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Palestinians carry an aid box distributed by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, November 4, 2024.
Gaza aid at lowest point in a year despite US ultimatum to Israel
Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he will nominate former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to serve as US ambassador to Israel. Huckabee is also an evangelical pastor and the first non-Jew to hold the position in 15 years. He has been a stalwart supporter of Israel’s right to defend itself and of its settlements in the West Bank throughout his career.
The announcement comes a month after the US gave Israel a 30-day ultimatum to boost humanitarian aid flows to Gaza or risk American military aid declining, a deadline that the UN says Israel has failed to meet. Instead, Gaza aid is at its lowest level in a year, according to the UN, and famine is imminent. Israel has also largely failed to comply with Washington’s other two demands: resuming access for commercial trucks and ending the isolation of the North.
Israel blames UN aid agencies for failing to distribute the aid, while the UN accuses the Israeli military of not ensuring safe conditions for distribution. The US State Department said that military aid will not be curtailed because Israel has made progress on its demands and is not in violation of US law.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salmansaid during a meeting with leaders of Islamic nations on Monday that Israel is carrying out a “collective genocide” in Gaza. Although MBS and many of the leaders present have enabled severe human rights abuses of their own, his statement is likely in anticipation that the US will soon, either as a last-ditch triumph for Joe Biden or an early victory for Donald Trump, try to negotiate a deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Statements like these bolster MBS’s credibility with Israel’s enemies in the region, while also gaining leverage that may translate to Israel making – potentially empty – promises to support future Palestinian statehood in exchange for normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia.
June 16, 2023 - Paris, France: Saudi Arabia s crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman arrives at the Elysee palace for his meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron.
Hard Numbers: Aramco invests, Japan frets, Perplexity gets popular — and sued, UK sentences man in deepfake case
25: When surveyed, only 25% of Japanese respondents said that AI makes them nervous — the lowest mark of any of the 32 countries that Ipsos polled recently. But the country has been very slow to adopt AI or lean fully into its research. Stanford’s count of the “foundation models” for generative AI found that 182 of them originated in the United States, while none originated in Japan. The country is open to AI, but its tech sector just isn’t diving in yet.
350 million: Perplexity is an ascendant AI search engine — it fielded 350 million user queries in September alone. That’s a big uptick considering users asked only 500 million questions in all of 2023. As it’s grown, the company has come under fire from news publishers. Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal, sued Perplexity last week alleging copyright violations. In response, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said he won’t pay to license content from news publishers but is discussing a revenue-sharing agreement similar to how Spotify pays musical artists.
18: In a landmark court decision, a judge in the United Kingdom sentenced a 27-year-old man to 18 years in prison for using AI to create child sexual abuse material. The man pleaded guilty to using a US-based service called Daz 3D to transform real photos of children into explicit deepfakes in violation of British law.In this photo illustration, the Saudi Arabian Airlines (Saudia) logo seen displayed on a smartphone with an Artificial intelligence (AI) chip and symbol in the background.
A Saudi tech institute chooses the US over China
Sir Edward Byrne, recently named the head of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, or KAUST, signaled that the institution will prioritize US technology and cut off ties with China if it jeopardizes its access to chips made in the US.
Byrne, an Australian neuroscientist, served as president at King’s College London from 2014 to 2021, and he was named president of KAUST last month. KAUST’s researchers depend on high-end chips from US companies such as Nvidia and AMD to train and run powerful artificial intelligence models and applications.
Both the US and China have vied for power in the Arabian peninsula, but the US has a clear advantage with most of the top chip and AI companies in the world — as well as strict export controls for US companies shipping to China or intermediaries.
Byrne is following the lead of others in the kingdom. In May, the chief executive officer of the Saudi Public Investment Fund-backed fund Alat also said that if asked to choose between the US and China, the fund would divest from China.
