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Hong Kong conglomerate CK Hutchison is under renewed pressure from Beijing after selling its Panama Canal ports, with Chinese authorities publishing newspaper criticism of the deal for the second time in three days.Last week the business empire of Hong Kong’s richest man, Li Ka-shing, sold most of its ports operations — including those in the …

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The creation of a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” in the United States is further proof of President Donald Trump’s support for the cryptocurrency sector.Trump earlier this month signed an executive order establishing the reserve, which White House crypto chief David Sacks has likened to “a digital Fort Knox”, comparing it to the stockpiling of gold bars …

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The first US strikes against Yemen’s Huthis since President Donald Trump took office in January killed at least 21 people, the rebels said Sunday, as Washington warned Iran to stop backing the group.The Huthis, who have attacked Israel and Red Sea shipping throughout the Gaza war, said children were among those killed by the intense barrage of strikes.An AFP photographer in the rebel-held capital Sanaa heard three explosions and saw plumes of smoke rising from a residential district, and strikes were also reported in Yemen’s northern Saada region, a Huthi stronghold.”Nine civilians were killed and nine others were injured, most of them seriously,” the Huthis’ health and environment ministry said in a statement on their Saba news agency, reporting the strikes on Sanaa.A strike in the Saada region killed at least 10 people and wounded others, according to the Huthi Ansarollah website, condemning what it called “US-British aggression” and Washington’s “criminal brutality”.A separate strike on a house in Saada’s Alshaaf district killed two people, Ansarollah said.The US Central Command (CENTCOM), which posted images of fighters taking off from an aircraft carrier and a bomb demolishing a building compound, said “precision strikes” were launched to “defend American interests, deter enemies, and restore freedom of navigation”.There was no immediate comment from British authorities.Trump, in a post on social media, vowed to “use overwhelming lethal force until we have achieved our objective”, citing the Huthis’ threats against Red Sea shipping.- ‘Escalation with escalation’ -The Huthis vowed that the strikes “will not pass without response”.”Our Yemeni armed forces are fully prepared to confront escalation with escalation,” the rebels’ political bureau said in a statement on the rebel Al-Masirah TV station.Trump also warned Iran that it must “immediately” cut support to the Huthis. The rebels, who have controlled much of Yemen for more than a decade, are part of the “axis of resistance” of pro-Iran groups staunchly opposed to Israel and the United States.They have launched scores of drone and missile attacks at ships passing Yemen in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden during the Gaza war, claiming solidarity with the Palestinians.The campaign crippled the vital route, which normally carries about 12 percent of world shipping traffic, forcing many companies into a costly detour around southern Africa.The Palestinian group Hamas, grateful for the Huthi support, hit out Saturday at the US strikes, branding them “a stark violation of international law and an assault on the country’s sovereignty and stability”.- ‘Hell will rain down’ – The United States has launched several rounds of strikes on Huthi targets, some with British support. After halting their attacks when Gaza’s ceasefire took effect in January, the Huthis announced on Tuesday that they would resume them until Israel lifts its blockade of aid to the shattered Palestinian territory.Trump’s statement did not reference the dispute over Israel, but focused on previous Huthi attacks on merchant shipping.”To all Huthi terrorists, YOUR TIME IS UP, AND YOUR ATTACKS MUST STOP, STARTING TODAY. IF THEY DON’T, HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE!” he said.”Do NOT threaten the American People, their President… or Worldwide shipping lanes. If you do, BEWARE, because America will hold you fully accountable and, we won’t be nice about it!”Earlier this month, the United States reclassified the Huthi movement as a “foreign terrorist organisation”, banning any US interaction with it.”Continued Huthi attacks on US military and commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea will not be tolerated,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, according to the State Department.Moscow is close to Tehran, which supports the Huthis.Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the Huthis had “attacked US warships 174 times and commercial vessels 145 times since 2023”.The Huthis captured Sanaa in 2014 and were poised to overrun most of the rest of the country before a Saudi-led coalition intervened.The war has largely been on hold since a 2022 ceasefire, but the promised peace process has stalled in the face of Huthi attacks on Israel and Israel-linked shipping.burs-pjm/sco

