manufacturers], who help us ensure that all sales comply with US export control rules,” a company spokesperson said.

“Even relatively small exporters and shipments are subject to thorough review and scrutiny, and any diverted products would have no service, support, or updates.”

The US government has banned the export of the most advanced chips to China amid a heated battle for technological supremacy between Washington and Beijing.

US officials have claimed that restrictions, many of which were introduced under former US President Joe Biden, are needed to safeguard national security.

China, which has hit back with its own export controls against the US, has accused Washington of undermining global trade and abusing its dominance in tech.

Last month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced that Washington had agreed to reverse its ban on the sale of its H20 GPU to China following discussions with US President Donald Trump.

Huang said the lifting of the export ban on the H20, which was specifically designed for the Chinese market and is less powerful than the H100, would encourage “nations worldwide to choose  America” for their AI models.

Despite his austerity measures, the president’s party is expected to do well in the crucial October mid-term elections.

Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier Milei, has vetoed bills aimed at increasing pensions and disability spending, amid ongoing protests against his austerity fiscal policies, which are hitting many people in their day-to-day lives.

Milei’s administration announced the decision on Monday, less than three months before the crucial mid-term elections, saying the country does not have enough money to finance the legislation.

The vetoes can still be overturned by a two-thirds majority in the Congress, where politicians passed the laws in July.

The Argentinian president, whose party only holds a small number of seats in parliament, will hope for a repeat of last year, when he managed to successfully stop pension rises, thanks to support from the conservative PRO bloc.

In a statement published on X on Monday, the president’s office suggested that the now-vetoed laws had been approved by Congress in an “irresponsible manner”, without identifying funding sources.

It claimed that the spending rises would have amounted to 0.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) this year and 1.68 percent of GDP in 2026.

“This president prefers to tell an uncomfortable truth rather than repeat comfortable lies,” the president’s office said.

“The only way to make Argentina great again is with effort and honesty, not the same old recipes,” it added, echoing the “make America great again” rhetoric of the United States President Donald Trump.

Since taking office in December 2023, Milei, a self-described “anarcho-capitalist”, has slashed federal spending in an attempt to reduce inflation.

As part of these largescale economic changes, his government has removed tens of thousands of civil service jobs and made drastic cuts to social spending and public works.

In 2024, Milei’s policies saw Argentina gain its first annual surplus in 14 years, and in June, Argentina’s monthly inflation rate fell below 2 percent for the first time since 2020.

However, the president’s measures have been blamed for tipping millions of people into poverty in the first half of last year.

Unemployment has also grown, and prices are up 40 percent year-on-year, conditions which have led people to protest.

Researchers say pensioners, who have been at the centre of weekly demonstrations, are the hardest-hit group.

Despite the public protests, polls show that Milei’s party holds a sizeable lead ahead of October’s mid-term elections, which will be seen as a referendum on his first two years in office.

The United States has imposed a punitive 25 percent tariff on India.

US President Donald Trump warns that more could follow.

It’s a spectacular change from six months ago, when the leaders of the two nations declared their friendship at the White House.

So what went wrong – and what will happen next?

Presenter: Dareen Abughaida

Guests:

Brahma Chellaney – Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council

Elizabeth Threlkeld – Senior fellow and director of the South Asia Program at the Stimson Center

Sumantra Bose – Political scientist and professor of International and Comparative Politics at Krea University in India

Thousands of US workers hit the picket line at three plants in Illinois and Missouri.

Thousands of workers at Boeing plants across the United States that develop military aircraft and weapons have gone on strike.

The strike began Monday at Boeing facilities in St Louis and St Charles, Missouri, as well as Mascoutah, Illinois, after failed negotiations over wage increases and other provisions of a new contract.

About 3,200 local members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers voted Sunday to reject a modified four-year labour agreement, the union said.

“IAM District 837 members build the aircraft and defense systems that keep our country safe,” Sam Cicinelli, the general vice president of the union’s Midwest division, said in a statement. “They deserve nothing less than a contract that keeps their families secure and recognizes their unmatched expertise.”

The vote followed a weeklong cooling-off period after the workers rejected an earlier proposed contract, which included a 20 percent wage increase over four years and $5,000 ratification bonuses.

