Stocks get mild bump from US court’s tariff ruling

Global shares gave a muted positive welcome Thursday to a US court’s decision blocking most of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs — with analysts noting the issue was far from being settled.The White House has already appealed the decision issued Wednesday by the US Court of International Trade, and Trump has several other avenues to pursue his tariffs objective, as his economic adviser Peter Navarro pointed out.The court invalidated Trump’s invocation of emergency powers to apply swingeing tariffs, though it left untouched his sectoral levies on steel, aluminium and cars.US and Asian indices rose on the news. Europe’s main indices were mostly flat in fairly thin Ascension day trading.The dollar weakened against major currencies.”The gains are less euphoric and more muted than some expected,” said XTB research director Kathleen Brooks.”The latest legal challenge to Trump’s tariffs could be the start of a long wrangle between the courts and the White House, and tariffs may still be implemented,” she said.China — the main target of Trump’s tariffs but recently granted a temporary reprieve — urged Washington to “fully cancel the wrongful unilateral” measures.New York’s biggest surge was on the Nasdaq, which basked in a better-than-expected earnings report from US chipmaking giant Nvidia, pointing to strength in the tech sector, particularly those tilted to AI.In Europe, though, realisation sank in that the US ruling was of limited cheer. If anything, the ruling threw uncertainty into trade negotiations the United States is currently holding with the European Union — and a deal it has already struck with Britain.It “does not remove the threat of US tariffs for Europe or end the need for negotiations,” said Andrew Kenningham, chief Europe economist for Capital Economics.Trump’s threat of 50-percent tariffs on EU goods from July 9 “now looks less credible” and “the EU side may feel less pressure to try to reach an agreement in very rapid time,” he said. “It is still reasonable to assume that the average US tariff on EU goods exports may settle at around 10 percent,” he said.Oil prices, which had surged on Wednesday on the back of a New York Times report saying Israel was looking at striking Iranian nuclear sites to derail US-Iran negotiations, fell back on Thursday.Trump said on Wednesday he had told Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu such action would be “inappropriate to do right now because we’re very close to a solution” on curbing Tehran’s nuclear programme.In corporate news, the star was Nvidia, whose shares soared more than five percent on Thursday after it reported a mammoth $18.8 billion in quarterly profits, despite US export controls on its chips. Furthering AI sector news, the New York Times announced a deal with Amazon licencing its content across the tech company’s AI platforms. Amazon shares were up more than one percent.- Key figures at around 1335 GMT -New York – Dow: UP 0.1 percent at 42,159.11 pointsNew York – S&P 500: UP 0.7 percent at 5,931.39New York – Nasdaq Composite: UP 1.3 percent at 19,345.10London – FTSE 100: DOWN 0.1 percent at 8,720.56Paris – CAC 40: UP 0.2 percent at 7,801.22Frankfurt – DAX: DOWN 0.2 percent at 23,988.93Tokyo – Nikkei 225: UP 1.9 percent at 38,432.98 (close)Hong Kong – Hang Seng Index: UP 1.4 percent at 23,573.38 (close)Shanghai – Composite: UP 0.7 percent at 3,363.45 (close)Euro/dollar: UP at $1.1347 from $1.1291 on WednesdayPound/dollar: UP at $1.3490 from $1.3468Dollar/yen: DOWN at 144.39 yen from 144.82 yenEuro/pound: UP at 84.12 pence from 83.84 penceBrent North Sea Crude: DOWN 1.0 percent at $63.65 per barrelWest Texas Intermediate: DOWN 1.0 percent at $61.20 per barrel 

Harvard holds graduation in shadow of Trump ‘retribution’

