And Grammy Award-winning neo-soul artist D’Angelo has died.
Happy Wednesday and welcome to your morning wrap of the latest political headlines from around the world.
First up, the US-brokered ceasefire between Israel and the militant group Hamas has been tested overnight. At least five Palestinians had been killed in an Israeli attack in Gaza City, Al Jazeera reported.
Sources from al-Ahli Arab Hospital told the news outlet that Israeli soldiers killed five people in the Shujayea neighbourhood. The Israeli military said it opened fire to remove a threat posed by people who approached its forces.
The soldiers fired against “suspects” who were “crossing the yellow line” – the line to which Israel’s military pulled back under the ceasefire deal – and were approaching the soldiers, it said.
Meanwhile, Reuters reported that Israel had delayed aid into the Palestinian enclave and kept its border shut, while re-emergent Hamas fighters demonstrated their grip by executing men in the street.
Three Israeli officials said Israel was restricting aid because Hamas had been slow to turn over the bodies of dead hostages, but the militant group said locating the bodies was difficult.
The partial withdrawal of Israeli forces earlier in the week has seen Hamas swiftly reclaim the streets, with a video that has circulated on social media showing Hamas fighters dragging seven men with their hands tied behind their backs into a Gaza City square, forcing them onto their knees and shooting them from behind. A Hamas source confirmed the video was filmed on Monday (local time).
Israel Defence Force. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)
In other news, the International Monetary Fund said the global economy had shown “unexpected resilience” in the face of Donald Trump’s tariffs, but the full impact was yet to be felt, and the outlook for growth remained “dim”, The Guardian reported.
The IMF upgraded its forecast for global GDP growth this year to 3.2% from 3% at its July update. Next year’s forecast is unchanged at 3.1%.
“To date, more protectionist trade measures have had a limited impact on economic activity and prices,” the IMF said in its latest World Economic Outlook.
The report raised a series of concerns, such as the risk to US growth from its immigration crackdown; “stretched valuations” in equity markets; and the fact that the full effect of tariffs was only now starting to show.
In business news, Google’s parent company Alphabet will invest US$15 billion to build an AI data centre hub in southern India, the BBC reported. The facility, which will be set up in the southern Andhra Pradesh state, will be part of Google’s global network of AI centres spread across 12 countries.
"It's the largest AI hub that we are going to be investing in anywhere in the world, outside of the United States," Google Cloud chief executive Thomas Kurian said at an event in Delhi.
India has emerged as a key destination for AI data centres, due to its low data costs and rapidly growing internet user base. Google’s shares were up 1.1% today.
Data centre.
To the United States, where Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said a sharp slowdown in hiring posed a growing risk to the world’s largest economy, Associated Press reported.
He said in written remarks that despite the federal government shutdown cutting off official economic data, “the outlook for employment and inflation does not appear to have changed much since our September meeting,” when the Fed reduced its benchmark rate for the first time this year.
Powell also reiterated previous messages about how the Fed was more concerned with the job market than its other requirement, which is to keep prices stable.
His written remarks were released ahead of a speech he was giving to the National Association of Business Economics in Philadelphia today.
Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell.
Staying with the US, the Department of Justice has seized $15b worth of Bitcoin held by a man who oversaw a massive “pig butchering” fraud operation in Cambodia, CNBC reported. It is the largest forfeiture action by the DoJ in its history.
An indictment charging the alleged pig butcher, Chen Zhi, was unsealed overnight, revealing the charges. Zhi, who is also known as “Vincent” remains at large.
He was identified as the founder and chair of Prince Holding Group, a multinational business based in Cambodia, which prosecutors said grew “in secret … into one of Asia’s largest transnational criminal organisations”.
Prince Group’s investment scams were said to have caused billions of dollars in losses and “untold misery” to victims around the world, which included forced-labour scam compounds across Cambodia. Individuals were held against their will and forced to engage in cryptocurrency fraud schemes, known as “pig butchering”, that stole billions of dollars from victims.
These scams work by someone receiving an unsolicited message on social media from a scammer who is looking to establish some sort of relationship with their target. As the “pig butchering” name suggests, the scammer looks to fatten their target over time by building trust before eventually asking them for money.
Finally, this morning, R&B award-winning singer D’Angelo has died aged 51 after a battle with cancer, the BBC reported. His family said the singer was leaving behind a “legacy of extraordinarily moving music” and asked fans to celebrate “the gift of song that he has left for the world”.
The influential singer was known for his pioneering neo-soul, a genre blending R&B with other types of music, including hip-hop and jazz.
His three albums – Brown Sugar, Voodoo and Black Messiah – earned him four Grammy Awards.
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