Boeing warned over the weekend that it anticipated the strike after workers rejected its latest offer, which did not further boost the proposed wage hike. However, the proposal removed a scheduling provision that would have affected workers’ ability to earn overtime pay.

“We’re disappointed our employees rejected an offer that featured 40 percent average wage growth and resolved their primary issue on alternative work schedules,” said Dan Gillian, Boeing Air Dominance vice president and general manager, and senior St Louis site executive.

“We are prepared for a strike and have fully implemented our contingency plan to ensure our non-striking workforce can continue supporting our customers.”

Boeing’s Defense, Space & Security business accounts for more than one-third of the company’s revenue. But Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg told analysts last week that the impact from a strike by the machinists who build fighter jets, weapons systems and the US Navy’s first carrier-based unmanned aircraft would be much less than a walkout last year by 33,000 workers who assemble the company’s commercial jetliners.

“The order of magnitude of this is much, much less than what we saw last fall,” Ortberg said. “So we’ll manage through this. I wouldn’t worry too much about the implications of the strike.”

The 2024 strike shut down Boeing’s factories in Washington state for more than seven weeks at a bleak time for the company. Boeing came under several federal investigations last year after a door plug blew off a 737 Max plane during an Alaska Airlines flight in January.

The Federal Aviation Administration put limits on Boeing plane production that it said would last until the agency felt confident about manufacturing quality safeguards at the company. The door-plug incident renewed concerns about the safety of the 737 Max. Two of the planes crashed less than five months apart in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people.

Ortberg told analysts that the company has slowly worked its way up to an FAA-set 737 Max production cap of 38 per month and expects to ask regulators later this year for permission to go beyond it.

Last week, Boeing reported that its second-quarter revenue had improved and its losses had narrowed. The company lost $611m in the second quarter, compared to a loss of $1.44bn during the same period last year.

Boeing’s stock tumbled on the news of the strike. Trending downwards earlier in the day, it has since been trending upwards, but is still below the market open by 0.26 percent as of 12:30pm ET (16:30 GMT).

The firing of a top United States statistics official by President Donald Trump last week has drawn concerns from economists and policymakers regarding the credibility of data in the world’s biggest economy.

Trump’s dismissal of Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after the release of disappointing employment figures on Friday has raised fears over the integrity of Washington’s economic data, which are relied on by countless businesses and investors in the US and across the world.

The National Association for Business Economics warned that McEntarfer’s “baseless” ouster risked doing “lasting harm to the institutions that support American economic stability”.

“It could open the door to political meddling and certainly will undermine trust in federal statistics that businesses, policymakers and individuals use to make some of their most important decisions,” Erica Groshen, who led the Bureau of Labor Statistics under former President Barack Obama, told Al Jazeera.

If Trump’s dismissal of McEntarfer and other presidential appointees is allowed to stand, Groshen said, he could make a habit of firing any head of a statistical agency or other body that delivers “unwelcome news”.

“Then he is likely to replace them with appointees who prioritise serving his goals over serving the mission of their agencies, ethical standards or scientific integrity,” Groshen said.

Trump, who justified McEntarfer’s removal by claiming without evidence that the latest job figures were “rigged” to make him look bad, said on Sunday that he would announce a new Bureau of Labor Statistics head in three or four days.

‘Global ramifications’

A collapse in trust in official economic data about the US would have ramifications worldwide.

Despite the growing influence of emerging economies such as China and India, the US remains the world’s largest economy by some distance.

The US gross domestic product (GDP) at about $30.3 trillion accounts for more than one-quarter of the global economy. China’s estimated GDP is about two-thirds that amount.

US government data on trade, employment, consumer spending and GDP are considered important signals for the direction of the global economy and are closely followed by businesses and investors from London to Dubai and Tokyo.

Many countries, including democratic states, have faced accusations of fiddling with economic statistics for political reasons, often with serious reputational consequences.

In 2010, the European Commission published a withering report accusing Greece of deliberately falsifying data to conceal the poor state of its public finances.

In 2013, the International Monetary Fund officially censured Argentina for providing what it said was inaccurate data on inflation and economic growth.

‘Economic data manipulation’

Some research suggests that countries run by strong-arm leaders are especially prone to misrepresenting the state of their economies.

