Amazon launches AI agent-building platform for businesses to help boost productivity
Amazon 推出 AI 代理程式建構平台，要幫企業衝高生產力！

The US resumed deportation flights to so-called “third countries” after the Supreme Court cleared the way for the controversial practice.

Five migrants from five different countries were flown on Tuesday to the small Southern African nation of Eswatini. The Donald Trump administration has previously sent deportees to El Salvador and South Sudan as part of its intensifying immigration crackdown, drawing scrutiny and legal challenges.

It’s not unheard of for governments to deport people to countries they aren’t from: Australia sends asylum seekers to offshore processing facilities in Pacific island nations, and the UK’s previous government struck a similar deal with Rwanda. But that plan cost more than $900 million, and only a total of four migrants were transferred.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang heaped praise on China’s technological advancements during a visit to Beijing on Wednesday, but treaded carefully when discussing geopolitics.

The head of the world’s most valuable company received a rockstar reception on the trip, which came a day after the US allowed Nvidia to resume selling one of its high-powered chips to China. But Huang downplayed his role in lobbying US President Donald Trump to green light the sales, and distanced himself from recent Chinese export controls, The New York Times reported.

Even as Huang notches this win, the constantly shifting geopolitical winds mean Nvidia could again find itself weaponized in future US-China spats, The Wall Street Journal wrote.

US President Donald Trump said he wasn’t planning to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, after reports of an imminent termination triggered market turmoil.

Stocks plunged, Treasury bonds sold off, and the dollar weakened following reports that Trump drafted a letter to fire Powell and asked Republican lawmakers for their opinion — the market reaction was “presumably the exact opposite of what Trump is hoping for economically,” Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal said.

Trump later said a removal is “highly unlikely,” though he renewed his criticism of Powell for not cutting interest rates.

Wall Street stabilized, but the swings showed how any attempt to fire Powell could trigger “revolt in global markets, including a possible collapse in the dollar and US bonds,” CNN wrote.

The Syrian government and leaders in the Druze religious minority announced a renewed ceasefire Wednesday after days of clashes that drew in Israel.

The announcement came shortly after Israel launched air attacks on the Syrian Defense Ministry and areas near the presidential palace, while continuing strikes on Syrian forces in the southern city of Suwayda.

More than 250 people died this week after clashes broke out on Sunday between Bedouin tribespeople and Druze militias. The violence has drawn in both the security forces of the new Syrian government and Israel, which warned Damascus that it would not tolerate harm to the Druze — many of whom live in Israel.

Syria’s new leaders have attempted to assert control over the country following the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in December, but deep sectarian divisions remain.

A Chinese artificial intelligence startup released an open-source language model that challenges top US chatbots’ performance at a fraction of the cost.

The release of Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2 shows that the “DeepSeek moment” — in which another cheaply trained Chinese model challenged Western market leaders — of January was not a one-off, Interconnects.ai argued: China is nearing “the absolute frontier” of performance.

The tech writer Azeem Azhar agreed, saying this is the model that should worry Silicon Valley. If DeepSeek represented the AI race’s “Sputnik moment,” shattering “Western assumptions of technological primacy,” he wrote, Kimi K2 is the equivalent of Yuri Gagarin becoming the first man in space four years later, proving that the first event was no fluke.

US President Donald Trump once again threatened new tariffs — this time on pharmaceuticals and chips — as a spiraling trade war drives huge global instability.

The latest levies would come on top of duties on cars, steel, and aluminum, as well as universal tariffs on all countries’ exports to the US, and could take effect on Aug. 1. ASML, the world’s only manufacturer of cutting-edge chipmaking equipment, said geopolitical uncertainty meant it could not confirm its 2026 earnings forecast, while China’s top trade official warned the world was experiencing “turbulence and transformation.”

The impact of the tariffs on economic growth, and unpredictable American trade policy more generally, will hurt households worldwide, the Bank of England’s governor warned.

French Prime Minister François Bayrou proposed axing two public holidays as part of €44 billion in cuts in order to bridge the country’s gaping budget deficit.

Though the additional working days garnered attention abroad, playing into clichés about French labor culture, Bayrou also wants to freeze increases to benefits and pensions, raise taxes on the wealthy, and reduce health care subsidies — a combination described by Le Monde as “bitter potion.”

The cuts speak to the scale of the fiscal crisis facing France, which has the widest deficit in the eurozone, but they may be politically costly: Nationalist leader Marine Le Pen, whose party tops opinion polls, threatened to oust Bayrou’s minority government with a no-confidence motion unless he backs down.

Mexico’s president said Washington had to do more to stop drug traffickers on US territory as well as to halt the flow of weapons across the border.

Claudia Sheinbaum’s comments came after US President Donald Trump threatened Mexico with 30% tariffs over the country’s inability or unwillingness to curb the production and trade of fentanyl.

Mexican officials have long argued that cracking down on domestic crime would be easier if the US stopped gunmakers from trafficking firearms to their country: Around 74% of Mexico’s illegal guns come from the US. However Washington has rejected restricting gun sales in border cities. “If [Trump] really wants to eliminate the cartels, he should focus on the flow of arms,” an expert told El País.

