After years of uneven attempts to play global peacemaker, China’s role in this week’s U.S.-Iran ceasefire suggests that its long bid for influence finally may be starting to land. But with the truce still fragile, Beijing is in largely uncharted territory and remains cautious about taking on a messy war of America’s making. Source link
In January 1969, Xi was among hundreds of young travelers on a train out of Beijing railway station. It was the end of Mao Zedong’s carnival of politics, a period of chaos known as the Cultural Revolution. Now legions of bright-eyed radical youths were exiled to the countryside to learn from the peasants. “Everyone was crying,” Xi recalled in a 2004 interview, “I was the only one smiling.” The youngsters took the train south to the deep, impoverished heart of China. Their destination was Shaanxi province, which might as well have been on another planet. For Xi it was a kind of homecoming. His father was a well-known figure there; its fortress town of Yan’an had been the Red Army’s refuge in the 1930s. Xi would stay in the area for seven years. Once in Shaanxi, Xi joined 14 other youths for a jolting ride in a truck up to a tiny village called Liangjiahe, a huddle of mud-walled dwellings, terraced fields, and homes carved out of the mountainside. The new arrivals were taken by …
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth holds a briefing with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine, amid the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 19, 2026. Evan Vucci | Reuters A broker for U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sought to make a large investment in major defense companies in the lead up to the Iran war, according to the Financial Times. The Pentagon has dismissed the report. The Financial Times reported Tuesday that Hegseth’s broker at banking giant Morgan Stanley contacted BlackRock in February about making a multimillion-dollar investment in its iShares Defense Industrials Active ETF. The ETF, which has about $3.1 billion in assets, counts companies such as RTX Corp, — formerly known as Raytheon — Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman among its largest holdings, Blackrock data showed. The Defense Industrials Active ETF has lost 12.4% in the past one month, about the time when the Iran war started, according to LSEG data. The FT also said that the investment discussed by Hegseth’s broker …
Tensions between Israel and Lebanon have been mounting over the past two weeks, since Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel in the wake of the Feb. 28 U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran. Israel responded with a series of retaliatory strikes on Lebanon. “Hezbollah must immediately halt its reckless advance,” Macron said. And “Israel must refrain from launching a large-scale offensive and cease its massive airstrikes, especially since hundreds of thousands of people have already fled the bombings,” he added. “France is ready to facilitate these discussions by hosting them in Paris,” Macron said. Macron’s offer came after an Israeli airstrike killed 12 medical workers at a medical center in southern Lebanon late Friday, according to media reports. The strike killed doctors, paramedics and nurses on duty, according to the Lebanese ministry of health, which said it “violated all international humanitarian laws.” Source link
March 1 (Reuters) – Veteran Iranian politician Ali Larijani, who said on Sunday a temporary leadership council would be set up after an air strike killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reemerged last year as one of the most powerful figures in the security hierarchy. He has been managing a broad portfolio from nuclear negotiations to Tehran’s regional ties to its violent suppression of internal unrest. An establishment insider who hails from one of the country’s leading clerical families, Larijani had been overseeing Iran’s efforts to reach a nuclear deal with the United States – just a month after Washington sanctioned him in January for allegedly directing a deadly crackdown on anti-government protests. He accused the United States and Israel of trying to plunder and disintegrate Iran and warned “secessionist groups” of a harsh response if they attempted any action, state television said on Sunday, nearly 24 hours after they began a wave of attacks on Iran. Iran’s Armed Forces Chief of Staff Abdolrahim Mousavi was also killed in strikes, broadcaster Iran TV said. Appointed …