A 2024 study published in the European Journal of Political Economy found that economic openness and democracy decreased the likelihood of governments manipulating statistics although there were no observable positive effects from media freedom or the independence of the statistical office.

In a 2022 paper that used satellite imagery of nighttime light as a proxy for economic development, Luis Martinez, a professor at the University of Chicago, estimated that autocratic countries artificially inflated their annual GDP growth by about 35 percent.

“Economic data manipulation is pervasive in history, especially in autocracies and dictatorships to create narratives for the people – typically to embellish standards of living,” Tomasz Michalski, an associate professor of economics at the HEC Paris business school, told Al Jazeera.

“What is rarer, though, is to find such deliberate behaviour in countries that strive to be democracies or are more developed.”

After Trump’s firing of McEntarfer, a career economist who was appointed in 2024 with overwhelming bipartisan support, critics were quick to note parallels to tactics attributed to strongman leaders seeking to bolster public approval for their policies.

“It’s one more step on our rapid descent into banana republic status,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said on Substack, a subscription-based newsletter platform.

Lawrence Summers, who served as US Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, described the firing as the “stuff of democracies giving way to authoritarianism”.

Scott Sumner, a professor of economics at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, said Trump’s move made the US “look more like a banana republic” although it remained to be seen whether he would seek to directly manipulate the government’s economic figures.

“It’s actually hard to fool the public, and almost no one was fooled by the Argentina manipulation,” Sumner told Al Jazeera.

“It’s too soon to say whether Trump will try to do the same. Any attempt to do so would likely fail.”

‘The quality of US economic statistics’

The quality of US economic data has been a growing concern for some time due in part to the Trump administration’s freeze on hiring federal employees and staff cuts at numerous agencies.

In March, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick dissolved two expert committees that advised the government on its economic statistics, prompting concern among some economists.

In June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that it had stopped collecting price-related data in three US cities – Buffalo, New York; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Provo, Utah – due to limitations in “current resources”.

But even before Trump’s return to the White House in January, declining response rates to surveys among the public in recent years had made the collection of data increasingly difficult, raising concerns about accuracy.

In a poll published by the Reuters news agency last month, 89 of 100 policy experts surveyed said they had at least some concerns about the quality of US economic statistics.

“Some data is just unreliable because people stopped responding to surveys or the responses became so biased given the nonhomogeneous response rates,” said Michalski, the HEC Paris associate professor.

“There are no easy remedies often for improving data collection given that many people are not using landlines, are unreachable or provide careless answers to investigators,” he said.

Even with sound methodology, data are always at risk of manipulation once politicians get involved, Michalski added.

“Even with correct numbers, it is possible to spin a story about inflation or GDP growth by changing the base years or selecting some specific periods to weave narratives,” he said.

“The incentives to manipulate and falsify are clearly there. There is little or no punishment.”

Groshen said that while she does not expect US economic data to stop being reliable in the immediate future, “we seem headed in that direction.”

“For now, the BLS will continue to operate as it has before,” she said.

“We will need to start worrying if and when the president’s people are embedded there.”

Trump administration officials question data amid condemnation of dismissal of Bureau of Labor Statistics head.

The White House has defended United States President Donald Trump’s firing of the top official responsible for compiling employment statistics after her dismissal raised concerns about the future credibility of crucial economic data.

Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), on Friday, claiming without evidence that the latest jobs report had been “rigged” to make him look bad.

On Sunday, Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, denied that Trump was “shooting the messenger” and questioned the accuracy of the figures showing much weaker hiring than previously reported.

“The president wants his own people there so that when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable,” Hassett told NBC News’s Meet the Press, calling the downward revision of jobs growth for May and June “unprecedented” and a “historically important outlier”.

“And if there are big changes and big revisions – we expect more big revisions for the jobs data in September, for example – then we want to know why. We want people to explain it to us.”

Speaking on Fox News later on Sunday, Hassett again poured doubt on the official figures, suggesting without evidence that employment statistics can sometimes contain “partisan patterns”.

“I think what we need is a fresh set of eyes at the BLS, somebody who can clean this thing up,” he told Fox News Sunday.

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer also defended Trump’s dismissal of McEntarfer, saying the president had “real concerns” about the jobs data.

