Latest news with #Ir
Mint
3 days ago
- Automotive
- Mint
The Elon Musk you did not know: From Tony Stark connection to launching a perfume
The world's richest man, Elon Musk, is well known as the owner of Tesla, the electric car maker, and SpaceX, his private space company. He also took over the social media platform Twitter, renaming it X. Until recently, Musk worked within the US government as head of the Department of Government Efficiency - known as DOGE - which was part of Donald Trump's dispensation. After nearly 130 days in the role, Musk announced his departure from the department. His time there and his close ties with Trump kept him in the headlines more than ever. But there are many lesser-known facts about the billionaire entrepreneur, according to a report by Sky news. At just 12 years old in the early 1980s, Musk created a video game called Blastar. Using coding skills he had learned from the age of nine, Musk designed a game where players used their keyboard to shoot alien spaceships. By 1984, the game was sold to PC and Office Technology magazine for $500 (£371) and appeared in their December issue. Read | Elon Musk 'willingly accepted outrageous abuse because…': Donald Trump bids DOGE head farewell | Top 10 points Musk's talent for business showed early. In 1995, at 24, he and his brother Kimbal started their first company, Zip2, which developed online city guides for newspapers. The business began with just $28,000 (£20,000) but was sold for nearly $300 million (£222 million) in 1999. Before the sale, Musk and his brother were almost broke and slept on their office floor—something Musk later repeated in Tesla's early days. He earned $22 million from the sale and bought a McLaren F1 sports car. He told CNN, 'Just three years ago I was sleeping on the office floor, and now I've got a million-dollar car.' Not all Musk's ventures have been long-lasting. In 2022, he launched a perfume called Burnt Hair, described on The Boring Company's website as 'the essence of repugnant desire.' The scent was priced at $100 (£74) a bottle and sold 10,000 bottles within hours, earning Musk a million dollars. He joked, 'With a name like mine, getting into the fragrance business was inevitable - why did I even fight it for so long!?' The perfume is no longer available on the company's website. Besides perfume, Tesla released tequila in 2020 and Musk even sold limited edition Tesla short shorts as a playful challenge to investors betting against the company. Read | Black spot near Elon Musk's eye raises speculations amid reports of drug use Before Twitter became X, Musk founded an online banking and financial service company. The platform merged in 2000 with Confinity, which was co-founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, and was later renamed PayPal. Musk served as PayPal's CEO but was ousted after disputes over the company's direction. eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion (£1.4 billion). In 2017, eBay sold the domain back to Musk. Read | 'Did Elon Musk get punched?' His bruised eye at Oval Office baffles netizens Musk's life inspired Hollywood. The screenwriter of Iron Man, Mark Fergus, said the character Tony Stark was partly based on Musk, alongside Donald Trump and Apple's Steve Jobs. 'Musk took the brilliance of Jobs with the showmanship of Trump. He was the only one who had the fun factor and the celebrity vibe and actual business substance,' Fergus told New York Magazine. Musk even made a cameo appearance in Iron Man 2 in 2010. Despite popular belief, Musk did not start Tesla. The company was founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Musk was an early investor and became Tesla's fourth CEO in 2008, shortly after the first Tesla Roadster was launched. He is credited with taking Tesla onto the global stage. After buying Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and renaming it X, Musk has been working to create an 'everything app.' He wants X to be like WeChat in China, offering messaging, payments, social media, business services and more. X's chief executive Linda Yaccarino said 2025 would be the year X 'connect [s] you in ways never thought possible,' with features like X TV, X Money, and Grok. In January, Musk announced a partnership with Visa to allow users to move money between traditional banks and an X digital wallet, making payments to friends easier.
