Cars and shipping containers were washed away by floods caused by Typhoon Kalmaegi in the Philippines, where thousands of people have been ordered to evacuate their homes.
Published On 4 Nov 20254 Nov 2025
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Shaquille O’Neal purchased a black 2025 Land Rover worth a reported $180,000 from an auto broker in Riverside. He paid even more to have it customized for his 7-foot-1 frame.
It was meant to be delivered to Baton Rouge, La., earlier this month but never arrived at its intended destination.
Instead, Shaq’s latest automobile purchase appears to be the “high-value vehicle” that is being investigated as stolen by the Lumpkin County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia and thought to be somewhere in Atlanta as of Monday morning.
In a news release last week, the Sheriff’s Office indicated that the vehicle had been “originally ordered through a California-based auto brokerage on behalf of a high-profile client.”
The New York Post was first to report that the client was O’Neal and the company was Riverside’s Effortless Motors. Ahmad Abdelrahman, owner of Effortless Motors, confirmed both facts to The Times during a phone interview.
Abdelrahman said his company had provided O’Neal with numerous customized vehicles over the last two years. He referred to the NBA and Louisiana State legend as “an amazing human being” and said that Effortless Motors was offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of the vehicle.
“The last guy you want to steal a car from is Shaquille O’Neal, you know?” Abdelrahman said. “I’ve never had this happen to us before. We do all his vehicles. We’ve transported deals for him hundreds of times, and something like this is definitely insane.”
In a statement emailed to The Times on Monday, the Lumpkin County Sheriff’s Office said that its criminal investigations division “is actively investigating the theft of a high-value vehicle that was fraudulently removed from a business in the Dahlonega area earlier this month. Investigators have confirmed that the vehicle was transported from a local fabrication business under false pretenses and is believed to have been taken to the Atlanta metropolitan area.”
The department added that multiple search warrants had been obtained and executed as part of the investigation and several people of interest had been identified.
Abdelrahman told The Times that O’Neal’s Land Rover was customized locally by Effortless Motors but was supposed to have additional fabrication work done in Georgia before completing its trip to Louisiana.
After learning that the vehicle never arrived in Baton Rouge, Abdelrahman said, he contacted the company he had hired to ship the vehicle, FirstLine Trucking LLC, and was told that “their system was hacked.”
“They never got our order,” Abdelrahman said he was told, “and the hackers intercepted the vehicle and picked it up, and they vanished with the car.”
FirstLine Trucking did not immediately respond to messages from The Times. O’Neal has not publicly commented on the matter.
US President Donald Trump said the deal had been negotiated over the last four to five months.
Published On 20 Oct 202520 Oct 2025
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United States President Donald Trump and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese have signed an agreement on rare earth and critical minerals as China tightens control over global supply.
The two leaders signed the deal on Monday at the White House.
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Trump said the agreement had been negotiated over four or five months. The two leaders will also discuss trade, submarines and military equipment, Trump said.
Albanese described it as an $8.5bn pipeline “that we have ready to go”.
The full terms of the agreement were not immediately available. The two leaders said part of the agreement had to do with processing of the minerals. Albanese said both countries will contribute $1bn over the next six months for joint projects.
China has the world’s largest rare earths reserves, according to the US Geological Survey data, but Australia also has significant reserves.
The two leaders also planned to discuss the $239.4bn agreement, reached in 2023 under then-US President Joe Biden, in which Australia is to buy US nuclear-powered submarines in 2032 before building a new submarine class with Britain.
US Navy Secretary John Phelan told the meeting the US and Australia were working very closely to improve the original framework for all three parties “and clarify some of the ambiguity that was in the prior agreement”.
Trump said these were “just minor details”.
“There shouldn’t be any more clarifications, because we’re just, we’re just going now full steam ahead, building,” Trump said.
Australian officials have said they are confident it will proceed, with Defence Minister Richard Marles last week saying he knew when the review would conclude.
Ahead of Monday’s meeting between the two leaders, Australian officials have emphasised Canberra is paying its way under AUKUS — a trilateral military partnership between the US, Australia and the United Kingdom, contributing $2bn this year to boost production rates at US submarine shipyards, and preparing to maintain US Virginia-class submarines at its Indian Ocean naval base from 2027.
The delay of 10 months in an official meeting since Trump took office has caused some anxiety in Australia as the Pentagon urged Canberra to lift defence spending. The two leaders met briefly on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York last month.
Australia is willing to sell shares in its planned strategic reserve of critical minerals to allies including Britain, as Western governments scramble to end their reliance on China for rare earths and minor metals.
Top US officials last week condemned Beijing’s expansion of rare earth export controls as a threat to global supply chains. China is the world’s biggest producer of the materials, which are vital for products ranging from electric vehicles to aircraft engines and military radars.