“You want to be able to have somewhat reliable numbers,” Greer told CBS News’ Face the Nation.

“There are always revisions, but sometimes you see these revisions go in really extreme ways. And it’s, you know, the president is the president. He can choose who works in the executive branch.”

The latest employment figures released on Friday showed that 258,000 fewer jobs were created in May and June than previously estimated, and that a fewer-than-expected 73,000 jobs were added in July, undermining Trump’s insistence that the economy has not been negatively affected by his sweeping tariffs.

Trump said on Sunday that he would announce a new BLS director, as well as a candidate to fill the position left open by the resignation of Federal Reserve governor Adriana Kugler, within the next few days.

Trump’s dismissal of McEntarfer, a career bureaucrat who was appointed with overwhelming bipartisan support in 2024, has prompted condemnation from economists and both Republican and Democratic lawmakers.

In a statement on Friday, The Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a group co-led by former BLS directors William Beach and Erica L Groshen, accused Trump of politicising the statistics agency and undermining confidence in official government data.

“US official statistics are the gold standard globally,” the group said.

“When leaders of other nations have politicised economic data, it has destroyed public trust in all official statistics and in government science.”

WASHINGTON — For all of President Trump’s promises of an economic “golden age,” a spate of weak indicators last week told a potentially worrisome story as the effects of his policies are coming into focus.

Job gains are dwindling. Inflation is ticking upward. Growth has slowed compared with last year.

More than six months into his term, Trump’s blitz of tariff hikes and his new tax-and-spending bill have remodeled America’s trading, manufacturing, energy and tax systems to his liking. He’s eager to take credit for any perceived wins and is hunting for someone else to blame if the financial situation starts to totter.

But as of now, this is not the boom the Republican president promised, and his ability to blame his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden, for any economic challenges has faded as the world economy hangs on his every word and social media post.

When Friday’s monthly jobs report turned out to be decidedly bleak, Trump ignored the warnings in the data and fired the head of the agency that produces the report.

“Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes,” Trump said on his social media platform, without offering evidence for his claim. “The Economy is BOOMING.”

It’s possible that the disappointing numbers are growing pains from the rapid transformation caused by Trump and that stronger growth will return — or they may be a preview of even more disruption to come.

A political gamble

Trump’s aggressive use of tariffs, executive actions, spending cuts and tax code changes carry significant political risk if he is unable to deliver middle-class prosperity. The effects of his new tariffs are still several months away from rippling through the economy, right as many Trump allies in Congress will be campaigning in the midterm elections.

“Considering how early we are in his term, Trump’s had an unusually big impact on the economy already,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist at Firehouse Strategies. “The full inflationary impact of the tariffs won’t be felt until 2026. Unfortunately for Republicans, that’s also an election year.”

The White House portrayed the blitz of trade frameworks leading up to Trump’s tariff announcement Thursday as proof of his negotiating prowess. The European Union, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia and other nations that the White House declined to name agreed that the U.S. could increase its tariffs on their goods without doing the same to American products. Trump simply set rates on other countries that lacked settlements.

The costs of those tariffs — taxes paid on imports to the U.S. — will be most felt by American consumers in the form of higher prices, but to what extent remains uncertain.

“For the White House and their allies, a key part of managing the expectations and politics of the Trump economy is maintaining vigilance when it comes to public perceptions,” said Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist.

Just 38% of adults approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, according to a July poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs. That’s down from the end of Trump’s first term when half of adults approved of his economic leadership.

The White House paints a rosier image, casting the economy as emerging from a period of uncertainty after Trump’s restructuring and repeating the economic gains seen in his first term before the pandemic struck.

“President Trump is implementing the very same policy mix of deregulation, fairer trade, and pro-growth tax cuts at an even bigger scale — as these policies take effect, the best is yet to come,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said.

Hints of trouble

The economic numbers over the last week show the difficulties that Trump might face if the numbers continue on their current path:

— Friday’s jobs report showed that U.S. employers have shed 37,000 manufacturing jobs since Trump’s tariff launch in April, undermining prior White House claims of a factory revival.

— Net hiring has plummeted over the last three months with job gains of just 73,000 in July, 14,000 in June and 19,000 in May — a combined 258,000 jobs lower than previously indicated. On average last year, the economy added 168,000 jobs a month.

