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Arabian Post
17 hours ago
- Arabian Post
GWM Brazil Plant Officially Opens with President Lula in Attendance
Iracemápolis, São Paulo – Media OutReach Newswire – 16 August 2025 – In the early hours of August 16 (Beijing time), GWM's Brazil plant officially commenced operations, marked by a grand ceremony for the rollout of its first vehicle, the HAVAL H6 GT. The plant, located in Iracemápolis, São Paulo, was acquired from Daimler Group and has since been upgraded into an intelligent manufacturing base. As GWM's third full-process vehicle manufacturing center overseas, it carries the core mission of serving the Latin American market and acts as a key hub linking Europe, Asia, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. This milestone not only advances GWM's globalization in Latin America but also sets an example of China's high-quality automotive expansion, showcasing innovative collaboration between the Chinese and Brazilian auto industries. GWM Brazil Plant officially begins production with the first HAVAL H6 GT rolling off the line At the opening ceremony, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, Chinese Ambassador Zhu Qingqiao, Brazil's Minister of Labor, and other dignitaries joined GWM President Mu Feng, GWM International President Parker Shi, GWM Brazil Region President Zhang Gengshen, and other GWM executives to witness this landmark moment in the company's globalization journey. President Lula personally signed the hood of the first HAVAL H6 GT, marking its final production step before entering the market. After the ceremony, he also posed for photos with factory workers. ADVERTISEMENT In his welcome address, GWM President Mu Feng stated: 'The Brazil plant is not only a strong commitment to the Brazilian market, but also the starting point for building the future together with our Latin American partners. In our global expansion, we adhere to the 'Four New Modernizations': Locally Built, Locally Operated, Globally Cultivated, Supply Chain Integrated. Following international quality standards, we will deliver highly reliable vehicles to the Latin American market.' He further announced that the plant's annual production capacity will gradually increase from 20,000 to 50,000 vehicles, creating over 1,000 direct jobs. Initial models include the HAVAL H9, POER P30, and HAVAL H6, with the H9 and POER P30 scheduled to launch in Brazil this September. Chinese Ambassador Zhu Qingqiao emphasized that since the establishment of diplomatic ties 51 years ago, China and Brazil's comprehensive strategic partnership has continued to deepen, with key areas of cooperation including renewable energy, infrastructure, and manufacturing. He described the Brazil plant as a model of Sino-Brazilian industrial synergy, combining 'Chinese smart manufacturing + Brazilian localization.' He noted that GWM is contributing to economic development and quality job creation in São Paulo and Brazil, and expressed hope for further collaboration in clean energy and digital technology to provide a 'China-Brazil solution' for global climate governance. In his speech, President Lula stressed: 'The GWM Brazil plant is very important for Brazil's national industry. Its inauguration shows that Brazil has the capability to acquire advanced technology and produce vehicles that can compete with those from any country in the world. This means creating jobs, increasing income, and enhancing professional expertise for Brazilians. We hope GWM will make Brazil its production base in Latin America. The Brazilian government stands ready to support businesses and welcomes more Chinese companies to invest here.' Brazilian Vice President Alckmin, the Minister of Labor, and the Mayor of Iracemápolis also gave speeches, jointly opening a new chapter for GWM in Latin America. Guests at the ceremony praised GWM's rapid growth and contributions to Brazil's automotive market and expressed confidence in the company's ability to further drive innovation and transformation in the industry. During the event, the Great Place to Work Institute awarded GWM Brazil the 'Great Place To Work' (GPTW) honor. In addition, GWM announced a donation of 500,000 reais to local schools in Iracemápolis to help improve educational facilities. Located in Iracemápolis, São Paulo, the GWM Brazil plant covers a total area of 1.2 million square meters, with 94,000 square meters of built-up area. It houses welding workshops, robotic painting lines, assembly lines, energy and equipment facilities, and logistics supply systems. With an initial annual production capacity of 50,000 vehicles, the plant is expected to create 1,000 jobs by the end of this year. Initial models will include the HAVAL H9, POER P30, and the HAVAL H6 series. The plant also supports flexible production of multiple energy types, including hybrid (HEV), plug-in hybrid (PHEV), and diesel. ADVERTISEMENT Since entering the Brazilian market in 2021, GWM has reached annual sales of 29,000 units within just three years, ranking 14th in the market. In the first half of this year, GWM sold over 15,700 vehicles in Brazil, up 19.8% year-on-year—17 percentage points above the industry average—demonstrating the company's confidence and determination to expand overseas and compete globally. Rooted in Brazil, expanding across Latin America, and reaching the world, GWM will continue to invest in Brazil, focusing on quality jobs, technological leadership, and R&D. The opening of the Brazil plant marks a new chapter in Chinese automotive globalization. With this plant, GWM will strengthen localized smart manufacturing, deepen its presence in Latin America, and bring its products and services to more global markets. Hashtag: #GWM The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.