Resource-rich Australia, wanting to extract and process rare earths, put preferential access to its strategic reserve on the table in US trade negotiations in April.
Oct. 17 (UPI) — The United States delayed the adoption of an international requirement for commercial cargo ships to reduce their greenhouse emissions or be subject to fines that is widely supported globally.
Using threats of sanctions and tariffs, and backed by Saudi Arabia and Russia, the Trump administration forced representatives of more than 100 countries to table the International Maritime Organization’s Net-zero Framework, which would have set a mandatory marine fuel standard.
The draft framework, agreed to in April and aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from cargo ships to net-zero by 2050, would have gone into effect in 2027 for all ocean going ships weighing more than 5,000 tons, according to the IMO.
President Donald Trump has referred to nearly all efforts to reduce human impacts on the environment as a “green scam.”
In an Oct. 10 statement meant to put “IMO members on notice,” Trump’s secretaries of state, energy and transportation said that the United States would employ a series of penalties “against nations that sponsor this European-led neocolonial export of global climate regulations.”
“President Trump has made it clear that the United States will not accept any international environmental agreement that unduly or unfairly burdens the United States or harms the interests of the American people,” Secs. Marco Rubio, Chris Wright and Sean Duffy said in the statement.
The new regulation would have gone into effect in 2027 after a standard for ships to reduce their annual gas fuel intensity — the amount of greenhouse gases released for each unit of energy a ship uses — and economic measures and penalties were established at meetings planned for 2026.
The IMO plan was widely supported — Britain, Canada, the European Union, Japan and China were all in favor — and was expected to pass by most of the roughly 100 countries represented at Friday’s meeting.
Although a handful of countries were not in favor of delaying talks about the regulation for a year, the United States persuaded several countries, including China, to join it, Russia and Saudi Arabia to push off negotiations on the deal.
“We are disappointed that member states have not been able to agree [on] a way forward at this meeting,” International Chamber of Shipping secretary-general Thomas Kazakos told reporters.
“Industry needs clarity to be able to make investments,” he said, reiterating the already known overall support the shipping industry reportedly has for the global standard.
Cameroon-flagged tanker issues distress call about 60 nautical miles (110km) south of Yemen’s Ahwar in Gulf of Aden.
Published On 18 Oct 202518 Oct 2025
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A ship has caught fire in the Gulf of Aden off Yemen after being struck by a projectile, the British military said, with one report suggesting its crew was preparing to abandon the vessel.
The incident on Saturday comes as Yemen’s Houthi rebels have maintained their military campaign of attacking ships through the Red Sea corridor in solidarity with Palestinians under fire in Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.
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The Houthis did not immediately claim an attack, though it can take them hours or even days to do so.
The British military’s United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) a centre issued an alert about the vessel, describing the incident as taking place some 210km (130 miles) east of Aden.
“A vessel has been hit by an unknown projectile, resulting with a fire,” the UKMTO said. “Authorities are investigating.”
The maritime security firm Ambrey described the ship as a Cameroon-flagged tanker that issued a distress call as it passed about 60 nautical miles (equivalent to 110km) south of Yemen’s Ahwar while en route from Sohar, Oman, to Djibouti.
It said radio traffic suggested the crew was preparing to abandon ship, and a search-and-rescue effort was under way.
Ambrey said the tanker was not believed to be linked to the target profile of Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis.
The group has launched numerous attacks on vessels in the Red Sea since 2023, targeting ships they deem linked to Israel or its supporters.
The attacks have disrupted trade flows through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, one of the world’s busiest shipping routes.
But no attacks have been claimed by the rebel group since the ceasefire began in Gaza on October 10.
The rebels’ most recent attack hit the Dutch-flagged cargo ship Minervagracht on September 29, killing one crew member on board and wounding another. The Houthi campaign against shipping has killed at least nine mariners and seen four ships sunk.
Israel has repeatedly struck what it says are Houthi targets in Yemen in recent months, killing dozens of Yemeni civilians. The Houthis have fired missiles towards Israel, most intercepted, but some breaking past Israel’s much-vaunted US-supplied air defences and causing injuries and disruptions at airports.
On Thursday, Israel claimed responsibility for killing the Houthi military’s Chief of Staff Muhammad Abd al-Karim al-Ghamari.
The Houthis said in a statement that the conflict with Israel had not ended and that Israel will “receive its deterrent punishment for the crimes it has committed”.
In August, Israel said it targeted senior figures from the group, including al-Ghamari, in air strikes on the capital Sanaa that killed the prime minister of Yemen’s Houthi-run government and several other ministers.