— A Thursday inflation report showed that prices have risen 2.6% over the year that ended in June, an increase in the personal consumption expenditures price index from 2.2% in April. Prices of heavily imported items, such as appliances, furniture and toys and games, jumped from May to June.

— On Wednesday, a report on gross domestic product — the broadest measure of the U.S. economy — showed that it grew at an annual rate of less than 1.3% during the first half of the year, down sharply from 2.8% growth last year.

“The economy’s just kind of slogging forward,” said Guy Berger, senior fellow at the Burning Glass Institute, which studies employment trends. “Yes, the unemployment rate’s not going up, but we’re adding very few jobs. The economy’s been growing very slowly. It just looks like a ‘meh’ economy is continuing.”

Attacks on the Fed

Trump has sought to pin the blame for any economic troubles on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, saying the Fed should cut its benchmark interest rates — even though doing so could generate more inflation.

Trump has publicly backed two Fed governors, Christopher Waller and Michelle Bowman, for voting for rate cuts at Wednesday’s meeting. But their logic is not what the president wants to hear: They were worried, in part, about a slowing job market.

But this is a major economic gamble being undertaken by Trump and those pushing for lower rates under the belief that mortgages will also become more affordable as a result and boost homebuying activity.

His tariff policy has changed repeatedly over the last six months, with the latest import tax numbers serving as a substitute for what the president announced in April, which provoked a stock market sell-off. It might not be a simple one-time adjustment as some Fed board members and Trump administration officials argue.

‘Universal tariffs’

Of course, Trump can’t say no one warned him about the possible consequences of his economic policies.

Biden, then the outgoing president, did just that in a speech in December at the Brookings Institution, saying the cost of the tariffs would eventually hit American workers and businesses.

“He seems determined to impose steep, universal tariffs on all imported goods brought into this country on the mistaken belief that foreign countries will bear the cost of those tariffs rather than the American consumer,” Biden said. “I believe this approach is a major mistake.”

Boak and Rugber write for the Associated Press.

Neighbouring countries agree on terms of economic cooperation in several areas, including energy and supply chains for minerals.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda have agreed on terms of economic cooperation in several sectors, as the two countries move towards delivering on a peace deal signed in June.

The tenets agreed on Friday summarise a regional economic integration framework, which includes elements of cooperation on energy, infrastructure, mineral supply chains, national parks and public health, according to the State Department of the United States, which brokered the deal.

A source familiar with the matter said a preliminary draft of the framework has been agreed to and there would now be an input period to get reaction from the private sector and civil society before it is finalised, the Reuters news agency reported.

In the statement, Rwanda and the DRC affirmed that each country has “full, sovereign control” over the exploitation, processing and export of its natural resources, and recognised the importance of developing mineral processing and transformation capacity within each country, according to Reuters.

The DRC views the plundering of its mineral wealth as a key driver of the conflict between its forces and Rwanda-backed M23 rebels in the country’s east that has killed thousands of people.

‘Mineral deal first’

The deal signed in Washington, DC, on June 27 aims to attract Western investment to a region rich in tantalum, gold, cobalt, copper, lithium and other minerals. According to Human Rights Watch, it is “a mineral deal first, an opportunity for peace second”, linking economic integration and respect for territorial integrity with the promise of billions of dollars of investments.

The two countries are also committed to ensuring that the minerals trade no longer provides funding to armed groups and to creating a world-class industrial mining sector in the region. The deal would also ensure better cross-border interoperability on mineral supply chains, according to the statement.

They also agreed to connect new infrastructure to the US-backed Lobito Corridor, underscoring Washington’s aim of greater access to resources in the region and efforts to counter China.

The Ruzizi III hydropower project and Lake Kivu methane exploitation were the only specific projects mentioned in the statement, despite US emphasis on critical minerals. The countries said they intended to prioritise financing for Ruzizi and work together to exploit methane gas sustainably.

Friday’s announcement comes after the two countries held the first meeting of a joint oversight committee on Thursday in a step towards implementing the deal, even as other commitments are yet to be fulfilled.

In the Washington agreement, the two countries pledged to implement a 2024 agreement that would see Rwandan troops withdraw from eastern DRC within 90 days.