At a global AI summit in Riyadh last month, the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority recently announced a deal to buy 5,000 Nvidia graphics chips to help develop an Arabic large language model, pending US government approval. The future of Saudi tech depends on the US and, it seems, the government and its most important institutions are signaling that while they don’t want to choose sides, the answer is clear as to who would win if they did.
Tourists visit the Torre de Belem (Belem Tower) in Lisbon, Portugal on October 19, 2021.
Hard Numbers: No tax for young Portuguese, Milton's death toll, Saudis fail at UN Human Rights Council, Nobel winners, UN wants its money back, US inflation cools
0: Portugal's government has proposed a novel plan to stem the flow of talented young people exiting the country for brighter job prospects in other countries. Beginning in 2025, young people earning up to €28,000 ($30,600) a year would pay zero income tax for their first year of work. They’d then get a 75% tax exemption from the second to the fifth year, 50% between the sixth and ninth years, and 25% in the 10th year.
12: More than 2 million Floridians still have no power as a result of Hurricane Milton, and the storm has been linked to at least 12 deaths, mostly on the eastern side of the Sunshine State.
7: On Wednesday,Saudi Arabia came up short in its bid to win a seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council, a setback for the kingdom’s bid to remake its image. The Asia-Pacific group of candidates, which included Saudi Arabia, had six candidates vying for five seats. The Saudis won 117 votes, seven fewer than the fifth-place Marshall Islands.
121: Novelist Han Kang is the 121st winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature — and the first South Korean author to win the award. Kang was lauded for “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
105: The Japanese anti-nuclear weapons organization Nihon Hidankyo, a group of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors, has been awarded the 105th Nobel Peace Prize. The group received the honor early Friday “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again," said the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which has been issuing the prize since 1901.
58.8: A United Nations tribunal has ordered a former high-ranking official to repay the UN $58.8 million of the organization’s money which he steered towards a British businessman in crooked deals. Vitaly Vanshelboim, a 20-year veteran of the UN who is from Ukraine, is accused of receiving interest-free loans and a Mercedes, among other gifts.
2.4: US inflation fell to 2.4% in September. That’s an improvement from 2.5% in August but fell short of the 2.3% analysts expected. The drop in inflation may not be enough to justify a 50 basis point rate cut when the Federal Reserve meets in November.Saudi Arabia plays host to AI world
Riyadh has invited the world’s governments and technology companies to its Global AI Summit from Sept. 10-12. Having launched in 2020, the summit’s third edition is an opportunity for the Saudi government to assert itself as a regional and global power in artificial intelligence.
So far, it’s doing a “decent job,” said Alexa Parks, an associate in Eurasia Group’s Middle East and North Africa practice, noting how the Saudis are building more physical infrastructure (such as data centers and chip manufacturing capabilities) to support their broader ambition of becoming a regional tech and AI leader. Having an authoritarian government helps, Parks noted, pointing to Saudi Arabia’s nimble policy-making and stable leadership, which allow for stable, long-term investments in industry.
Metrics of success. Participation is key, and Parks said Saudi Arabia’s success is reflected in the number of major companies attending, including Huawei, Nvidia, and Microsoft, which are listed as partners for the event. “The presence of so many heavy hitters in the tech space at the summit is a real victory for Saudi Arabia’s AI ambitions and shows how seriously many in the tech sector are taking Riyadh and its AI and tech goals,” she said.
But the US and China will be butting heads in Riyadh as they vie for influence in the region, especially with Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Last year, the influential Emirati fund G42 cut ties with China to appease the US. In May, Amit Midha, the chief executive officer of the Saudi fund Alat, which is supported by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, said that if asked to choose between the US and China, the fund would divest from China. That came mere months after Alat signed a $200 million partnership with Dahua Technology for surveillance technology for the kingdom’s smart cities projects.
While neither the US nor Chinese government is attending in an official capacity, according to the summit’s website, their top companies’ leaders certainly are. Parks is watching to see if Alat or other funds ink deals with American or Chinese companies at the summit as a sign of how the tides are turning. We’ll report back next week on any significant developments.