Members of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) have voted to postpone approving a plan to curb shipping emissions, after United States President Donald Trump threatened to impose sanctions on countries that supported the measure.
The vote on Friday set back plans to regulate the shipping industry’s contributions to climate change by at least 12 months, even though the Net Zero Framework (NZF) had already been approved by members of the London-based IMO, a United Nations body, in April.
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The decision to formally delay adopting the framework until late next year came a day after President Trump took to his Truth Social platform, saying: “I am outraged that the International Maritime Organization is voting in London this week to pass a global Carbon Tax.”
“The United States will NOT stand for this Global Green New Scam Tax on Shipping,” he said, telling countries to vote against the plan.
Washington also threatened to impose sanctions, visa restrictions and port levies on countries that supported the deal.
In advance of this week’s meeting in London, about 63 IMO members who had voted for the plan in April were expected to maintain their support for curbs on emissions, and others were expected to join the initiative to formally approve the framework.
Following Trump’s social media threat, delegates in London instead voted on a hastily arranged resolution to push back proceedings on the matter, which passed by 57 votes to 49.
The IMO, which comprises 176 member countries, is responsible for regulating the safety and security of international shipping and preventing pollution on the high seas.
Since returning to power in January, Trump has focused on reversing Washington’s course on climate change, encouraging fossil fuel use by deregulation, cutting funding for clean energy projects and promising businesses to “drill, baby drill”.
A spokesman for UN chief Antonio Guterres called Friday’s decisions “a missed opportunity for member states to place the shipping sector on a clear, credible path towards net zero emissions”.
The International Chamber of Shipping, representing more than 80 percent of the world’s fleet, also expressed disappointment.
“Industry needs clarity to be able to make the investments needed to decarbonise the maritime sector,” the chamber’s Secretary-General Thomas Kazakos said in a statement.
Disappointed, but still very much Committed! https://t.co/7P192kAvCx
— Thomas A. Kazakos (@ThomasKazakos) October 17, 2025
Ralph Regenvanu, the minister for climate change for Vanuatu, said the decision to delay the vote by 12 months was “unacceptable given the urgency we face in light of accelerating climate change”.
“But we know that we have international law on our side and will continue to fight for our people and the planet,” Regenvanu added.
Leading up to Friday’s decision, China, the European Union, Brazil, Britain and several other members of the IMO had reaffirmed their support.
Countries that opposed the measures included Russia and Saudi Arabia.
A Russian delegate described the proceedings as “chaos” as he addressed the plenary on Friday after talks had lasted into the early hours.
Argentina and Singapore, two countries that had previously voted in support of the framework in April, were among those that voted to postpone introducing it this week.
If it had been formally adopted this week, the Net Zero Framework (NZF) would have been the first global carbon-pricing system, charging ships a penalty of $380 per metric tonne on every extra tonne of CO2-equivalent they emit while rewarding vessels that reduce their emissions by using alternatives.
The framework plan is intended to help the IMO reach its target of cutting net emissions from international shipping by 20 percent by 2030 and eliminating them by 2050.
Climate change is already beginning to affect shipping and the safety of seafarers, including by changing ocean currents and causing more frequent and severe storms.
Proposals to reduce reliance on dirtier bunker fuel in the shipping industry include using ammonia and methanol, as well as fitting cargo ships with special sails.
Pacer Advisors, Inc. disclosed a significant reduction in its United Parcel Service (UPS 0.05%) holdings, selling 3,884,101 shares for an estimated $351.8 million, according to an SEC filing dated October 15, 2025.
According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission dated October 15, 2025, Pacer Advisors, Inc. sold 3,884,101 shares of United Parcel Service during the quarter. The estimated transaction value, based on the average share price for the quarter, was ~$351.8 million. Following the sale, the fund held 533,764 shares, worth $44.59 million.
This sale reduced the United Parcel Service stake to 0.11% of Pacer Advisors’ total reportable U.S. equity assets under management as of September 30, 2025.
Top holdings after the filing:
As of October 14, 2025, United Parcel Service shares were priced at $84.05, down 37.5% over the past year; shares have underperformed the S&P 500 by 47.9 percentage points on a price-change basis (ex-dividends) over the same period.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Revenue (TTM) | $90.17 billion |
| Net Income (TTM) | $5.73 billion |
| Dividend Yield | 7.79% |
| Price (as of market close 10/14/25) | $84.05 |
United Parcel Service, Inc. is a global leader in integrated freight and logistics, operating in over 200 countries and territories. The company leverages a vast transportation network and advanced technology to provide reliable, time-definite delivery services. UPS’s scale, diversified service offering, and operational efficiency underpin its competitive position in the logistics sector.