Harvard began its annual graduation ceremony Thursday as a federal judge considers the legality of punitive measures taken against the university by US President Donald Trump that threaten to overshadow festivities.Hundreds of robed students and academics squeezed onto the steps of the campus’s main library early Thursday as Trump piles unprecedented pressure onto the university, one of the most prestigious in the world.He is seeking to ban it from having foreign students, shredding its federal contracts, slashing its multibillion-dollar grants and challenging its tax-free status.Harvard is fighting all of the measures in court.The Ivy League institution has continually drawn Trump’s ire while publicly rejecting his administration’s repeated demands to give up control of recruitment, curricula and research choices. The government claims Harvard tolerates anti-Semitism and liberal bias.”Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper,” Trump said Wednesday.Harvard president Alan Garber, who told National Public Radio on Tuesday that “sometimes they don’t like what we represent,” may address the ceremony, which will be attended by as many as 30,000 people.Garber has acknowledged that Harvard does have issues with anti-Semitism, and has struggled to ensure that a variety of views can be safely heard on campus.”The Covenant of Water” author Abraham Verghese will be the commencement speaker and will receive an honorary degree in front of crowds wearing academic garb.Ahead of the ceremony, members of the Harvard band sporting distinctive crimson blazers and brandishing their instruments filed through the narrow streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts — home to the elite school, America’s oldest university.A huge stage had been erected and hundreds of chairs laid out in a grassy precinct that was closed off to the public as the event got under way.Students wearing black academic gowns also toured through Cambridge with photo-taking family members, AFP correspondents saw.Madeleine Riskin-Kutz, a Franco-American classics and linguistics student at Harvard, said some students were planning individual acts of protest against the Trump policies.”The atmosphere (is) that just continuing on joyfully with the processions and the fanfare is in itself an act of resistance,” the 22-year-old said.- Legal fightback -Garber has led the fightback in US academia after Trump targeted several prestigious universities — including Columbia, which made sweeping concessions to the administration in an effort to restore $400 million of withdrawn federal grants.A federal judge in Boston will on Thursday hear arguments over Trump’s effort to exclude Harvard from the main system for sponsoring and hosting foreign students.Judge Allison Burroughs quickly paused the policy which would have ended Harvard’s ability to bring students from abroad who currently make up 27 percent of its student body. Harvard has since been flooded with inquiries from foreign students seeking to transfer to other institutions, Maureen Martin, director of immigration services, said Wednesday. “Many international students and scholars are reporting significant emotional distress that is affecting their mental health and making it difficult to focus on their studies,” Martin wrote in a court filing.Retired immigration judge Patricia Sheppard protested outside Harvard Yard on Wednesday, sporting a black judicial robe and brandishing a sign reading “for the rule of law.”Basketball star and human rights campaigner Kareem Abdul-Jabbar addressed the class of 2025 for Class Day on Wednesday.”When a tyrannical administration tried to bully and threaten Harvard to give up their academic freedom and destroy free speech, Dr. Alan Garber rejected the illegal and immoral pressures,” he said, comparing Garber to civil rights icon Rosa Parks.

Wall Street ouvre en hausse après une décision judiciaire sur les droits de douane

La Bourse de New York a ouvert en hausse jeudi, optimiste après qu’un tribunal américain a décidé de bloquer une partie des droits de douane imposés par l’administration Trump, les investisseurs étant aussi satisfaits des résultats du géant Nvidia.Dans les premiers échanges, le Dow Jones prenait 0,16%, l’indice Nasdaq progressait de 1,51% et l’indice élargi S&P 500 gagnait 0,87%.

US suggests Syria-Israel non-aggression deal

The United States’ new envoy for Syria, Thomas Barrack, called for a non-aggression agreement between Syria and Israel in remarks to Saudi channel Al Arabiya on Thursday.Syria and Israel have technically been at war since 1948, with Israel taking the Golan Heights from Syria in 1967.Since the ouster in December of former president Bashar al-Assad, Israel has carried out hundreds of air strikes and multiple incursions into Syria.Barrack, who inaugurated the US ambassador’s residence in Damascus on Thursday, said the conflict between the two countries was a “solvable problem”.To him, Syria and Israel could “start with just a non-aggression agreement, talk about boundaries and borders” to build a new relationship with its neighbour.Israel has said its strikes on Syria were aimed at preventing advanced weapons from falling into the hands of the new authorities, whom it considers jihadists.It has also threatened further intervention should the new authorities fail to protect the Druze religious minority.Syria’s interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa said earlier this month that his administration was holding “indirect talks” with Israel to calm tensions between the two countries.- Restoring US ties -Sharaa, who led the rebel offensive that toppled Assad in December, was once a jihadist leader wanted in the United States.Since coming to power, he has repeatedly pledged inclusive governance that is open to the world, and restored Syria’s ties with global powers, ending decades of isolation under Assad.While on tour in the Gulf earlier this month, US President Donald Trump announced the lifting of sanctions on Syria, and said he hoped the country would normalise relations with Israel.”I told him, I hope you’re going to join once you’re straightened out and he said yes. But they have a lot of work to do,” he said of Sharaa. He also called Sharaa a “young, attractive guy” with a “very strong past. Fighter”.On May 8, Sharaa said in France that Syria was holding “indirect talks through mediators” with Israel to “try to contain the situation so it does not reach the point where it escapes the control of both sides.”The United States has in recent months started rebuilding ties with Syria, ending more than a decade of diplomatic freeze.Syria signed a $7 billion energy deal on Thursday with a consortium of Qatari, US and Turkish companies as it seeks to rehabilitate its war-ravaged electricity sector.- US flag raised -The agreement, signed in the presence of interim Sharaa and Barrack, is expected to generate 5,000 megawatts of electricity and cover half of the country’s needs.Barrack, who is also ambassador to Turkey, inaugurated the US ambassador’s residence in the Syrian capital with Syrian Foreign Minister Assaad al-Shaibani, state media outlet SANA reported.AFP photographers saw the US flag raised at the ambassador’s residence, just a few hundred metres (yards) from the US embassy in the Abu Rummaneh neighbourhood, under tight security.”Tom understands there is great potential in working with Syria to stop Radicalism, improve Relations, and secure Peace in the Middle East,” Trump said, according to a post on the State Department’s X.The US embassy in Syria was closed after Assad’s repression of a peaceful uprising that began in 2011, which degenerated into civil war.Barrack met with interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa in Istanbul on 24 May, after the United States lifted sanctions on Syria.The meeting followed a meeting in Riyadh between Trump and Sharaa, who led the Islamist coalition that toppled Assad in December.The last US ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, was declared persona non grata in 2011 after defying the Syrian government by visiting a city that was under army siege and the site of a major anti-regime protests.In late December, a US delegation led by Barbara Leaf, the State Department’s Middle East representative, held an initial meeting with the new leadership in Damascus.