Beneath the broken earth of the besieged Sudanese city of El-Fasher in the western region of Darfur, Nafisa Malik clutches her five children close.As shells rain down, the 45-year-old mother tries to shield them in a cramped hole barely big enough to crouch in.”Time slows down here,” Malik said, from her home near El-Fasher’s Hajer Gadou market.”We sit in the darkness, listening, trying to guess when it’s over,” she told AFP by phone.For almost two years the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Sudan’s army have waged a war that has killed tens of thousands.United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday called it a “crisis of staggering scale and brutality”.El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, is the only major city in Darfur still under army control, making it a strategic prize.The RSF has tried for months to seize it.Malik’s crude shelter, held up by splintered wooden planks and scraps of rusted metal, is one of thousands in the war-battered city, according to residents.The army regained much of the capital Khartoum this year, but the RSF has intensified its attacks on El-Fasher.Desperate for safety from artillery and drone strikes, residents have built makeshift bunkers.Some are hurriedly excavated foxholes, others are more solid and reinforced with sandbags.Mohammed Ibrahim, 54, once believed hiding under beds would be enough, “until houses were hit”.”We lost neighbours,” he said by phone. “The children were terrified.”Determined to protect his family, Ibrahim dug a hole in his yard. He covered it with sacks of soil with only a narrow entrance.- Doctors underground -Despite the RSF’s siege cutting off supply lines, the army and an allied coalition of armed groups known as the Joint Forces still hold most of the city.Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which uses satellite and other data to track the conflict, has identified “clusters of damage”.It details destruction from munitions and fires including near the airport, market and in the city’s east and south.The researchers reported bombardment of “residential structures”, and said its findings are consistent with Sudanese army air strikes as well as RSF artillery and ground attacks.Staff at the Saudi Hospital, one of the last functioning medical facilities in the city, carved out an underground shelter last October.”We use it as an operating room during the strikes, lit only by our phones,” one doctor told AFP, requesting anonymity for his safety.Every explosion sends tremors through the shelter walls, shaking surgical instruments and rattling nerves.El-Fasher was historically the seat of the Darfur sultanate and has long been a centre of power in Darfur.Now, it is all that stands between total RSF control of Darfur, whose gold resources provide the paramilitaries with vital revenue, according to the United States Treasury Department.The African Union warned last week that Sudan risks partition.”The army is well entrenched in El-Fasher, making it exceedingly difficult for the RSF to capture the city,” said Marc Lavergne, a Sudan expert at France’s University of Tours.Crucial to the army’s war effort in El-Fasher is its support from the Zaghawa, a non-Arab ethnic group.The UN says the Zaghawa are among those targeted by RSF and allied Arab militias, exacting “a horrific toll”.- ‘Existential threat’ -Forces from prominent Zaghawa figures, Darfur Governor Minni Minnawi and Finance Minister Gibril Ibrahim, have joined the city’s defence after being neutral at the war’s beginning. “The Zhagawa see the fall of El-Fasher as an existential threat,” said Sudanese political analyst Kholood Khair.”They are concerned that the RSF would commit reprisal attacks against them for breaking their neutrality — if they capture the city,” she told AFP.But as the RSF tightens its grip, the army and its allies face a dilemma: hold the city at immense human cost or risk ceding a stronghold that Khair said could shift the war’s balance.”Holding the city depletes resources,” she said. “But losing it would be catastrophic.”A UN-backed assessment declared famine in three displacement camps around El-Fasher. Famine is expected to spread to five more areas, including El-Fasher itself, by May.Aid is practically nonexistent.Remaining humanitarian agencies have suspended operations as the RSF attempts to break through, attacking camps and villages around El-Fasher.”Bringing goods in has become nearly impossible,” shop owner Ahmed Suleiman said. “Even if you take the risk, you have to pay bribes at checkpoints, which drives up prices.”Leni Kinzli from the World Food Programme warned of dire consequences.”If aid continues to be cut off, the fallout will be catastrophic”, she said.