The company offers letter and package delivery, transportation, logistics, and supply chain solutions across U.S. domestic and international markets. It generates revenue through time-definite air and ground shipping, freight forwarding, customs brokerage, and ancillary logistics services.
United Parcel Service serves a diverse client base including businesses of all sizes, healthcare and life sciences organizations, and individual consumers globally.
Pacer advisors, a private investment manager based out of Pennsylvania, recently disclosed the sale of nearly 3.9 million shares of United Parcel Service (UPS), worth more than $351 million. It’s another blow for a company whose stock has chronically underperformed key benchmarks recently.
For example, UPS shares have slipped nearly 48% over the last three years, while the S&P 500 has gained about 86% over the same period. That means UPS shares have underperformed the benchmark index by 134% dating back to late 2022.
Therefore, it’s no wonder that institutional support is drying up. Fund managers like Pacer are clearly retreating from the logistics giant. But why?
As is often the case, it comes down to fundamentals. Key metrics for UPS, like revenue, net income, and free cash flow have fallen steadily in recent years. Dating back to 2022, UPS’ revenue has fallen 10%; net income has dropped 50%; and free cash flow has slumped by an eye-popping 62%.
Clearly, a turnaround is needed for this iconic company. However, until the company can improve its overall fundamentals, retail investors may want to exercise caution with UPS stock.
Assets Under Management (AUM): The total market value of all investments managed by a fund or investment firm.
Reportable U.S. Equity Assets: U.S. stock holdings that an investment manager must disclose in regulatory filings.
Stake: The ownership interest or position held in a company by an investor or fund.
Top Holdings: The largest investments in a fund’s portfolio, usually ranked by market value.
Dividend Yield: Annual dividends per share divided by the share price, expressed as a percentage.
Time-Definite Delivery: Shipping services that guarantee delivery by a specific date or time.
Freight Forwarding: The coordination and shipment of goods on behalf of shippers, often internationally.
Customs Brokerage: Service that helps importers and exporters comply with customs regulations and clear goods through customs.
Ancillary Logistics Services: Additional support services in logistics, such as warehousing, packaging, or inventory management.
TTM: The 12-month period ending with the most recent quarterly report.
Jake Lerch has positions in Altria Group, ExxonMobil, Nvidia, and United Parcel Service. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Applied Materials, Nvidia, and United Parcel Service. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
The United States and China have started charging additional port fees on ocean shipping firms that move everything from holiday toys to crude oil, making the high seas a key front in the trade war between the world’s two largest economies.
A return to an all-out trade war appeared imminent last week, after China announced a major expansion of its rare earths export controls, and US President Donald Trump threatened to raise tariffs on Chinese goods to triple digits.
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But after the weekend, both sides sought to reassure traders and investors, highlighting cooperation between their negotiating teams and the possibility they could find a way forward.
China said it had started to collect the special charges on US-owned, operated, built or flagged vessels, but it clarified that Chinese-built ships would be exempted from the levies.
In details published by state broadcaster CCTV, China spelled out specific provisions on exemptions, which also include empty ships entering Chinese shipyards for repair.
Similar to the US plan, the new China-imposed fees would be collected at the first port of entry on a single voyage or for the first five voyages within a year.
“This tit-for-tat symmetry locks both economies into a spiral of maritime taxation that risks distorting global freight flows,” Athens-based Xclusiv Shipbrokers said in a research note.
Early this year, the Trump administration announced plans to levy the fees on China-linked ships to loosen the country’s grip on the global maritime industry and bolster US shipbuilding.
An investigation during the administration of former US President Joe Biden concluded that China uses unfair policies and practices to dominate the global maritime, logistics and shipbuilding sectors, clearing the way for those penalties.
China hit back last week, saying it would impose its own port fees on US-linked vessels from the same day the US fees took effect.
“We are in the hectic stage of the disruption, where everyone is quietly trying to improvise workarounds, with varying degrees of success,” said independent dry bulk shipping analyst Ed Finley-Richardson. He said he has heard reports of US shipowners with non-Chinese vessels trying to sell their cargoes to other countries while en route, so the vessels can divert.
The Reuters news agency was not immediately able to confirm this.
Analysts expect China-owned container carrier COSCO to be the most affected by the US fees, shouldering nearly half of that segment’s expected $3.2bn cost from the fees in 2026.
Major container lines, including Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd and CMA CGM, slashed their exposure by switching China-linked ships out of their US shipping lanes. Trade officials there reduced fees from initially proposed levels, and exempted a broad swath of vessels after heavy pushback from the agriculture, energy and US shipping industries.
The Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters.
China’s Ministry of Commerce on Tuesday said, “If the US chooses confrontation, China will see it through to the end; if it chooses dialogue, China’s door remains open.”