Mark Zuckerberg assure que Meta AI a un milliard d’utilisateurs

Mark Zuckerberg, le patron de Meta, a déclaré mercredi que Meta AI comptait désormais un milliard d’utilisateurs se servant de l’assistant d’intelligence artificielle (IA) au moins une fois par mois, en pleine course à l’adoption la plus large possible de ces nouveaux outils.”Sur l’ensemble de nos applications, près d’un milliard d’usagers actifs mensuels utilisent Meta AI”, avait-il déjà écrit sur Facebook fin avril.Il a répété cette affirmation mercredi lors de l’Assemblée générale du géant des réseaux sociaux, peu après de nombreuses annonces emphatiques de la part de ses concurrents, Google en tête.Le service “AI Overviews”, qui répond aux requêtes sur le moteur de recherche avec des réponses rédigées par l’IA, “compte plus d’1,5 milliard d’utilisateurs”, a indiqué la semaine dernière Sundar Pichai, patron de Google.”Cela signifie que Google met l’IA générative à la portée de plus de personnes que tout autre produit dans le monde”, a-t-il souligné.Face au succès de ChatGPT, l’assistant IA lancé par OpenAI fin 2022, les géants de la tech ont investi des dizaines de milliards de dollars pour proposer leurs propres concurrents.Meta a intégré Meta AI à ses différents services, dans l’espoir qu’il devienne l’assistant IA le plus utilisé au monde.En décembre 2024, 3,35 milliards de personnes dans le monde se connectaient tous les jours sur au moins une des plateformes de Meta.Sur WhatsApp et sur Instagram, l’assistant IA se manifeste très facilement, sans le chercher spécifiquement, simplement en faisant une recherche.Meta a en outre lancé il y a un mois Meta AI en tant qu’application séparée.Sundar Pichai a déclaré la semaine dernière que Gemini, l’assistant IA de Google, a 400 millions d’utilisateurs actifs mensuels. En février, OpenAI comptait de son côté 400 millions d’utilisateurs actifs hebdomadaires.Les trois principaux acteurs de l’IA générative pour les consommateurs espèrent tous s’imposer comme incontournables.”Je pense que nous aurons bientôt tous une IA avec laquelle nous parlerons tout au long de la journée – sur nos téléphones, et éventuellement via des lunettes connectées – et je pense que ce sera l’un des services les plus importants et les plus précieux qui aient jamais été créés”, avait assuré Mark Zuckerberg fin avril.Les trois entreprises ajoutent rapidement des fonctions qui transforment leurs assistants IA en “agents IA”, capables d’effectuer des tâches en ligne pour les utilisateurs, de la recherche d’informations au shopping.Pour les rendre indispensables, ils sont aussi de plus en plus personnalisables, avec la possibilité de donner accès à ses comptes Facebook ou Instagram ou ses emails, par exemple.

Mauritanian candidate on track to become Africa’s next ‘super banker’Thu, 29 May 2025 12:52:33 GMT

Mauritania’s former economy minister Sidi Ould Tah was on Thursday heading the race to become Africa’s next “super banker”, succeeding Nigeria’s Akinwumi Adesina as head of the African Development Bank.Five candidates began the contest in Ivory Coast’s economic capital Abidjan but after two rounds of voting, Tah was out in front and close to securing …

Mauritanian candidate on track to become Africa’s next ‘super banker’Thu, 29 May 2025 12:52:33 GMT Read More »