The first US strikes against Yemen’s Huthis since President Donald Trump took office in January killed at least 20 people, the rebels said Sunday, as Washington warned Iran to stop backing the group.The Huthis, who have attacked Israel and Red Sea shipping throughout the Gaza war, said children were among those killed by the intense barrage of strikes.An AFP photographer in the rebel-held capital Sanaa heard three explosions and saw plumes of smoke rising from a residential district, and strikes were also reported in Yemen’s northern Saada region, a Huthi stronghold.”Nine civilians were killed and nine others were injured, most of them seriously,” the Huthis’ health and environment ministry said in a statement on their Saba news agency, reporting the strikes on Sanaa.A strike in the Saada region killed at least 10 people and wounded others, according to the Huthi Ansarollah website, condemning what it called “US-British aggression” and Washington’s “criminal brutality”.The US Central Command (CENTCOM), which posted images of fighters taking off from an aircraft carrier and a bomb demolishing a building compound, said “precision strikes” were launched to “defend American interests, deter enemies, and restore freedom of navigation”.There was no immediate comment from British authorities.Trump, in a post on social media, vowed to “use overwhelming lethal force until we have achieved our objective”, citing the Huthis’ threats against Red Sea shipping.- ‘Escalation with escalation’ -The Huthis vowed that the strikes “will not pass without response”.”Our Yemeni armed forces are fully prepared to confront escalation with escalation,” the rebels’ political bureau said in a statement on the rebel Al-Masirah TV station.Trump also warned Iran that it must “immediately” cut support to the Huthis. The rebels, who have controlled much of Yemen for more than a decade, are part of the “axis of resistance” of pro-Iran groups staunchly opposed to Israel and the United States.They have launched scores of drone and missile attacks at ships passing Yemen in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden during the Gaza war, claiming solidarity with the Palestinians.The campaign crippled the vital route, which normally carries about 12 percent of world shipping traffic, forcing many companies into a costly detour around southern Africa.The Palestinian group Hamas, grateful for the Huthi support, hit out Saturday at the US strikes, branding them “a stark violation of international law and an assault on the country’s sovereignty and stability”.- ‘Hell will rain down’ – The US has launched several rounds of strikes on Huthi targets, some with British support. After halting their attacks when Gaza’s ceasefire took effect in January, the Huthis announced on Tuesday that they would resume them until Israel lifts its blockade of aid to the shattered Palestinian territory.Trump’s statement did not reference the dispute over Israel, but focused on previous Huthi attacks on merchant shipping.”To all Huthi terrorists, YOUR TIME IS UP, AND YOUR ATTACKS MUST STOP, STARTING TODAY. IF THEY DON’T, HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE!” he said.”Do NOT threaten the American People, their President… or Worldwide shipping lanes. If you do, BEWARE, because America will hold you fully accountable and, we won’t be nice about it!”Earlier this month, the United States reclassified the Huthi movement as a “foreign terrorist organisation”, banning any US interaction with it.Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the Huthis had “attacked US warships 174 times and commercial vessels 145 times since 2023”.The Huthis captured Sanaa in 2014 and were poised to overrun most of the rest of the country before a Saudi-led coalition intervened.The war has largely been on hold since a 2022 ceasefire, but the promised peace process has stalled in the face of the Huthi attacks on Israel and Israel-linked shipping.burs-pjm/fox

Gaza’s civil defence agency said nine people including journalists were killed in Israeli strikes on Saturday, attacks which could further endanger the fragile truce in the Palestinian territory.Following the reported strikes, the deadliest since the ceasefire took hold on January 19, Hamas accused Israel of a “blatant violation” of the truce which largely halted more than 15 months of fighting.The truce’s first phase ended on March 1 without agreement on the next steps, but both Israel and Hamas have refrained from returning to all-out war.A senior Hamas official said Tuesday fresh talks had begun in Doha, with Israel also sending negotiators.Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his negotiating team “to prepare for the continuation” of indirect talks with Hamas on the ceasefire, a statement from his office said Saturday.On Saturday, Gaza civil defence spokesman Mahmoud Bassal told AFP that “nine martyrs have been transferred (to hospital), including several journalists and a number of workers from the Al-Khair Charitable Organisation”.He said the killings were “a result of the occupation (Israel) targeting a vehicle with a drone in the town of Beit Lahia, coinciding with artillery shelling on the same area”.The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said “nine martyrs and several injured, including critical cases” were taken to the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza.Israel’s military said it hit “two terrorists… operating a drone that posed a threat to IDF troops in the area of Beit Lahia”.”Later, a number of additional terrorists collected the drone operating equipment and entered a vehicle. The IDF struck the terrorists.”