In a related move, Beijing also imposed sanctions on Tuesday against five US-linked subsidiaries of South Korean shipbuilder Hanwha Ocean, which it said had “assisted and supported” a US probe into Chinese trade practices.
Hanwha, one of the world’s largest shipbuilders, owns Philly Shipyard in the US and has won contracts to repair and overhaul US Navy ships. Its entities will also build a US-flagged LNG carrier.
Hanwha said it is aware of the announcement and is closely monitoring the potential business impact. Hanwha Ocean’s shares sank by nearly 6 percent.
China also launched an investigation into how the US probe affected its shipping and shipbuilding industries.
A Shanghai-based trade consultant said the new fees may not cause significant upheaval.
“What are we going to do? Stop shipping? Trade is already pretty disrupted with the US, but companies are finding a way,” the consultant told Reuters, requesting anonymity because he was not authorised to speak with the media.
The US announced last Friday a carve-out for long-term charterers of China-operated vessels carrying US ethane and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), deferring the port fees for them through December 10.
Meanwhile, ship-tracking company Vortexa identified 45 LPG-carrying VLGCs — an acronym for very large gas carriers, a type of vessel — that would be subject to China’s port fee. That amounts to 11 percent of the total fleet.
Clarksons Research said in a report that China’s new port fees could affect oil tankers accounting for 15 percent of global capacity.
Meanwhile, Omar Nokta, an analyst at the financial firm Jefferies, estimated that 13 percent of crude tankers and 11 percent of container ships in the global fleet would be affected.
In a reprisal against China curbing exports of critical minerals, Trump on Friday threatened to slap additional 100 percent tariffs on goods from China and put new export controls on “any and all critical software” by November 1.
Administration officials, hours later, warned that countries voting this week in favour of a plan by the United Nations International Maritime Organization (IMO) to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from ocean shipping could face sanctions, port bans, or punitive vessel charges.
China has publicly supported the IMO plan.
“The weaponisation of both trade and environmental policy signals that shipping has moved from being a neutral conduit of global commerce to a direct instrument of statecraft,” Athens-based Xclusiv said.
Oct. 10 (UPI) — The United States has sanctioned more than 50 people, entities and vessels accused of facilitating the sale of Iranian oil and liquefied petroleum gas, as the Trump administration continues to tighten its financial vise on Tehran.
The sanctions target nearly two dozen shipping vessels, a China-based crude oil terminal and a Chinese so-called teapot refinery that the Treasury accuses of moving hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of LPG for Iran.
The Treasury said that Shandong Jincheng Petrochemical Group, an independent teapot refinery in Shandong Province, has purchased millions of barrels of Iranian oil since 2023, receiving the shipments worth hundreds of millions of dollars via Iran’s shadow fleet of vessels.
The China-based Rizhao Shihua Crude Oil Terminal was also blacklisted for accepting more than a dozen of those shadow fleet ships.
“The Treasury Department is degrading Iran’s cash flow by dismantling key elements of Iran’s energy export machine,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.
“Under President [Donald] Trump, this administration is disrupting the regime’s ability to fund terrorist groups that threaten the United States.”
The sanctions are the fourth round of the second Trump administration to target China-based refiners accused of purchasing Iranian oil and follow the U.S. blacklisting of facilitators of Iran’s oil trade on Aug. 22 and a network of dozens of individuals, entities and vessels that make up Tehran’s shipping network on July 30.
The sanctions continue the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign that failed during his first term to bring Iran to the negotiating table on a new deal.
The punitive policy was initially launched in 2018, when Trump withdrew the United States from a landmark multinational Obama-era accord aimed at preventing Iran from securing a nuclear weapon as part of efforts to cobble together one of his own.
The maximum pressure campaign of sanctions and other measures was employed in an effort to compel Iran to resume negotiations on a new deal.
Instead, Iran continued to advance its nuclear program.
The previous Biden administration attempted to restart negotiations with Iran on reinstating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, but those prospects were dashed when Iran-backed Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The second iteration of the maximum pressure campaign was launched on Feb. 4 with Trump’s signing of National Security Presidential Memorandum 2, which seeks to “impose maximum pressure on the Iranian regime to end its nuclear threat, curtail its ballistic missile program and stop its support for terrorist groups.”
The policy’s second iteration is a broader focus on China’s aid to Iran, secondary sanctions and a targeting of Tehran’s shadow fleet
The sanctions announced Thursday coincided with the Treasury also sanctioning a network of individuals and companies assisting Iran with evading U.S. sanctions.
It also blacklisted 44 individuals and firms accused of being involved in Iran’s nuclear program and weapons procurement network earlier this month.