“Any agreements that emerge between Alat and American tech companies concerning smart cities during this summit,” she said, “could signal a more concerted American effort to try and start pushing Chinese tech companies out of the Saudi smart city space.”
The dangers of sportswashing for the Olympics
Should there be a limit on foreign investment in professional sports? Sportswashing—when a government uses sports to improve its country’s reputation, distract from human rights abuses, or political controversies—has become a major problem in athletics and pro sports. But can governments do anything to stop it?
Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins joined Ian Bremmer on GZERO World ahead of the Olympic Games in Paris to talk about politics, sports and how they overlap. Saudi Arabia has invested billions of dollars in the last few years in sports like golf and tennis to help burnish its global reputation as a modern, forward-looking country. Sportswashing isn’t just a moral issue but also a political one, Jenkins points out, because the more foreign money that gets entangled in domestic companies, the more difficult it is for governments to draw a red line. Jenkin also addresses the NBA’s complex relationship with China on issues like Hong Kong, another example of how financial ties can lead to compromising on democratic values, a position Jenkins calls “the anaconda in the chandelier.”
Watch full episode: The politics of the Paris Olympics
Season 7 of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, launches nationwide on public television stations (check local listings).
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Politics, power, and the Paris Olympics: Insight from WashPo sports columnist Sally Jenkins
Listen: The 2024 Summer Olympic Games kick off in Paris this week as the world’s most elite athletes representing more than 200 countries gather in the French capital to compete for gold. Over the next two weeks, we’ll see triumphant wins, heartbreaking losses, superhuman feats of strength, and touching displays of international sportsmanship. But politics loom large at the Olympics, threatening to overshadow the City of Light’s big celebration. Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins joins Ian Bremmer on the GZERO World Podcast to discuss the biggest stories heading into the 2024 Olympics, including the ban on Russia’s Olympic Committee, calls for Israeli athletes to compete under a neutral flag, and security concerns at what Jenkins calls “the most sprawling and urban Olympics in history.” They also dig into the problem with Saudi sportswashing, the NBA’s financial interest in China, and a transformative WNBA season that’s bringing more eyeballs to games than ever before.
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.
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PA via Reuters The Princess of Wales attends Trooping the Colour, London.
Hard Numbers: Kate steps out, Wash your hands in Tokyo, Hajj heat proves deadly, Sudan’s towns being burned, LA wildfire scorches acres
75: King Charles III celebrated his 75th birthday (actually Nov. 14) with the traditional “Trooping of the Colours” ceremony and birthday parade on Saturday — but it was Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales, who stole the show with her first public appearance in months. Both Kate and Charles have been dealing with cancer diagnoses, and the princess recently said she expects a few more months of treatment.
977: Japanese health authorities are raising the alarm over an alarming spike in patients with a “flesh-eating bacteria” that can kill within 48 hours if left untreated, with 977 cases reported between January and June. That’s as many as were reported in all of 2023, and with a mortality rate of around 30%, doctors are urging people to wash their hands carefully as the best first line of defense.
14: At least 14 Jordanian pilgrims have perished during the Hajj in Saudi Arabia, and at least another 17 are missing as an intense heatwave has made the annual religious event riskier than usual. Temperatures in Mecca are expected to reach 116 degrees Fahrenheit (47 C) on Monday.
50: New analysis by the Centre for Information Resilience of NASA satellite images shows that the parties in Sudan’s ongoing civil war have deliberately burned at least 50 villages, and possibly as many as 235, largely in the Darfur region. The Rapid Support Forces have been systematically targeting Black ethnicities in the region, particularly the Masalit people, and setting fire to villages as part of a strategy of ethnic cleansing.
10,000: Speaking of fires, a wildfire has blazed over 10,000 acres near Los Angeles, forcing the evacuation of 1,200 people from the Hungry Valley recreation area. The inferno was not contained at the time of writing, and authorities say hot, dry winds are hampering efforts to combat it.