- ‘Systematic targeting’ -Israel has carried out near-daily air strikes in Gaza since early March, often targeting what the military said were militants planting explosives.”The occupation has committed a horrific massacre in the northern Gaza Strip by targeting a group of journalists and humanitarian workers, in a blatant violation of the ceasefire agreement,” Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said in a statement.A separate Hamas statement called the attack “a dangerous escalation”, adding that it “reaffirms (Israel’s) intent to backtrack on the ceasefire agreement and intentionally obstruct any opportunity to complete the agreement and carry out the prisoner swap”.During the truce’s initial six-week phase, militants released 33 hostages, including eight who were dead, in exchange for about 1,800 Palestinian detainees held in Israeli prisons.Hamas said Saturday that “the ball is in Israel’s court” after offering to release an Israeli-US hostage and return the bodies of four others as part of the truce talks.- ‘Very bad bet’ -The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said that among those killed on Saturday were an editor and three photo journalists. One was a drone photography specialist, according to the civil defence agency.The syndicate’s deputy head in Gaza, Tahseen al-Astal, told AFP that the attack targeted an Al-Khair charity vehicle, where the journalists were “preparing reports and documentaries on the work of charitable organisations during the month of Ramadan”.Two Al-Khair members were also among those identified as killed, including a spokesperson, the civil defence agency said.”This heinous crime comes in the context of the systematic targeting of Palestinian journalists,” a Palestinian Journalists Syndicate statement said.”The continuation of these brutal attacks against journalists constitutes a war crime and a blatant violation of international laws, especially the Geneva Convention, which guarantees the protection of journalists during conflicts.”In November, Reporters without Borders said that more than 140 journalists had been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel which sparked the war.The October 7 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people on the Israeli side, while Israel’s military retaliation in Gaza killed more than 48,543, according to figures from the two sides.There are still 58 hostages held in Gaza, 34 of whom the Israeli army has declared dead.Israel said Friday Hamas had “not budged” in the truce talks and was engaged in “psychological warfare”.Israel’s ally the United States said Hamas was “making a very bad bet that time is on its side”.In Tel Aviv, a crowd of several hundred gathered for the weekly protest to demand the release of the remaining Gaza hostages.bur-az-skl-acc/pjm

Nine people were killed in strikes on Yemen’s capital on Saturday, Huthi rebels said, after US President Donald Trump announced an attack on the Iran-backed group.Another nine people were wounded in the first US strikes on the Huthis, who have attacked Israel and Red Sea shipping throughout the Gaza war, since Trump took office in January.An AFP photographer in Sanaa heard three explosions and saw plumes of smoke coming from a residential district in the north of the rebel-held capital, Sanaa. Security forces cordoned off the area immediately.”Nine civilians were killed and nine others were injured, most of them seriously,” the Huthis’ health and environment ministry said in a statement on their Saba news agency.The rebels’ Al-Masirah TV station said an “American-British aggression raided a residential neighbourhood in the Shuub district” in Sanaa. It later reported such a strike on the Huthi stronghold of Saada.There was no immediate comment from British authorities.In a post on social media, Trump vowed to “use overwhelming lethal force until we have achieved our objective”, citing the Huthis’ threats against Red Sea shipping.The Huthis hit back in a statement on Al-Masirah vowing that the strikes “will not pass without response”.”Our Yemeni armed forces are fully prepared to confront escalation with escalation,” the rebels’ political bureau said.Trump also warned Iran that it must “immediately” cut support to the rebels. The rebels, who have controlled much of Yemen for more than a decade, are part of the “axis of resistance” of pro-Iran groups staunchly opposed to Israel and the United States.They have launched scores of drone and missile attacks at ships passing Yemen in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden during the Gaza war, claiming solidarity with the Palestinians. The campaign crippled the vital route, which normally carries about 12 percent of world shipping traffic, forcing many companies into a costly detour around the tip of southern Africa.- ‘Hell will rain down’ – In response, the US has launched several rounds of strikes on Huthi targets, some with British support. After halting their attacks when Gaza’s ceasefire took effect in January, the Huthis announced on Tuesday that they would resume them until Israel lifts its blockade of aid to the shattered Palestinian territory.Trump’s statement did not reference the dispute over Israel, but focused on previous Huthi attacks on merchant shipping.”To all Huthi terrorists, YOUR TIME IS UP, AND YOUR ATTACKS MUST STOP, STARTING TODAY. IF THEY DON’T, HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE!” he said.”Do NOT threaten the American People, their President… or Worldwide shipping lanes. If you do, BEWARE, because America will hold you fully accountable and, we won’t be nice about it!”Earlier this month, the United States reclassified the Huthi movement as a “foreign terrorist organisation”, banning any US interaction with it.The Huthis captured Sanaa in 2014 and were poised to overrun most of the rest of the country before a Saudi-led coalition intervened the following year.The war has largely been on hold since a 2022 ceasefire but the promised peace process has stalled in the face of the Huthi attacks on Israel and Israel-linked shipping.