The missile attack comes amid Houthi pledges to target Israel-linked shipping over its ongoing war in Gaza.
Published On 1 Sep 20251 Sep 2025
Yemen’s Houthi movement has claimed responsibility for a missile attack on a tanker in the Red Sea, days after Israeli air strikes killed its prime minister and several senior officials.
The group on Monday said it directly hit the Liberian-flagged Scarlet Ray, which is Israeli-owned, according to the maritime security company Ambrey.
The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) agency, which monitors shipping in the region, disputed the claim, reporting the missile missed its target on Sunday.
“The crew witnessed a splash in close proximity to their vessel from an unknown projectile and heard a loud bang,” UKMTO said, adding all staff were unharmed and the tanker had resumed its voyage.
The attack is the latest in a string of Houthi operations in the Red Sea. The group sank two tankers in July and has pledged to continue targeting Israel-linked shipping as part of its declared support for Palestinians and opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
On Saturday, the Houthis announced that Prime Minister Ahmed Ghaleb al-Rahawi and other top officials had been assassinated in Israeli strikes on Thursday. A funeral for the prime minister and other slain officials is scheduled on Monday.
Houthi leader Abdel-Malik al-Houthi hailed them as “martyrs of all Yemen” and accused Israel of “savagery” against civilians. “The crime of targeting ministers and civilian officials is added to the criminal record of the Israeli enemy in the region,” he said.
Tensions escalated further on Sunday when Houthi fighters raided United Nations offices and detained at least 11 staff members, accusing them of espionage.
The UN has rejected the allegations and called for their “immediate and unconditional release”. The group is already holding 23 other UN employees, some since 2021.
In May, Oman brokered a ceasefire between the United States and the Houthis, leading Washington to halt its daily bombing campaign in Yemen. However, Houthi chief negotiator Mohammed Abdulsalam said the agreement does not cover operations against Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to retaliate, warning the Houthis they will “pay a heavy price” for attacks on Israeli territory and shipping.
The Houthis, who control much of northern Yemen, have launched dozens of drone and missile strikes against Israel and its allies since October, disrupting international trade through the Red Sea.
Officials say about 10 people rescued after accident in African country’s northwestern region.
Rescuers are searching for more than 40 people who are missing after a boat capsized in Nigeria’s northwestern state of Sokoto, according to authorities.
Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) said on Sunday that its Sokoto operations office had deployed a response team to support rescue efforts following the “tragic boat mishap”.
NEMA’s director general, Zubaida Umar, said the agency responded after “receiving reports that a boat conveying over 50 passengers to Goronyo Market had capsized”.
NEMA said in a statement shared on social media that about 10 people had been rescued, and more than 40 other passengers were missing.
Nigeria’s The Punch newspaper, citing a local official, said the accident may have been caused by overloading, a recurring issue for boats in the state’s riverine communities.
Boat accidents are common in Nigeria, particularly during the annual rainy season, from March to October, when rivers and lakes overflow.
At least 16 farmers died in a similar accident in Sokoto State in August 2024, when a wooden canoe carrying them across a river to their rice fields capsized.
Last month, at least 13 people died and dozens more went missing after a boat ferrying about 100 passengers capsized in Niger State, in north-central Nigeria.
Two days later, six girls drowned after a boat taking them home from farm work capsized midstream in the northwestern Jigawa State.
Tougher United States trade penalties on goods originating in one country being re-shipped from another are not expected to immediately follow new US tariffs, three people in Southeast Asia with knowledge of the matter said, easing a major cause of concern.
Southeast Asian countries, including Vietnam and Thailand, have been explicitly targeted by White House officials for their alleged role in facilitating the so-called transshipment to the US of Chinese goods, which would face higher tariffs if shipped directly from China.
The administration of US President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on goods from dozens of countries from Thursday, and in an executive order, said products determined to have been illegally rerouted to conceal their country of origin would face additional duties of 40 percent. But it did not clarify what constitutes transshipment.
US imports from Southeast Asia’s biggest economies, which rely heavily on exports, are now subject to tariff rates of about 19 percent, many of which have been significantly reduced from previously threatened rates.
Existing US customs guidance states that goods from countries with no free trade agreements with Washington, such as Southeast Asian nations, can be labelled as made in the country where they undergo a “substantial transformation” of components, even if those parts entirely come from another country, such as China.
And with no new US guidance on rules of origin or specification of what transshipment means, some officials in Southeast Asia have told exporters that existing rules apply.
That effectively limits cases of transshipment to illegal activities, like the use of forged export certificates or documents obtained illicitly.
“Currently, all exported goods [from Thailand] are subject to a 19 percent rate because there are no rules on transshipment yet,” Arada Fuangtong, head of the Thai Ministry of Commerce’s Department of Foreign Trade, told Reuters on Thursday.