The UK secretly brought thousands of Afghan citizens to Britain after their details were accidentally leaked.

Following the Western withdrawal in 2021, London set up clandestine programs to help Afghans who assisted allied forces during the war to leave the country, fearing they or their families would be targeted by the Taliban. But in 2022, a spreadsheet of 18,700 applicants’ names was put on Facebook. The UK government obtained a controversial legal ban on reporting on the issue, and has spent billions relocating nearly 7,000 people.

Interpreters, fixers, and other Afghans who worked with Western forces during the 20-year conflict were deemed “conspirators” by the Taliban, Al Jazeera reported in 2021: Many have been killed, detained, or tortured.

US President Donald Trump announced a preliminary trade deal with Indonesia, which he had threatened with 32% duties starting Aug. 1.

Southeast Asia’s largest economy will face a 19% tariff per the pact, while US exports to Indonesia won’t be taxed, according to the White House.

Trump said he negotiated directly with Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, who has recently been on something of a diplomatic blitz: He attended France’s Bastille Day parade Monday, heralding closer ties with Paris, and he has deepened economic investments in the Gulf.

However, underneath the “whirlwind of international activity,” Prabowo’s foreign policy lacks substance and he “has yet to articulate what Indonesia stands for in global affairs,” East Asia Forum argued last month.

US inflation rose to its highest level in four months in June, suggesting that the effects of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs are starting to show up in prices.

According to Labor Department statistics released Tuesday, the consumer price index increased by 0.3% for the month, putting the 12-month inflation rate at 2.7%.

So far, the levies have had a limited impact on inflation — a point Trump has repeatedly used to pressure Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to lower interest rates — partly due to declines in both new and used vehicle prices, travel costs, as well as businesses stockpiling goods before tariffs took effect.

Still, with higher tariffs set to take effect in August, economists said the June inflation data isn’t enough to prompt the Fed to cut rates early.

Israel said it struck tanks in southern Syria after fighting broke out between rival groups and the new Damascus regime.

Clashes between Bedouin tribespeople and Druze militias claimed dozens of lives, with reports saying that Syrian forces backed the Bedouins. Israel’s defense minister said it destroyed the tanks as a “warning” to Damascus that it would not allow harm to the Druze, many of whom live in Israel.

Since the fall of the Assad regime, Syria’s leaders have been keen to portray the country as modern and inclusive, and major powers have sought to support its transition from autocracy — Gulf nations are helping pay for reconstruction, and London reestablished official ties this month — but deep sectarian divisions remain.

China’s economy expanded more than expected in the second quarter, but analysts voiced worry over the country’s long-term prospects.

The 5.2% annual growth rate puts the world’s second-biggest economy on track to meet Beijing’s 2025 target. The latest figure was bolstered by exports that exceeded experts’ forecasts, as the Trump administration’s tariffs force China to pivot away from the US and sell to other markets instead.

Still, domestic consumption remains disappointing, property prices are falling, and investment rates are in decline, while the consequences of Washington’s protectionism are not yet clear. “The second half of the year could prove to be more challenging,” ING’s China chief economist warned.

US President Donald Trump’s tougher stance on Russia opened a new front in a trade war that has expanded to encompass global security.

Trump threatened secondary tariffs on any country trading with Moscow if the Kremlin did not agree to peace in Ukraine, potentially throwing the US into renewed conflict with China — which does $250 billion in annual trade with Russia — just as the two appeared to be reaching a rapprochement. Beijing said it would view any such sanctions as “coercion.”

US allies have not been spared either: Trump’s threat of 30% tariffs against the European Union drove Brussels to pull together a list of €72 billion worth of US goods that it would levy tariffs on in response.

Nvidia won Washington’s green light to resume sales of artificial intelligence chips to China, a surprising loosening of strict US curbs on Beijing in the AI race.

While a major boost for the semiconductor giant, the approvals apply only to Nvidia’s H20 chip, which was designed for the Chinese market; restrictions on the company’s most cutting-edge technology remain in place.

Though the reversal — the US had barred Nvidia in April from selling the immensely popular H20 to China — was largely driven by pleas from the company, it was viewed in Beijing as a gesture of good faith, The Wall Street Journal said, as trade talks between the superpowers grind on.

Meta plans to build several city-sized data centers in the US and overhaul its artificial intelligence strategy as it races to catch up with Big Tech rivals.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company would spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the sites, just one of which would cover “a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan,” with the first coming online next year.

Meta’s AI efforts have been disappointing, but Zuckerberg is intent on his models reaching superintelligence — AI that can outperform humans on every metric — and is throwing huge sums at hiring and infrastructure. The firm is also considering dropping its longstanding open-source strategy and has formed a dedicated superintelligence lab.

Measles cases in Europe and Central Asia surged to their highest levels this century because of falling immunization levels.

The World Health Organization’s European region, which includes some Asian countries, saw cases more than double from 2023 levels to almost 150,000 last year, while a child died of the virus in the UK. Vaccination rates in the region have fallen to 91%, significantly below the 95% needed for herd immunity, while coverage against other viruses is also down.

Though vaccine skepticism in the US has garnered attention, with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr its most notable adherent, hesitancy is on the rise in other countries including the UK, where minority ethnic groups show particular skepticism.