Congressional Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee say they’ve identified more than $20.9 billion in consumer losses tied to identity theft connected to four major breaches involving data broker firms. The estimate was released Friday in a minority report stemming from a months-long inquiry into data broker practices launched by United States senator Maggie Hassan. Hassan, a New Hampshire Democrat and the JEC’s ranking member, sent investigative requests to five major data brokers—Comscore, Findem, IQVIA Digital, Telesign, and 6Sense Insights—in August after an investigation by The Markup and CalMatters, copublished by WIRED, found some data brokers were hiding opt-out tools from Google and other search engines using “no index” instructions that tell web crawlers not to list the page. Scammers are shown to use the kind of sensitive data that companies like these hold—including identifiers like dates of birth, addresses, and even Social Security numbers—to target victims with personalized fraud. Four of the companies took steps after Hassan’s outreach to improve access to opt-out options, including by removing the “no index” code, adding more prominent …
NEW YORK, Feb 24 (Reuters) – A Miami-based ticket broker offered investors 50% returns over six months through a plan to resell FIFA World Cup tickets at steep markups, even as angry fans say “extortionate” prices are shutting them out of the world’s most-watched sporting event. TicketKings, which was founded in 2019 and says on its website that its goal is to “democratize access to live entertainment,” sought $5.5 million to buy 8,000 World Cup tickets for matches involving England, Brazil and Scotland, among others, and offered returns as high as 87%, according to a pitch deck from the company that was reviewed by Reuters. In the proposal, TicketKings warned that the tickets could be cancelled by a “FIFA invalidation or enforcement actions,” though the firm said it takes steps to mitigate these risks. The investment proposal, which has not been previously reported, surfaced as global soccer fans vent their anger over ticket prices for the June 11-July 19 tournament in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Prices already are the highest in the World Cup’s …
The SpaceX IPO, potentially launching as early as mid-June, is set to accelerate the “space investment” theme we previously outlined, with Elon Musk’s rocket company rumored to target about $50 billion in proceeds at a $1.5 trillion valuation. Early bullish sentiment is already appearing in one public-market proxy: Seoul-based Mirae Asset Securities Co., which has about $400 million of exposure to SpaceX and xAI, and has surged to the top spot on MSCI’s broadest global stock index performance so far this year. Ha SeokKeun, CEO at Eugene Asset Management Co., was quoted by Bloomberg as saying that Mirae Asset’s fundamentals are improving due to the strong Korean stock market, while its SpaceX position provides an additional catalyst, allowing investors to capture two sources of value simultaneously. Mirae Asset’s brokerage revenue jumped to a record in 2025, up 43% over the previous year, according to its earnings report last week. The stock is trading at 21 times forward earnings estimates, or triple its five-year average. KB Securities Co. analyst Kang Seunggun warned that the stock’s valuation …
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Turkey is attempting to bring U.S. and Iranian officials to the negotiating table in hopes of easing the threat of U.S. military action against Iran. Neither the U.S. nor Iran has confirmed whether they plan to take part in any negotiations. Two Turkish officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, said Turkey is trying to organize a meeting between U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian leaders. The meeting could take place as soon as the end of the week, one of the officials said. The U.S. military has moved the USS Abraham Lincoln and several guided-missile destroyers into the Middle East, but it remains unclear whether U.S. President Donald Trump would decide to use force against the Iranian government, as he has suggested he might do in retribution for their devastating crackdown on last month’s protests and as he presses for a deal on Iran’s nuclear program. “We have talks going on with Iran, we’ll see how …
Robert Mnuchin, the Wall Street pioneer who became one of New York’s most respected art dealers and a fixture at blue-chip auctions, died on Friday at his home in Bridgewater, Connecticut. He was 92. His death, first reported by the New York Times, was confirmed by his stepdaughter, Lisa Hedley Wick. Mnuchin was unusual in having two long and highly successful careers. At Goldman Sachs, he was a central figure in the rise of block trading in the 1960s and ’70s, helping build the firm’s institutional equities business under managing partner Gustave Levy. By 1978, the Wall Street Journal described him as “the acknowledged dean of block traders,” rivaled only by Salomon Brothers’ Michael Bloomberg. His skill on the trading floor—an encyclopedic recall of buyers and sellers, an instinct for pressure and timing—made him a legend inside the firm. He became a partner in 1967, co-headed trading and arbitrage by 1976, and joined the firm’s powerful management committee in 1980. He retired in 1990. That same set of instincts—competitive, analytic, and deeply interpersonal—animated his second act. After …