Her message was echoed by US officials in Vietnam, who told businessmen the tariff of 20 percent would apply to Vietnamese goods, even if they are entirely made with Chinese components and only assembled in Vietnam, according to one person familiar with those talks.
Trade consultants have said rules are vague, and they have advised clients, even before the new wave of US tariffs, to have at least 40 percent of local content for their exports to the US. That is “to be on the safe side”, one of them said.
The US embassy in Vietnam did not immediately reply to a request for comment. The Office of the US Trade Representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside US working hours.
“Goods defined by US customs as transshipped are subject to 40 percent duties, but pending any new definition, that’s limited to old definitions,” said a Vietnam-based consultant.
Both people declined to be named in order to speak more freely.
According to the US customs guidance, repackaging does not usually cause a “substantial transformation”, but assembly may, depending on the complexity of the operations.
It is unclear if this narrow interpretation of transshipment could be enforced for other countries.
Economic ministries in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Singapore did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the issue.
Manufacturers in Southeast Asia, which rely heavily on Chinese components, have been in the dark for months about what Washington would consider transshipment.
Questions remain about whether that would include goods with a large, but yet undefined, share of components or raw materials from China, even when they are legitimately transformed in Southeast Asian nations.
A strict definition of transshipment may come later, multiple investment consultants warned.
An executive order signed by Trump last week said the US will “publish every six months a list of countries and specific facilities used in circumvention schemes”.
That will “inform public procurement, national security reviews, and commercial due diligence”, it said.
“The message from Washington is deterrence,” said Marco Forster, director for Southeast Asia at investment consultancy Dezan Shira and Associates.
“If your supply chain cuts corners, it won’t be treated as a technical error. It’ll be treated as fraud.”
Prosecutors say two men ‘knowingly and willfully’ used California-based company to evade export controls on AI chips.
Authorities in the United States have charged two Chinese citizens with shipping tens of millions of dollars’ worth of advanced Nvidia chips to China in breach of export controls.
Chuan Geng and Shiwei Yang are alleged to have “knowingly and willfully” exported the graphic processing units (GPUs) used to power artificial intelligence without authorisation from October 2022 to July 2025, the US Department of Justice said on Tuesday.
Export records indicate that Geng and Yang, both 28, organised at least 21 shipments through their El Monte, California-based company ALX Solutions Inc to companies in Singapore and Malaysia, the Justice Department said.
The exports included a December 2024 shipment of Nvidia H100 GPUs – described as the most powerful chip on the market – that was “falsely labelled” and had not obtained the necessary licence from the US Department of Commerce, the Justice Department said.
According to prosecutors, ALX Solutions received payments from firms in Hong Kong and China, including a $1m sum from a China-based company in January 2024, rather than the companies that accepted the shipments.
Prosecutors said a search of ALX Solutions’s office and Geng and Yang’s phones last week revealed “incriminating communications”, including communications about shipping chips to China through Malaysia to evade US export restrictions.
Geng and Yang face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison if convicted under the Export Control Reform Act.
Al Jazeera could not immediately locate the accused’s lawyers for comment.
Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia said the case showed that “smuggling is a nonstarter”.
“We primarily sell our products to well-known partners, including OEMs [original equipment manufacturers], who help us ensure that all sales comply with US export control rules,” a company spokesperson said.
“Even relatively small exporters and shipments are subject to thorough review and scrutiny, and any diverted products would have no service, support, or updates.”
The US government has banned the export of the most advanced chips to China amid a heated battle for technological supremacy between Washington and Beijing.
US officials have claimed that restrictions, many of which were introduced under former US President Joe Biden, are needed to safeguard national security.
China, which has hit back with its own export controls against the US, has accused Washington of undermining global trade and abusing its dominance in tech.
Last month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced that Washington had agreed to reverse its ban on the sale of its H20 GPU to China following discussions with US President Donald Trump.
Huang said the lifting of the export ban on the H20, which was specifically designed for the Chinese market and is less powerful than the H100, would encourage “nations worldwide to choose America” for their AI models.
July 31 (UPI) — The United States on Wednesday sanctioned dozens of individuals, entities and vessels accused of being an Iranian oil and petroleum shipping network, as the Trump administration continues with its so-called maximum pressure campaign targeting Tehran.
The 50 people and entities and 50 vessels blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury, along with 20 entities and 10 vessels sanctioned by the State Department on Wednesday, represent the largest punitive package against Iran since 2018, when President Donald Trump first imposed mass sanctions against Iran during his first term.
