US weighs taking stake in Intel: Bloomberg
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The Trump administration is in talks with Intel to have the US government potentially take a stake in the struggling chipmaker, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the plan.Intel's shares surged over 7% in regular trading and then another 2.6% after the bell.The plan stems from a meeting this week between President Donald Trump and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan , according to the report.The meeting came days after Trump publicly demanded the resignation of Tan over his investments in Chinese tech companies, some linked to the Chinese military.Intel declined to comment on the report but said it was deeply committed to supporting President Trump's efforts to strengthen US technology and manufacturing leadership."Discussion about hypothetical deals should be regarded as speculation unless officially announced by the administration," said White House spokesman Kush Desai.The details of the stake and price are still being discussed, according to the report.Any agreement and potential cash infusion will help the years-long efforts to turn around the company's fortunes. Once the undisputed leader in chip manufacturing, Intel has lost its position in recent years.The chipmaker's stock market value has plummeted to $104 billion from $288 billion in 2020.Intel's profit margins - once the envy of the industry - are also at about half their historical highs.Tan has been tasked to undo years of missteps that left Intel struggling to make inroads in the booming AI chip industry dominated by Nvidia, while investment-heavy contract manufacturing ambitions led to heavy losses.Any agreement would likely help Intel build out its planned chip complex in Ohio, Bloomberg reported.Intel's planned $28 billion chip fabrication plants in Ohio have been delayed, with the first unit now slated for completion in 2030 and operations to begin between 2030 and 2031, pushing the timeline back by at least five years.Taking a stake in Intel would mark the latest move by Trump, a Republican, to deepen the government's involvement in the US chip industry, seen as a vital security interest to the country.Earlier this week, Trump made a deal with Nvidia to pay the US government a cut of its sales in exchange for resuming exports of banned AI chips to China.
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First Post
a few seconds ago
- First Post
How the Trump-Putin talks in Alaska could unfold
US President Donald Trump will host Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska for a high-stakes meeting to discuss a possible ceasefire between Moscow and Kyiv, without Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy present. Notably, Zelenskyy has already said he will not accept a deal that involves giving away Ukrainian territory, so what could happen during the meeting? This will be Trump's first face-to-face meeting with Putin in his second term. Reuters/File Photo If you consider the history of Donald Trump's public relationship with Vladimir Putin, you won't be surprised that there's a fair amount of concern in Ukraine and among Ukraine's European allies at what might happen when the two meet in Alaska today for their summit. While it'll be their first face-to-face meeting of Trump's second presidency, the pair has met previously on six occasions and, as we know, spoken fairly frequently over the phone. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD The first face-to-face meeting was at the G20 summit in Hamburg in 2017, just months into Trump's first term. The pair spent two hours of a scheduled 35-minute meeting talking about all things from Syria to North Korea. It was constructive and cordial, they said. Later they talked during a summit dinner in an exchange that was only witnessed by Putin's interpreter, the nature of which was not reported. They enjoyed a brief encounter at that year's Apec conference in Vietnam, sharing a handshake but having no formal discussion. The first face-to-face meeting between Trump and Putin was at the G20 summit in Hamburg in 2017. Reuters/File Photo The following year they met for the now notorious summit in Helsinki, where Putin denied US intelligence reports that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election and Trump said he had no reason to doubt Putin's word. The two spent two hours closeted with only their interpreters present. Trump's high spirits were exhibited by a couple of winks he gave the Russian president during their public exchanges. There was a brief exchange at the G20 summit later that year in Buenos Aires, but this was at the height of the justice department's investigation into election meddling into Russian election interference. It was a subject Trump returned to when they met at the 2019 G20 summit in Osaka, where Trump seemed to grin as he told Putin: 'Don't meddle in the election.' As a result, as Stefan Wolff puts in, 'expectations are low and anxieties are high' in the run-up to the meeting. Wolff, an expert in international security at the University of Birmingham, sees a number of possible pitfalls for Ukraine in the meeting. Trump has billed the summit as 'a feel-out meeting' at which he will get a sense of whether it's possible to agree a ceasefire. But the US president and his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, have reportedly already sketched out scenarios whereby Putin is offered Ukrainian territory in return for a ceasefire. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD The Ukrainian president won't be there, of course. But he has already said that he won't accept a deal which imposes a giveaway of Ukrainian territory (which would, in any case, violate his country's constitution). Wolff believes this would give Putin the opportunity to paint Zelensky as the problem – the man denying the US president his Nobel peace prize. On the other hand is the possibility that Trump will persuade Putin to agree to a three-way with Zelensky but without other European leaders. Wolff believes this brings with it the danger that Putin (who as a longtime Soviet intelligence officer would have plenty of experience at this sort of thing) would be able to manipulate the meeting into the sort of blow-up between Trump and Zelensky we saw in their disastrous meeting at the White House in February. These are clearly all concerns shared by Ukraine's European allies, so much so that they convened an emergency virtual conference on August 13. Zelensky, German chancellor Friedrich Merz and an array of other European leaders warned Trump and his vice-president, J.D. Vance, that Ukrainian and European interests must be protected at the summit. