BIG Wrap

(CNN) The lavish fanfare President Donald Trump is laying on for China’s leader Xi Jinping implies that a grand global moment is at hand. In an unusual move, Trump traveled to a blustery Joint Base Andrews to greet Xi at the foot of the steps to his plane when he arrived Wednesday for a two-night stay. The leaders chatted, together with their wives, before strolling down a red carpet side by side. There was one blip in...

(Al Jazeera Media Network) Iran has threatened neighbouring countries with retaliation if they enforce new United States sanctions designed to stop Iranian airlines from operating internationally, raising the prospect of further disruption to air travel across a region already affected by nearly seven months of the US-Israel war on Iran. “I urge all our neighbouring countries not to get involved in the United States adventure. This adventure will very soon end in failure,” Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of...

(Al Jazeera Media Network) Iranian authorities and state media have praised the Houthis’ capture of Yemen’s Red Sea coast, which some see as giving Tehran more leverage against the United States. The Houthis, a political and armed group dominated by Zaidi Shia Muslims, have been fighting against the Western-backed Yemeni government since capturing the capital, Sanaa, in 2014. The Houthis captured a series of Red Sea coastal cities and islands this week, essentially giving them control...

(Al Jazeera Media Network) Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store has said a plane carrying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy from Moldova to Oslo was almost hit by a drone. Zelenskyy arrived in Norway’s capital on Tuesday evening to attend the funeral of Norway’s King Harald V. “His flight was almost hit by a drone when it was taking off from Moldova,” Store told Norwegian public broadcaster NRK on Wednesday. “That is the reality he lives in.” Store did...

(Al Jazeera Media Network) The shipping industry, already heavily constrained by restrictions on transit through key waterways such as the Strait of Hormuz, faces another challenge stemming from the US-Israel war on Iran and Russia’s war on Ukraine: a shortage of fuel oil used by ships and power plants. The fuel used by ships powers the transport of large cargoes around the world. Any shortage of this fuel could drive up global freight costs, which...

(New York Times) Nvidia said on Thursday that it is buying Hugging Face, a library of open artificial intelligence models, for $12.9 billion, as the chip maker extends a spending spree in the escalating global race to dominate the technology. The deal marries Nvidia’s chip and data center infrastructure with Hugging Face’s millions of open-source A.I. models that can be freely downloaded and modified. And it puts Nvidia’s deep pockets firmly on one side of a...

(Al Jazeera Media Network) The Netherlands has moved billions of dollars of its gold reserves out of the United States and Canada, and transferred them to the United Kingdom amid global geopolitical tensions. On Wednesday, the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) said it had moved the gold reserves to ensure it is “better prepared for severe crises.” While DNB did not specify for which crises it might need to be prepared, the US is currently engaged in...

(Al Jazeera Media Network) The German government has accused Russia of being behind an attempted drone attack on a major regional airport last month. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said on Tuesday that the attempted attack on Leipzig/Halle Airport in eastern Germany using a drone laden with explosives fits a known pattern of “Russian hybrid operations” and added that investigators had proof that agents controlling the drone were working on “behalf of Russian state entities”. “Taken ‌together,...

(Al Jazeera Media Network) Greece has inked a weapons deal with Israel that will see a $3.5-billion multi-layered air-defence system delivered to Athens in what is the largest defence agreement ever between the two countries. The agreement, signed on Monday in Tel Aviv, comes as Greece’s relations with neighbour and rival Turkiye have grown more sour. It also, however, breaks with a broader European wariness of being seen as too close to Israel. Greece and Israel...

(Al Jazeera Media Network) Iran says it launched missiles at two US bases in Jordan following a US attack on Larak Island in southern Iran earlier on Sunday. In a statement reported by Iranian news agencies on Sunday, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said the combined missile and drone operation, which it called “Punishment of the Aggressor”, hit the King Hussein and Al Azraq bases in Jordan. The exchange of attacks is the first flare-up...