Middle East Eye
19 hours ago
- Middle East Eye
Israel is the last vestige of European colonialism - so Trump defends it at all costs
At a July rally in Des Moines, Iowa, Donald Trump used a telling turn of phrase. While touting the benefits of his recently passed tax-and-spend bill, the American president remarked: 'No death tax, no estate tax, no going to the banks and borrowing from, in some cases, a fine banker - and in some cases, Shylocks and bad people.' 'Shylock' is, of course, a reference to the Jewish moneylender in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and is widely recognised as an antisemitic trope. The Anti-Defamation League, for example, called the president out for his comment, while Trump, for his part, later claimed ignorance of the term's anti-Jewish connotations. It might be possible to write this off as an isolated comment, but Trump's gaffe is part of a larger pattern of antisemitism linked to his Make America Great Again (Maga) movement. In May, NPR identified three administration officials with close ties to antisemitic extremists, including a man described by federal prosecutors as a 'Nazi sympathiser' and a prominent Holocaust denier. More recently, Trump's erstwhile ally Elon Musk has come under fire for antisemitism once again when his Grok AI bot launched into antisemitic tirades praising Adolf Hitler. All of this contrasts sharply with the Trump administration's stated goal of combating antisemitism and its unapologetically pro-Israel posture. On 29 January 2025, Trump signed an executive order titled 'Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism', providing a pretext for his administration to pursue deportations of pro-Palestine student activists like Mahmoud Khalil. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters One month before his gaffe in Des Moines, Trump followed the Israeli military's lead by bombing Iran and pulling out of negotiations over their nuclear programme. Even Musk felt obliged to make pro-Israel gestures when he toured the sites of the 7 October Hamas attack in a highly publicised visit in November 2023. Odd alliance How do we explain this alliance between the seemingly antisemitic Maga movement and Israel? Analysts usually point to two major factors. First is the power and influence of pro-Israel lobbying groups, donors, media figures and political operatives, famously analysed by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Second is the role of Christian Zionists in the Maga movement, including prominent figures like the current American ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. Huckabee has explicitly stated that his pro-Israel approach is rooted in his belief that the rapture is imminent and that Israel will be the site of unfolding Biblical prophecy during the end of days. While these factors both play an important role in shaping the Maga-Israel alliance, neither explains the deep intensity of the Trump-era American right's attachment to Israel. The core of the Maga-Israel alliance is not about votes, theology or even security: it is a project of historical amnesia. It seeks to erase the moral and political lessons of decolonisation I believe a more foundational impulse is at work, one tied not only to theology or lobbying power, but to historical memory. This impulse lies at the intersection of multiple programmes currently underway - all intent on rehabilitating colonialism's reputation. These include suppression of teaching and speaking about the colonial past, active justification of colonialism's historical crimes, efforts to undermine recognised international humanitarian law and struggles against active decolonial movements. The Maga-Israel alliance should be understood as part of a broader effort to suppress the memory of colonialism's atrocities and to create a sanitised narrative of colonial history in order to resuscitate colonialism in the present. In the Maga version of modern global history, Israel has come to represent the symbolic last vestige of European colonialism still allowed to flourish, and Palestine stands in for the last unresolved case of anti-colonial resistance. Supporting Israel, then, is not just a normal matter of American foreign policy; it is a proxy battle in culture wars over history, identity and the legitimacy of settler colonialism. The Maga movement has mobilised around a common sense of nostalgia for a past in which white, western, Christian civilisation exercised global dominance. Commentators reflecting on Trump's first term often associated this notion with a desire to re-establish the belief systems of the United States in the 1950s, the dawn of the so-called 'American century'. In his second term, it seems more appropriate to interpret Maga nostalgia as invoking, not the era beginning in the 1950s, but rather the one that began a century earlier at the peak of Euro-American colonialism. Colonial land grab As a recent article in the Monthly Review pointed out, it was no accident that - after opining about the possibility of adding Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal as new American territories - Trump hung a portrait of James K Polk in the Oval Office. Polk served as president from 1845-49 and oversaw the largest territorial expropriation of land in US history after the Mexican War. In the Maga worldview, the era of Anglo-American power ushered in by colonial land grabs at this time brought order, democracy and prosperity in its wake. The post-World War Two era marked a decided turn in the other direction, and the massive movement for decolonisation in the 1950s and 60s upended the worldview of Polk and others like him. The United Nations (UN) Charter was drawn up at this time and was based on the principle of sovereign equality among all nations. This implied that unequal relationships of domination and extraction between nations, such as the relationship between coloniser and colonised, should be undone. Israel has distilled western colonial war techniques, but fails to