The Congolese military’s operations targeting the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Congo-based armed group that includes remnants of Rwanda’s former army and militias that carried out a 1994 genocide, are meant to conclude over the same timeframe.

The deal also said the DRC and Rwanda would form a joint security coordination mechanism within 30 days and implement a plan agreed upon last year to monitor and verify the withdrawal of Rwandan soldiers within three months.

But 30 days from the signing have passed without a meeting of the joint security coordination mechanism.

The source familiar with the matter said the joint security coordination mechanism meeting would be held on August 7 in Addis Ababa.

The DRC is also involved in direct talks with M23 hosted by Qatar, and last month the two sides pledged to sign a separate peace agreement by August 18, though many outstanding details need to be negotiated.

The US president has hurled insults at Fed Chair Jerome Powell, renewing calls for the Federal Reserve to slash interest rates.

Washington, DC – United States President Donald Trump has called on the Federal Reserve board to wrest control of the central bank from Chairman Jerome Powell and lower interest rates.

In a series of social media posts on Friday, Trump — who has called for lowering interest rates for months — escalated his attacks on Powell, suggesting that the central bank chief should be stripped of his powers.

“Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell, a stubborn MORON, must substantially lower interest rates, NOW,” Trump wrote.

“IF HE CONTINUES TO REFUSE, THE BOARD SHOULD ASSUME CONTROL, AND DO WHAT EVERYONE KNOWS HAS TO BE DONE!”

Trump later added that Powell “should also be put ‘out to pasture’.”

Earlier this week, Powell announced that interest rates would remain steady at 4.25 to 4.5 percent.

The central bank’s rates indirectly set the rates for private lending across the country.

When the Federal Reserve, known as the Fed, sees the need to accelerate economic activity, it cuts interest rates to lower the cost of borrowing and pump money into the economy.

Conversely, when prices rise too rapidly, the Fed raises interest rates to bring the cost of living under control.

The central bank operates independently of political officials.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, interest rates plummeted to prevent a prolonged recession during the lockdown.

But as supply-chain disruption and an abundance of money in the economy sparked an inflation crisis in 2022, the Fed hiked interest rates to levels not seen since the 2008 Great Recession.

An advocate for greater investments in the US economy, Trump has been arguing that inflation is now at sustainable levels, so there is no need for interest rates to remain high.

Over the past year, the central bank slashed interest rates by about 1 percent, but Trump has been demanding more aggressive cuts.

On Wednesday, Powell cited a risk of inflation linked to Trump’s trade policies as the reason behind his decision not to drop interest rates.

“Higher tariffs have begun to show through more clearly to prices of some goods, but their overall effects on economic activity and inflation remain to be seen,” he told reporters.

Earlier this month, a government report showed that consumer prices rose by 0.3 percent from May to June, compared with 0.1 percent the previous month, as Trump’s tariffs started to set in.

Powell did not rule out that the uptick in prices could be “short-lived”, but he also warned that it may become persistent, arguing for a cautious approach while monitoring inflation.

“For the time being, we’re well positioned to learn more about the likely course of the economy and the evolving balance of risks before adjusting our policy stance,” he said. “We see our current policy stance as appropriate to guard against inflation risks.”

The decision proved controversial, with the Fed board seeing rare dissent from two members, both Trump appointees, who publicly argued for more rate cuts.

On Friday, Trump warned Powell that the dissent “WILL ONLY GET STRONGER“.

Trump also applauded the news that Federal Reserve board member Adriana Kugler, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, would step down on August 8, giving him a new vacancy to fill.

“Too Little, Too Late,” the US president wrote on Friday. “Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell is a disaster. DROP THE RATE! The good news is that Tariffs are bringing Billions of Dollars into the USA!”

The White House has launched an aggressive public relations campaign promoting a narrative of economic strength during the first six months of United States President Donald Trump, with claims of his policies fueling “America’s golden age”.

But an Al Jazeera analysis of economic data shows the reality is more mixed.

Trump’s claims of his policies boosting the US economy suffered a blow on Friday when the latest jobs report revealed that the country had added a mere 73,000 jobs last month, well below the 115,000 forecasters had expected. The only additions were in the healthcare sector, which added 55,000 jobs, and the social services sector added 18,000.