4 days ago
- Politics
State Department notifies Congress of reorganization plan with bigger cuts to programs and staff
WASHINGTON -- The State Department on Thursday notified Congress of an updated reorganization of the massive agency, proposing cuts to programs beyond what had previously been revealed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and a steeper 18% reduction of staff in the U.S. The planned changes, detailed in a notification letter obtained by The Associated Press, reflect the Trump administration's push to reshape American diplomacy and scale back the size of the federal government. The proposal includes an even higher reduction of domestic staff than the 15% initially floated in April. The department also is planning to eliminate some divisions tasked with oversight of America's two-decade involvement in Afghanistan, including an office focused on resettling Afghan nationals who worked alongside the U.S. military. The letter sent to Congress by the State Department notes that the reorganization will affect more than 300 bureaus and offices 'to refocus on core U.S. foreign policy objectives and the needs of contemporary diplomacy.' The department says it's eliminating offices it describes as doing unclear or overlapping work and that Rubio 'believes that effective modern diplomacy requires streamlining this bloated bureaucracy.' The document is clear that the reorganization also is intended to eliminate programs, particularly those related to refugees and immigration as well as human rights and democracy promotion, that the Trump administration believes have become ideologically driven in a way that is incompatible with its priorities and policies. It says, without evidence, that such offices 'have proven themselves prone to ideological capture and radicalism.' Some of the bureaus set to be cut include the Office of Global Women's Issues and the State Department's diversity and inclusion efforts, which have been eliminated government-wide under Trump. The letter says the women's issues office is being eliminated to 'ensure that promoting women's rights and empowerment is a priority across the full scope of the Department's diplomatic engagement.' Efforts to cut the department's Afghan programs received immediate backlash from veterans groups and advocates who have spent the last three and a half years since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan working to resettle and integrate Afghans into life in the U.S. 'This is not streamlining,' said Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran and head of #AfghanEvac. 'This is deliberate dismantling.' CARE, which stands for the Coordinator for Afghan Relocation Efforts, was created in October 2021 in the aftermath of the withdrawal. The office was designed to help Afghans, like interpreters who aided the U.S. military, who were eligible for resettlement in the U.S. due to their work helping America during the war. The State Department notification says its work will be 'realigned' to the Afghanistan Affairs Office. Over time, CARE was credited with streamlining visa and immigration processes that many people helping Afghans and Iraqis, who benefited from similar resettlement programs, said were overly bureaucratic, opaque and left at-risk Afghans waiting for far too long on programs specifically intended to help them. In December, then-President Joe Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which included a provision authorizing the CARE office for three years, but ever since President Donald Trump took office, concerns have loomed over the office's future. 'Eliminating it — without public explanation, transition planning, or reaffirmation of mission — is a profound betrayal of American values and promises,' VanDiver added.
New York Post
5 days ago
- Politics
- New York Post
Explosive new intelligence report reveals Iran's nuclear weapons program still active
A new intelligence report claims Iran is continuing with its active nuclear weapons program, which it says can be used to launch missiles over long distances. The startling intelligence gathering of Austrian officials contradicts the assessment of the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told a Senate Intelligence Committee in March that the American intelligence community 'continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.' Austria's version of the FBI — the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution — wrote Monday in an intelligence report, 'In order to assert and enforce its regional political power ambitions, the Islamic Republic of Iran is striving for comprehensive rearmament, with nuclear weapons to make the regime immune to attack and to expand and consolidate its dominance in the Middle East and beyond.' The Austrian domestic intelligence agency report added, 'The Iranian nuclear weapons development program is well advanced, and Iran possesses a growing arsenal of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads over long distances.' According to an intelligence document obtained and reviewed by Fox News Digital, 'Iran has developed sophisticated sanctions-evasion networks, which has benefited Russia.' The Austrian intelligence findings could be an unwanted wrench in President Trump's negotiation process to resolve the atomic crisis with Iran's rulers because the data outlined in the report suggests the regime will not abandon its drive to secure a nuclear weapon. 4 Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei attends a meeting with teachers, in Tehran, Iran, Saturday, May 17, 2025. AP In response to the Austrian intelligence, a White House official told Fox News Digital, 'President Trump is committed to Iran never obtaining a nuclear weapon or the capacity to build one.' The danger of the Islamic Republic of Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism (and its illegal atomic weapons program) was cited 99 times in the 211-page report that covers pressing threats to Austria's democracy. 'Vienna is home to one of the largest embassies of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Europe, which disguises intelligence officers with diplomatic,' the Austrian intelligence report noted. 4 A view of the Bushehr nuclear power plant is seen from the Persian Gulf in the south of Iran, on April 29, 2024. NurPhoto via Getty Images 'Iranian intelligence services are familiar with developing and implementing circumvention strategies for the procurement of military equipment, proliferation-sensitive technologies, and materials for weapons of mass destruction,' the Austrian intelligence agency said. In 2021, a Belgium court convicted Asadollah Asadi, a former Iranian diplomat based in Vienna, for planning to blow up a 2018 opposition meeting of tens of thousands of Iranian dissidents held outside Paris. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who served as President Trump's personal lawyer at the time, attended the event in France. When asked about the differences in conclusions between the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Austrian intelligence report, David Albright, a physicist and founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, D.C., told Fox News Digital, 'The ODNI report is stuck in the past, a remnant of the fallacious unclassified 2007 NIE [National Intelligence Estimate]. 4 Tulsi Gabbard, director of National Intelligence, arriving for the House Intelligence Committee Annual Worldwide Threats Assessment hearing on Wednesday, March 26, 2025 in Washington, DC. Jack Gruber-USA TODAY via Imagn Images 'The Austrian report in general is similar to German and British assessments. Both governments, by the way, made clear to (the) U.S. IC [intelligence community] in 2007 that they thought the U.S. assessment was wrong that the Iranian nuclear weapons program ended in 2003. 'The German assessment is from BND [Germany's Federal Intelligence Service] station chief in D.C. at that time. The British info is from a senior British non-proliferation official I was having dinner with the day the 2007 NIE was made public. The German said the U.S. was misinterpreting data they all possessed.' The Austrian intelligence findings that Tehran is working on an active atomic weapons program 'seems clear enough,' said Albright. 4 Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei waves during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, May 20, 2025. via REUTERS In 2023, Fox News Digital revealed a fresh batch of European intelligence reports showed that Iran sought to bypass U.S. and EU sanctions to secure technology for its nuclear weapons program with a view toward testing an atomic bomb. European intelligence agencies have documented prior to 2015 and after the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) was agreed upon that Tehran continued efforts to illegally secure technology for its atomic, biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction programs. The Austrian intelligence report noted that Iran provides weapons to the U.S.-designated terrorist movements Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as to Syrian militias. A spokesperson for ODNI declined to comment. The U.S. State Department and U.S. National Security Council did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital press queries.