quell resistance Read More » Article 2 prohibited member states from using force to acquire territory and foresaw the resolution of disputes undertaken in a manner that ensures international peace as well as justice. By the 1970s, the number of UN member states had more than quadrupled. The British, French, Russian, German, Dutch and Portuguese empires were dismantled, and their territories returned to governments representing the indigenous inhabitants from the pre-war era. Because of the United States' unique role in creating and sustaining the post-World War Two order, Maga supporters imagine their country can sidestep critiques of the decolonisation movement. I have written elsewhere about how the circumstances of the battle between colonial powers on the one hand and the Nazi regime on the other have allowed for a kind of global amnesia to take place with regard to the legacy of racism in creating the world we inhabit today. The Maga narrative is just one particularly virulent example of this broader western cultural tendency. Middle America is obsessed with World War Two, as we can see in popular culture like the History Channel. A survey conducted in 2016 found that fully 70 percent of military history programming on the network dealt with the single conflict of World War Two. The Maga movement plays on this popular fixation on "the good war" to whitewash American history and deny any link between nationalistic pride in their own country and the kind of antisemitism associated with the Nazi movement it fought against. Israel's role The importance of Israel's role in this story is in inverse proportion to its small territorial size. The creation of a state for the Jewish people in the wake of the Holocaust has allowed Maga republicans - along with the broader western world - to imagine that history's most uniquely horrific crime has been answered for in the American-led postwar order. This narrative element produces a double effect for those who retell it. On one hand, the creation of a Jewish state in the wake of the Holocaust allows western powers to imagine themselves as just and righteous, even as many of those same powers had collaborated in or turned a blind eye to its unfolding. The foundation of the state of Israel is a form of symbolic restitution, allowing western culture to wash its hands of the stain of antisemitism and to imagine that they have made amends to the aggrieved Jewish people. On the other hand, excessive focus on the Holocaust as a singular crime in need of restitution deflects attention from the many other atrocities committed on a similar scale by western colonial empires. Palestine is not just a contested land; it is the last mirror in which the West might see the truth of its colonial past For example, scholars estimate that upwards of 10 million people were killed due to King Leopold's forced labour regime in the Congo Free State, while the Bengal famine caused by official policy led to the deaths of 3 million people in British India. In the US, scholars have called the loss of life associated with American colonisation an 'Indigenous Holocaust', estimating the number of Native American deaths from 1492 onwards at 4.5 million. Making amends for these crimes and others like them would require political and social reorganisation on a world scale. Instead of coming face-to-face with this global reckoning, western culture has chosen to hyperfixate on one specific case in a small bit of territory on the Levantine coast. Israel as we know it today took shape in the context of the Mandate for Palestine, founded in the wake of the First World War (1914-18), when Britain and France split up the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire among themselves. But while the rest of the Mandates were eventually returned to governments representing the indigenous inhabitants of the territory from the pre-war era, in Palestine, Jewish settlers from Europe - who had created a new political identity of their own based on historical-religious claims - were recognised as sovereign. Today, Palestine is the only colony founded in the late imperial period that has never undergone a decolonisation process. Algeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa were all sites of European settlement and indigenous dispossession from 1850 to 1950, and all eventually experienced some version of decolonisation. This is why efforts to acknowledge Israel as a settler-colonial state have stirred such controversy; to do so would be to say that Israel is out of step with the moral arc of the modern world in which colonialism is understood as a crime rather than a civilising mission. For Maga ideologues and their global counterparts, it is precisely Israel's status as the last bastion of 19th-century-style colonialism today that makes flocking to its defence attractive. In their eyes, the revisionist Zionism of Netanyahu and his ilk is a shining example of what the West 'should have' done: established a firm grip, refused to apologise and dealt harshly with native resistance. The Maga movement celebrates Israel, not in spite of its colonial character, but because of it. In their eyes, Israel is the living rebuttal to decolonisation, multiculturalism and the whole post-1945 liberal international order they are in the process of dismantling. In this sense, the Maga-Israel alliance should be understood alongside efforts to suppress teaching critical race theory and suppress what Trump calls the 'woke agenda'. It is an effort to turn back the clock to an earlier era and put the genie of progressive decolonisation back in its bottle. Maga nostalgia Maga nostalgia for the 19th-century heyday of colonialism is not an isolated phenomenon. One need only look to Vladimir Putin's Russia, which has launched a war of territorial conquest in Ukraine in an effort to undo Soviet efforts acknowledging Ukrainian nationality a century ago. Similarly, Trump's ally Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has praised the American colonial