Author: Scott Davidson

The United States has refrozen Korea’s payment for Iran’s crude oil exports that South Korea transferred to a Qatari bank as part of a prisoner swap deal between the United States and Iran. On Oct. 12 (local time), the U.S. government said that Iran will not be able to get its hands on US$6 billion transferred to the Qatari bank as part of a prisoner swap deal between Washington and Teheran in September, according to foreign media outlets. U.S. Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo met with Democratic members of Congress and told them that the U.S. and Qatari governments reached an…

Fifty young climate tech innovators and leaders from 19 African countries have arrived in Ghana for a three-week intensive leadership and professional development training program sponsored by the U.S. Government. Announced during Vice President Harris’s historic visit to Ghana in March 2023, the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) Regional Leadership Center West Africa will host the program, which will challenge young leaders and entrepreneurs to develop social and business solutions to address today’s climate challenges using innovative technology. “African leadership is critical to confronting our time’s defining challenge of climate change,” said U.S. Ambassador to Ghana Virginia Palmer at the…

Huawei is hoping to increase its smartphone shipments up to 70 million units by 2024, two industry insiders have revealed to Nikkei. According to the report, Huawei has also requested that its only US 4G chip supplier, Qualcomm, speed up its full year shipment of hardware months earlier fearing further US export controls. Since the introduction of the US Science and CHIPs Act in 2022, Huawei’s presence abroad has been under tighter constraints. Just this August the Biden administration introduced a blanket ban on all US investment towards Chinese companies that manufactured or designed what it described as “sensitive technologies”…

rime Minister Anthony Albanese will soon head to Washington DC for his first bilateral visit. He’ll arrive into a feverish political climate ahead of next year’s presidential election. As that approaches, Australia and other democracies that consider themselves friends to the United States must forgo the timid approach of refusing to comment on other countries’ political campaigns. While the reticence is well founded and based on principles of sovereignty and avoiding foreign interference, it is not in Australia’s interests to persist with an inflexible view that US elections are a matter only for Americans. Decisions made in Washington affect the…

Toronto, Atlanta (24/10 – 10) Not too long ago, “Halloween”, a contraction of the Christian holiday known as “All Hallows’ Eve,” was a time to honors dead saints. Take a look at the multi-billion-dollar enterprise, celebrated on October 31st every year, which it has evolved into, at least in North America, and you’ll find no sainted creatures – but a plethora of devils and the dead. Not to mention the Undead (imagine Yoko Ono) which have leaked out of the hundreds upon hundreds of horror movies, many of them truly horrible horrors, since brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière invented the…

Israel and Saudi Arabia are moving towards the outline of a historic US-brokered deal to normalize relations after decades of hostility, the White House said on Friday. President Joe Biden is hoping to transform the Middle East — and score an election-year diplomatic victory — by securing recognition of the Jewish state by Saudi Arabia, the guardian of Islam’s two holiest sites. “All sides have hammered out, I think, a basic framework for what, you know, what we might be able to drive at,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters. “But, as in any complex arrangement, as this…

Paris, Frankfurt (13/10 – 42) Twenty-First Century technology has a way of speeding everything up – often overdriving events beyond human control. Exhibit “A”: the internet. Hamas and its supporters were undoubtedly aware of the multiplication impact of social media when they mounted their recent murderous attack on a “peace party” along the Israeli border (twist the irony dial); Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, intent on a blanket reprisal on the Palestinians, apparently does not care what the internet thinks, says or reports. It is perplexing to the simple-minded when there are no “good guys” in a fight. Note how the…

Mexican and US authorities held a high-level security dialogue on Thursday aimed at improving border security which focused on the flow of migrants and fentanyl trafficking. Meeting in Mexico City, Mexican Security Secretary Rosa Icela Rodríguez and Foreign Minister Alicia Barcena welcomed the US delegation headed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Homeland Security Advisor Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall. Witnessing a record number of migrant crossings and an inability to discourage migration flows through Mexico to the US, the bilateral commission pointed to the need to renew commitments to stop the influx…

The European Union and Aga Khan Foundation Partner for Rural Development in Tajikistan High in the mountains of Central Asia, villagers can only dream of easy access to water for drinking and irrigation, as the river waters glisten in the snaking valleys below. That dream is about to become a reality as the European Union and the private, not-for-profit Aga Khan Foundation team together to promote agricultural development and improve access to clean and safe drinking water in Tajikistan’s Zarafshonvalley, a region characterized by mountain ranges with peaks reaching 4,000 – 5,000 meters high. The EU and Aga Khan Foundation…

New York City is known for being notoriously pricey. And now, the state overall ranks as the most expensive place to retire in the U.S., according to recent Bankrate data. To determine each state’s affordability, Bankrate reviewed several public and private datasets, including property and sales tax rates from the Tax Foundation and cost of living data from the Council for Community and Economic Research. New York moved up to the top spot from ninth place on last year’s list of the most expensive states to retire. This may be explained by the rising housing costs in NYC, where the majority of the…