US employers also cut 62,075 jobs in July — up 29 percent from cuts in the month before, and 140 percent higher than this time last year, according to the firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas, which tracks monthly job cuts. Government, tech, and retail sectors are the industries that saw the biggest declines so far this year.

It comes as this month’s jobs and labour turnover report showed an economic slowdown. There were 7.4 million open jobs in the US, down from 7.7 million a month before.

The Department of Labour on Friday released downward revisions to both the May and June jobs reports, significantly changing the picture the White House had previously painted.

“For the FOURTH month in a row, jobs numbers have beat market expectations with nearly 150,000 good jobs created in June,” the White House said in a July 3 release following the initial June report.

The Labor Department had reported an addition of 147,000 jobs in June. On Friday, it sharply revised down that number to just 14,000. May’s report also saw a big downgrade from 144,000 to only 19,000 jobs gained. Trump has since fired the head of the agency that produces the monthly jobs data, alleging that the data had been manipulated to make him look bad.

Even before the revisions, June’s report was the first to reflect early signs of economic strain tied to the administration’s tariff threats, as it revealed that job growth was concentrated in areas such as state and local government and healthcare. Sectors more exposed to trade policy – including construction, wholesale trade, and manufacturing – were flat. Meanwhile, leisure and hospitality showed weak growth, even in peak summer, reflecting falling travel demand both at home and abroad.

The administration also claimed that native-born workers accounted for all job gains since January. That assertion is misleading as it implies that no naturalised citizens or legally present foreign workers gained employment.

However, it is true that employment among foreign-born workers has declined – by over half a million jobs – claims that native-born workers are replacing foreign-born labour, are not supported by the jobs data.

Jobs lost in sectors with high foreign-born employment, including tech, have been abundant, driven by tariffs and automation, particularly AI. In fact, recent layoffs in tech have been explicitly attributed to AI advancements, not labour displacement by other groups.

Companies including Recruit Holdings — the parent company of Indeed and Glassdoor, Axel Springer, IBM, Duolingo and others have already made headcount reductions directly attributed to AI advancements.

Wage growth

The pace of rise of wage growth, an indicator of economic success, has slowed in recent months. That is partly due to the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates steady in hopes of keeping inflation stable.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, wages have been outpacing inflation since 2023, after a period of declining real wages following the COVID pandemic.

Wage growth ticked up by 0.3 percent in July from a month prior. Compared with this time last year, wage growth is 3.9 percent, according to Friday’s Labor Department jobs report.

Earlier this year, the White House painted a picture that wage growth differed between the era of former President Joe Biden and now under Trump because of policy.

“Blue-collar workers have seen real wages grow almost two percent in the first five months of President Trump’s second term — a stark contrast from the negative wage growth seen during the first five months of the Biden Administration,” the White House said in a release.

However, Biden and Trump inherited two very different economies when they took office. Biden has to deal with a massive global economic downturn driven by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump, on the other hand, during his second term, inherited “unquestionably the strongest economy” in more than two decades, per the Economic Policy Institute, particularly because of the US economy’s rebound compared with peer nations.

Inflation

Inflation peaked in mid-2022 during Biden’s term at 9 percent, before falling steadily because of the Federal Reserve’s efforts to manage a soft landing.

A July 21 White House statement claimed, “Since President Trump took office, core inflation has tracked at just 2.1 percent.” On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessett said “inflation is cooling” in a post on X.

However, the Consumer Price Index report, which tracks core inflation – a measure that excludes the price of volatile items such as food and energy – was 2.9 percent in the most recent report and overall inflation was at 2.7 percent in June.

Prices

The most recent Consumer Price Index report, published July 15, shows that on a monthly basis, prices on all goods went up in June by 0.3 ,percent which is 2.7 percent higher from this time last year.

Grocery prices in particular are up 2.4 percent from this time last year and 0.3 percent from the prior month. The cost of fruits and vegetables went up 0.9 percent, the price of coffee increased by 2.2 percent and the cost of beef went up 2 percent.

New pending tariffs on Brazil, as Al Jazeera previously reported, could further drive up the cost of beef in the months to come.