cavalry and denied the existence of an ongoing genocide against indigenous groups in the Amazon. When US Secretary of State Marco Rubio opined in a January 2025 interview that 'eventually [the world is] going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet', he was talking about returning to an era of imperial competition not unlike the one that culminated in two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century. Israel and Trump: From euphoria to anxiety Read More » It is no accident that Rubio's comment echoes similar statements made by the anti-liberal Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, whose book Multipolarity: The Era of Great Transition has influenced radical circles on the right and the left. The core of the Maga-Israel alliance is not about votes, theology or even security: it is a project of historical amnesia. It seeks to erase the moral and political lessons of decolonisation and to re-legitimise the colonial worldview. It allows the Holocaust to be remembered in isolation, while any acknowledgement of the millions killed in colonial atrocities around the world is suppressed. Palestine is not just a contested land; it is the last mirror in which the West might see the truth of its colonial past. And so, the mirror must be shattered. Palestinians and those who sympathise with them must be silenced, not because they are wrong, but because they remember. And in remembering, they threaten to unmake the myths upon which the American empire depends. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Arabian Post
a day ago
- Arabian Post
US Government Eyes Stake in Intel Amid Chip Manufacturing Push
The U. S. government is reportedly negotiating a potential stake in semiconductor giant Intel, as part of efforts to bolster the nation's chip manufacturing capabilities. According to sources familiar with the matter, the deal could be a significant move in Washington's ongoing strategy to strengthen domestic manufacturing of critical technologies, particularly semiconductors. Intel has been facing mounting challenges in the competitive semiconductor industry, with delays in its manufacturing projects, including the much-anticipated Ohio chip factory. The U. S. government's interest in taking an equity stake in the company signals a broader push to reduce dependency on foreign chip production, especially from Asia, and ensure the security of critical supply chains. This move is seen as part of a strategic initiative to revitalise America's technological leadership and secure its position in global markets. Intel's Ohio facility, which is poised to become one of the largest semiconductor manufacturing plants in the world, has faced delays partly due to supply chain disruptions and increasing construction costs. The involvement of the U. S. government could provide much-needed capital and oversight, accelerating the development of the plant and helping Intel compete more effectively with rival manufacturers, particularly Taiwan's TSMC and South Korea's Samsung, who have been expanding their presence in the U. S. market. ADVERTISEMENT The discussions come on the heels of significant policy shifts, such as the CHIPS Act, passed by Congress in 2022, which aims to incentivise semiconductor manufacturing on American soil. The act includes $52 billion in subsidies for semiconductor companies to develop and expand production facilities within the United States. By taking a stake in Intel, the government would not only provide financial support but could also play a role in shaping the company's long-term strategy in an increasingly geopolitical semiconductor landscape. Intel's shift towards increasing domestic production comes at a time when geopolitical tensions and supply chain issues have exposed vulnerabilities in global chip supply chains. These concerns were particularly underscored during the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to widespread shortages and underscored the need for diversified production capabilities. As the U. S. government navigates this complex environment, its stake in Intel could also be seen as an effort to counter China's rising influence in the semiconductor space, which is a growing concern for U. S. policymakers. For Intel, the U. S. government's involvement could provide the company with a much-needed financial cushion to accelerate its plans. With Intel's long-term ambitions to manufacture leading-edge chips in the U. S., this partnership could be a critical factor in its race to catch up with competitors who have already established more advanced production processes. Industry experts suggest that the collaboration between the government and Intel could reshape the dynamics of semiconductor production in the U. S. The push for a self-sufficient chip supply chain could lead to a wave of investment in U. S.-based manufacturing plants, potentially creating thousands of jobs and boosting local economies. The implications for the broader tech sector are also significant, as the development of these high-tech manufacturing plants could drive further innovation and research in the field of semiconductor design and fabrication. However, some analysts caution that while the partnership could provide substantial benefits, it also comes with risks. The involvement of the government in a private company could lead to concerns about political interference in business decisions, especially in an industry as vital to national security as semiconductor manufacturing. Critics argue that the focus should be on creating an environment that encourages private sector growth without overt government involvement. As discussions continue, it remains unclear how much of a stake the U. S. government would take in Intel and the specific terms of the agreement. However, the move is widely seen as part of a broader strategy to revitalise the U. S. semiconductor industry and ensure that it is equipped to meet the growing demand for chips in everything from consumer electronics to military technology.