In 2018, Trump pulled the United States from a landmark multinational Obama-era accord aimed at preventing Tehran from securing a nuclear weapon, and slapped sanctions on the country as part of his maximum pressure campaign that failed to bring Iran to the negotiating table on a new deal.
Instead, Iran escalated its nuclear program to the point that the State Department remarked in 2022 that it would need as little as a week to produce enough weapons-grade highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon.
Trump reinstated his maximum pressure campaign on Iran in February and has been targeting its ability to generate revenue since. He also attacked three Iranian nuclear sites last month, amid Israel’s war against Iran-backed Hamas in Gaza.
The sanctions unveiled Wednesday target the vast shipping network of 49-year-old Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani that the United States accuses of laundering billions in profit from the sales of Iranian and Russian crude oil and other petroleum products to buyers mostly in China.
Hossein is the son of Ali Shamkhani, a top political advisor to Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei, and who was sanctioned by the United States in 2020.
“The Shamkhani family’s shipping empire highlights how the Iranian regime elites leverage their positions to accrue massive wealth and fund the regime’s dangerous behavior,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.
“These actions put America first by targeting regime elites that profit while Tehran threatens the safety of the United States.”
Bessent added on X that with Wednesday’s sanctions, the United States has sanctioned more than 500 Iranian and Iran-linked targets this year.
The announcement of sanctions comes a day after Iran’s foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, threatened to retaliate against any new threats to its nuclear program.
“If aggression is repeated, we will not hesitate to react in a more decisive manner and in a way that will be IMPOSSIBLE to cover up,” he said on X on Monday.
Trump claimed his strikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, while others have questioned the severity of the damage.
A message in a bottle found off the west coast of Ireland has revived hopes for answers about the fate of a Taiwanese fishing crew that disappeared four years ago.
Internet sleuths have linked the note, a purported SOS message written in a mixture of Chinese, Indonesian and English, to the Yong Yu Sing No 18, a Taiwanese fishing vessel that was found adrift with its crew missing in 2021.
Matthew Long said that he and a friend were walking on a beach on Inisheer, a small island located about 8km (5 miles) off County Clare, last week when they came across a wax-sealed bottle containing the handwritten note.
“We used Google Translate and the first half of the message translated to an SOS message in Indonesian,” Long told Al Jazeera.
Long said he handed the note over to the local police before posting about his discovery on the social media site Reddit, where internet sleuths quickly got to work trying to track down its origin.
“We posted it in a few places online, but when we posted it in r/beachcombing, it blew up and clever Redditors were able to trace it back to a real missing ship crew,” Long said.
According to the Reddit posting, the text reads: “Please send help! We are lost since 12/20. There are 3 of us here. We don’t know the name of this island. We are injured. HELP. HELLO. SOS.”
The note ends with the Chinese character for “Li” and the name “Yong Yu Sing No 18.”
An Garda Síochána, the Irish police service, said it does not comment on third-party content online but confirmed it had received a “report of an item found” on Inisheer last Saturday.
It declined to provide further information.
The Yong Yu Sing No 18 was reported missing on January 1, 2021, after its owner lost contact with the ship’s captain, a man surnamed Li, two days earlier, according to Taiwan’s Central News Agency.
The fishing vessel was later found approximately 600km (373 miles) from Midway Atoll, an unincorporated United States territory in the North Pacific Ocean, with its crew and lifeboat missing.
The incident was later ruled an accident by Taiwanese prosecutors, but the fate of Li and his nine Indonesian crew members remains unknown to this day.
The Taiwan Yilan District Prosecutors Office, which investigated the case in 2021, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Long’s Reddit post has received nearly 10,000 upvotes, or “likes”, and 1,200 comments from users, many of them offering theories about the crew’s fate and debating whether it is more likely that the note is genuine or a hoax.
In Taiwan, the note has been taken seriously by advocates for the families of the missing crew, including the Su’Ao Fisherman’s Association.
“This association relays the hope that the government will verify the situation through appropriate channels, and if confirmed to be true, is willing for the government to cooperate with international organisations to coordinate rescue efforts,” the association said in a statement to local media.
The Su’Ao Fisherman’s Association did not immediately respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
Internet users on Taiwan’s PTT message board have also debated the authenticity of the note.
Some have compared it with an incident in 1992 in which a container of 28,000 plastic ducks and bath toys fell off a cargo ship during a storm.
In the decades since the incident, the ducks have washed up around the world, including as far away as Scotland.
Long said he is uncertain about whether the note is genuine, but believes it is possible.
“I don’t know about the note’s authenticity or if it was really sent by the crew of that ship,” he said.
“I was very sceptical at first and believed it to be a hoax when I first opened and read the message, but since then, it is starting to look more plausible to me.”