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD The main worry, writes Michelle Bentley, a professor of international relations at Royal Holloway University of London, will be that while Putin's position is clear, Trump's is not. Putin wants a deal that recognises Russian ownership of Crimea and the various provinces in Ukraine's east that his military already occupies, including land it has not managed to take by force. He wants to prevent Ukraine joining Nato and wants the country to demilitarise. Trump, by contrast, wants to do a deal. Partly because he has said he will do one. And partly because there is economic benefit to be had for the US in repairing relations with Russia. Bentley also worries that the US president has a track record of support for the Russian president and the mere fact that the pair are getting together for a summit on equal terms effectively brings to an end the years of Russia's diplomatic isolation in the west. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD There is a possibility that Trump will persuade Putin to agree to a three-way with Zelensky, but without other European leaders. Reuters/File Photo What to expect? What will also be worrying Kyiv and its allies is Trump's singular foreign policy style, which is notably transactional. It may be the US president's background in real estate asserting itself (and it's no coincidence that his envoy to Russia and at times to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Steve Witkoff, is from a similar background). Just recently, Trump hosted the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Oval Office for a meeting at which they signed a deal to end the decades of conflict between their two countries. Integral to the deal is the development of a new corridor through Armenia to link Azerbaijan with its enclave of Nakhchivan. Previously known as the Zangezur corridor, the link will have the name the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity. Trump is by no means the first US president to link commerce or economic incentives with diplomacy, writes Patrick Shea, an expert in international relations and global governance at the University of Glasgow. But Trump's style is somewhat different, he writes. The president's deals often skirt dangerously close to the wind in terms of international law, the recent tariff policies being an example. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Foreign governments, meanwhile, are first learning that such sweeteners can be effective in dealing with this administration. As is flattery. So it's notable that, following Trump's warning to Putin to get serious about doing a deal, the Russian president has been fulsome in his praise of Trump's 'sincere efforts' to bring about peace in Ukraine. Trump has made a big fuss about Putin coming to see him in Alaska, a US state. He sees that as courtesy on the part of the Russian leader. But there are many who think holding the summit in a territory that one belonged to Russia means the whole meeting has a subtext that territorial sovereignty is not absolute and that it does change hands from time to time. Here's a brief history of Alaska from William L. Iggiagruk Hensley of the University of Alaska Anchorage, a former member of the state legislature. Munich Agreement of 1938 A major international summit, where an aggressor is threatening to invade another country with the prospect of a major European war? We've been here before. The summit was at Munich in September 1938, the aggressor was Germany and the country at threat was Czechoslovakia. And like the impending Alaska summit where Ukraine has not been invited, when the British and French leaders visited Adolf Hitler to talk peace, Czechoslovakia was not in the room. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD The example of Munich 1938 doesn't fill one with a great deal of confidence for Ukraine's future security, writes Tim Luckhurst, a historian of the second world war. Luckhurst recounts the events leading up to Munich, at which British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, and his French counterpart, Édouard Daladier, agreed that Germany would be allowed to annex the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia, with no involvement of the Czech leader, Edvard Beneš. It would be 'peace in our time', boasted Chamberlain. It wasn't even peace for a year. What's happening in Israel? To Israel, where this weekend there is likely to be one of the biggest mass protests and general strikes in the country's history on Sunday, August 17. Huge numbers of people are expected to turn out in protest at the Netanyahu government's failure to secure the release of the remaining October 7 hostages and the prime minister's plan to launch a fresh offensive to take and occupy Gaza city despite the risk to the remaining hostages' lives. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Benjamin Netanyahu's position as prime minister is looking far from secure. The next election is due in October 2026, but John Strawson – an expert in Israeli politics at the University of East London – believes a new poll may be held much sooner than that. Netanyahu's parliamentary coalition is becoming more shaky as his ultra-orthodox supporters quit the government in protest at the government's decision to scrap the exemption from conscription enjoyed by orthodox Israeli students. But whether this will bring any relief to Palestinians is doubtful. Recent polling suggests that while there is huge support for an end to the war, this doesn't translate into public backing for a two-state solution. Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate Editor, The Conversation This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Indian Express