Trump has pointed to falling egg prices in particular as evidence of economic success, after Democrats attacked his administration over their price in March. He has even gone so far as to claim that prices are down by 400 percent. That figure is mathematically impossible – a 100 percent decrease would mean eggs are free.

During the first few months of Trump’s term egg prices surged, and then dropped due to an outbreak of, and then recovery from, a severe avian flue outbreak, which had been hindering supply – not because of any specific policy intervention.

In January, when Trump took office egg prices were $4.95 per dozen as supply was constrained by the virus. By March, the average egg price was $6.23.  But outbreak and high prices drove away consumers, allowing farmers with healthier flocks to catch up on the supply side. As a result, prices fell to an average of $3.38. That would be a 32 percent drop since the beginning of his term and a 46 percent drop from their peak price – far from the 400 percent Trump claimed.

Trump also recently said petrol prices are at $1.98 per gallon ($0.52 per litre) in some states. He doubled down on that again on Wednesday. That is untrue. There is not a single state that has those petrol prices.

According to Gasbuddy, a platform that helps consumers find the lowest prices on petrol, Mississippi at $2.70 a gallon ($0.71 per litre) has the cheapest gas, and the cheapest petrol station in that state is currently selling gas at $2.37 ($0.62 per litre).

AAA, which tracks the average petrol price, has it at $3.15 per gallon ($0.83 per litre) nationwide, this is up from the end of January when it was $3.11 ($0.82 per litre).

While petrol prices have gone down since Trump took office, they are nowhere close to the rate he has continually suggested. In July 2024, for instance, the average price for a gallon of petrol nationwide was $3.50 ($0.93 per litre).

GDP

On Wednesday, the White House said that “President Trump has reduced America’s reliance on foreign products, boosted investment in the US”, citing the positive GDP data that had come out that morning.

That is misleading. While the US economy grew at a 3 percent annualised rate in the second quarter, surpassing expectations, that was a combination of a rebound after a weak first quarter, a drop in imports – which boosted GDP, and a modest rise in consumer spending.

The data beneath the headline showed that private sector investment fell sharply by 15.6 percent and inventories of goods and services declined by 3.2 percent, indicating a slowdown.

Manufacturing

The administration recently highlighted gains in industrial production, pointing to a boost in domestic manufacturing. Overall, there was a 0.3 percent increase in US industrial production in June. That was after stagnating for two months.

There have been isolated gains, such as increases in aerospace and petroleum-related sectors—1.6 percent and 2.9 percent, respectively.

But production of durable goods — items that are not necessarily for immediate consumption— remained flat, and auto manufacturing fell by 2.6 percent last month as tariffs dampened demand. Mining output also decreased by 0.3 percent.

According to the Department of Commerce’s gross domestic product report, manufacturing growth among non-durable goods has slowed. While there was a 1.3 percent increase, that’s a decline from 2.3 percent in the previous quarter.

This could change in the future, as several companies across a range of sectors have pledged to increase US production, including carmaker Hyundai and pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, which just pledged a $50bn investment over the next five years.

Trade deals and tariffs

In April, the White House replaced country-specific tariffs with a 10-percent blanket tariff while maintaining additional levies on steel, cars, and some other items. It then promised to deliver “90 trade deals in 90 days.” That benchmark was not met. By the deadline, only one loosely fleshed out deal — with the United Kingdom — had been announced. As of 113 days later, the US has announced comparable deals with just a handful more countries and the European Union. The EU deal still needs parliamentary approval.

Contrary to the administration’s claims, tariffs do not pressure foreign exporters — they are paid by US importers and ultimately are likely to be passed on to US consumers. Companies, including big box retailer Walmart and toymaker Mattel, have announced price hikes as a direct result. Ford, for example, raised prices on three Mexico-assembled models due to tariff pressures.

To protect their own economies, many countries have pivoted their trade policies away from the US. Brazil and Mexico recently announced a new trade pact.

The White House and its allies continue to defend tariffs by highlighting the increased revenue they bring to the federal government, which is true. Since Trump took office, the US has brought in more than $100bn in revenue, compared with $77bn in the entire fiscal year 2024. The price of imports for consumers has only risen about 3 percent, but many expect that will change as the import taxes are passed on to consumers.

The White House did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.