New Straits Times
20-05-2025
- Business
- New Straits Times
Samaiden lands RM45mil solar project in Kulim
KUALA LUMPUR: Samaiden Group Bhd's unit, Samaiden Sdn Bhd (SSB), has secured a RM45 million contract from PAXS Renewables Sdn Bhd to carry out large-scale solar photovoltaic (LSSPV) works in Kulim, Kedah. In a filing with Bursa Malaysia, the group said the contract involves providing engineering, procurement, construction, and commissioning (EPCC) services for a 9.99 megawatt alternating current (MWac) LSSPV power plant. The scope of work includes the full design, engineering, procurement, construction, testing, and commissioning of the solar facility. "The project is one of the LSSPV projects approved by the Energy Commission in December 2024 pursuant to Large Scale Solar 5 (LSS5) programme," it added. Samaiden said the project will begin immediately following the contract signing on May 19, while on-site work will start once a formal notice to proceed is issued, contingent on the fulfilment of all required contractual conditions. "SSB shall complete all the works to achieve the commercial operation date which shall be on July 12, 2027," it said. Samaiden noted that the project is anticipated to have a positive impact on the group's future earnings over the course of the contract. Group managing director Datuk Ir Chow Pui Hee said the LSS5 contract award reinforces Samaiden's position as a reliable and established solar EPCC provider in Malaysia. "It reinforces our commitment to supporting the government's renewable energy agenda while building long-term value through consistent project execution and sustainable earnings contributions," she added. At midday, Samaiden's share price had climbed 1.82 per cent, gaining 2 sen to reach RM1.12 from its previous closing price of RM1.10, with a total of 149,200 shares changing hands.
Daily Express
04-05-2025
- Climate
- Daily Express
Plans to upgrade Kadazan Mostyn road in the works
Published on: Sunday, May 04, 2025 Published on: Sun, May 04, 2025 By: Ibrahim Tabir Text Size: The gravel Kadazan Mostyn road currently maintained by the Public Works Department (JKR). KUNAK: The plan to upgrade Kadazan Mostyn road from gravel to asphalt is now in the consultant appointment stage for design work. Deputy Chief Minister III and State Minister of Public Works, Datuk Ir Shahelmey Yahya, told Daily Express that construction is expected to begin by mid-2026 under the 13th Malaysia Plan (RMK13). Currently, only about 600 metres of the road is paved from the Simpang Empat roundabout, while the rest remains gravel. The road connects Kampung Mostyn Lama, Kampung Sri Bahagia, SK Mostyn, and the Sabah Electricity Main Intake Substation (PMU) in Kunak. Built in the post-independence era, the Kadazan Mostyn road was once a major route for transporting timber to Kunak port and for the district's abaca industry. Locals urged the government to upgrade the road, which now serves as a key access route to Kunak town and surrounding areas. The gravel road often suffers damage after heavy rain, especially in hilly and winding sections. It is currently maintained periodically by the District Public Works Department (JKR). * Follow us on Instagram and join our Telegram and/or WhatsApp channel(s) for the latest news you don't want to miss. * Do you have access to the Daily Express e-paper and online exclusive news? Check out subscription plans available. Stay up-to-date by following Daily Express's Telegram channel. Daily Express Malaysia