a few seconds ago
- Indian Express
In Kyiv, disheartened Ukrainians wary ahead of Trump-Putin summit
As President Donald Trump prepared to meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday, Ukrainians were watching warily, fearful the US leader could sell Kyiv out in his bid for a quick deal with Moscow. The American leader, who has set his sights on securing a truce in Russia's 3-1/2-year-old war in Ukraine, agreed last week to hold the first US-Russian summit since 2021, abruptly ending Western attempts to isolate the Kremlin leader. Polls by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology show Ukrainians overwhelmingly want a negotiated settlement to end the fighting, but would also oppose any truce secured with crushing concessions. Half a dozen Ukrainians interviewed by Reuters on Kyiv's central square said they were not optimistic ahead of the summit. Some said they worried that Kyiv's interests would not be taken into account. 'I don't trust Trump. He says one thing today, another tomorrow. The day after tomorrow – another thing, in five days – something else. Therefore, I have no faith in him,' 47-year-old accountant Anna Sherstniova said. Tetiana Harkavenko, a 65-year-old cleaner, predicted the fighting would rage on after the summit. 'Nothing good will happen there, because war is war, it will not end. The territories – we're not going to give anything to anyone.' Trump has said any deal to end the war will require territorial concessions by both sides, and that he would like to see a follow-up meeting between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Liubomyr Yurtsiv, 26, a technician, said he expected little would change after the meeting. 'Most likely, the outcome won't be positive,' he added. Valerii Kucherenko, a 31-year-old war veteran, had a similarly pessimistic take, speaking to Reuters at the pizzeria he set up in the town of Bila Tserkva outside the capital. Kucherenko lost both his hands to injuries that he sustained while storming a Russian position on the eastern front in 2023. 'I hope for peace on our terms, but we're all adults and understand it's not that simple. Putin and Trump may reach an agreement, but it will not be in our favour. This scenario will not suit us,' he said. 'We are Ukrainians, and we will defend our rights to the very end.'
Hindustan Times
a few seconds ago
- Hindustan Times
China's planned Turkish EV factories have yet to power up
WHEN BYD, China's biggest electric carmaker, offered a $1bn investment in the summer of 2024, Turkey rolled out the red carpet. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country's president, attended the signing ceremony. Officials in Manisa, where the company plans to open a new factory, mused about a future 'Chinatown' to house BYD workers. Yet a year down the line, despite reports the company would accelerate work on the plant at the expense of one in Hungary, things have not progressed much. The factory is supposed to open next year, but there are no signs of construction save for a few containers and the occasional dump truck. Turkey's location and relatively low labour costs make it a big draw for Chinese EV makers. So does its customs-union agreement with the European Union, which allows cars built in Turkey to be exported to the bloc tariff-free. Last year the EU slapped tariffs of up to 35%, on top of an existing 10% duty, on Chinese EVs. Other Chinese auto makers looking to Turkey as a way to avoid the tariffs include Chery, said to be eyeing a $1bn investment. China is also keen to grab a slice of Turkey's booming domestic EV market. High fuel prices and an extortionate consumption tax of up to 220% for conventional vehicles have driven up demand for EVs. Over 100,000 fully electric cars were sold in Turkey in the seven months to July, an increase of 147% on the same period in 2024. Desperate for foreign investment but hoping to stem the tide of cheap Chinese EVs—which threaten its own electric carmaker, TOGG—Turkey has sought to solve both problems in one go. Last year the country raised tariffs on Chinese cars to 50%. But it made BYD and other carmakers who pledge to invest in Turkey exempt. Sales of BYD cars have surged. On paper TOGG, one of Mr Erdogan's flagship projects, has fared well. Since its launch in 2023, it has outsold every other EV brand at home, partly thanks to government support. But competition from foreign EVs and the prospect of 150,000 BYD cars per year from the plant in Manisa could spell trouble. 'They may not survive in such a market,' says Cagdas Ungor of Marmara University. Chinese investments in Turkey amount to only some $5bn, lower than in Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Iraq. Politics is no longer the main obstacle. Turkey has toned down its criticism of China's treatment of its Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic group. The biggest brake is instead Turkey's rule-of-law record. Mr Erdogan and his inner circle enjoy nearly unchecked power. 'Regulations and tariff decisions are made overnight without any consultations with the key actors,' says Ceren Ergenc of the Centre for European Policy Studies, a Brussels think-tank. 'China perceives that as a high risk.' China's EV operations in Turkey have not escaped scrutiny by EU bureaucrats. Earlier this year the European Commission warned that it would go after countries and companies that engage in tariff circumvention. EU anti-dumping rules mean that cars made in Turkey could face punitive tariffs if imported parts account for 60% or more of their value, unless assembly adds over 25% to manufacturing costs. To have unfettered access to the EU market, companies like BYD will need to source at least some parts from Turkey. Fear of pushback from the EU may explain why work in Manisa has slowed. Firms like BYD are hedging their bets, says Ms Ergenc, and waiting for the EU and China to settle their EV tariff dispute. Local officials and other analysts say BYD will finish the factory, though perhaps not on time. Turkey may be a convenient backdoor to the EU, but the Chinese have not yet prised it open. To stay on top of the biggest European stories, sign up to Café Europa, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
