geneva_convenience

The approvals were required under Israel’s Land Law because Nvidia is a foreign-controlled company. The deal will allow the global technology giant to establish a new development campus on state land, allocated without a public tender and at a 51% discount.

The proposed 51% land discount is valued at tens of millions of shekels. Officials cited the significant economic impact on northern Israel, noting that thousands of employees would work directly at the campus and that hundreds of additional businesses are expected to benefit from providing services to the site.

According to the plan, Nvidia will build a unique, large-scale campus unlike any previously seen in Israel, modeled in part on the company’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California. The project is expected to span approximately 160,000 square meters and employ about 8,000 workers.

Nearly two months into the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, Israel continues to bar journalists from freely entering the Gaza Strip to report, despite a longstanding petition brought by journalists seeking access to the territory.

On Sunday, the Israeli Supreme Court gave the government an extension in responding to the petition, the ninth such delay since the case was filed in September 2024.

The Israeli government, which has yet to fully explain why it continues to bar journalists, is slated now to give its latest response on Dec. 21, according to court filings, a delay that could be extended further.

Far-right, pro-Israel candidate José Antonio Kast will become the next president of Chile after winning the second-round voting on Sunday with 60% of the votes.

Son of a former Nazi official, Kast will replace a Chilean administration led by Gabriel Boric, a vocal critic of Israel and the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to the point of stopping diplomatic relations months after the October 7 attacks.

Kast was one of the main opponents of Boric’s foreign affairs policy, and promised during his campaign that he “would rectify the mistakes made by Boric,” which he called “whims” and “tantrums” on more than one occasion.

“Chile's foreign relations are too relevant to prioritize the whims of a President over the interests of the Nation. Boric, once again, evidences his antisemitism by leaving Israel out of FIDAE [Santiago’s international air show], in an irresponsible and markedly ideological decision,” he posted on X in March 2024.

It’s likely you heard the surreal news that FIFA President Gianni Infantino awarded Donald Trump a “Peace Prize” amid the backdrop of protest outside the Kennedy Center.

It’s less likely that you heard about a far more serious announcement the previous week: that Infantino will be formally accused of aiding and abetting Israeli war crimes against Palestinians.

The ICC filing parties will include a group of Palestinian footballers, Palestinian clubs, land owners, and advocacy groups Irish Sport for Palestine, Scottish Sport for Palestine, and Just Peace Advocates, with support from an expert legal team.

According to a public statement from the filing parties, Infantino, as well as Union of European Football Association President Aleksander Čeferin, are facing accusations that FIFA and UEFA funded settlement clubs—that is, football clubs that operate on land illegally seized from Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

China has executed a former senior banker who was found guilty of taking more than 1.1 billion yuan (US$155 million) in bribes.

Bai Tianhui, the former general manager of the asset management firm China Huarong International Holdings, was executed on Tuesday after the Supreme People’s Court approved the sentence, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

The state-owned offshore unit Bai ran was taken over by Citic Group and renamed China Citic Financial Asset Management in January last year.

LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — Bolivia’s new right-wing government said Tuesday that it restored diplomatic relations with Israel, the latest sign of the dramatic geopolitical realignment underway in the South American country that was once among the most vocal critics of Israeli policies toward Palestinians.

Bolivian Foreign Minister Fernando Aramayo met his Israeli counterpart Gideon Saar in Washington and signed a declaration agreeing to revive bilateral ties, which Bolivia’s previous left-wing government severed two years ago over Israel’s devastating campaign against Hamas in Gaza.

Aramayo, as well as Bolivian Economy Minister José Gabriel Espinoza, launched this week into a whirlwind of meetings with American officials as their government works to warm long-chilly relations with the United States and unravel nearly two decades of hard-line, anti-Western policies under the Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS

When protests over Morales’ disputed 2019 reelection prompted him to resign under pressure from the military, a right-wing interim government took over and restored full diplomatic relations with the U.S. and Israel as it sought to undo many of Morales’ popular policies.

But 2020 elections brought the MAS party back to power with the presidency of Luis Arce, who in 2023 once again cut ties with Israel in protest over its military actions in Gaza.

A drone strike by Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) hit a kindergarten in South Kordofan, killing 50 people, including 33 children, the Sudan Doctors Network (SDN) said late on Friday.

The group said the RSF and its ally, Abdelaziz al-Hilu’s faction of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement - North (SPLM-N), on Thursday carried out “deliberate suicide-drone attacks" on the kindergarten and several civilian facilities in Kalogi town.

The SDN, a group that has been supporting civilians throughout the course of Sudan's war, said paramedics responding to the scene came under “a second, unexpected attack”.

You can use Thaura for everyday tasks like writing emails, doing homework, and researching online. It remembers your conversations, helps you create documents and code, and even searches the web for you. And it works seamlessly with your existing tools through full OpenAI SDK compatibility.

But what really makes Thaura different is what it doesn't do:

• It doesn't collect your data or spy on you
• It doesn't have political bias
• It doesn't water down the truth on sensitive topics

The Sudanese city of El Fasher resembles a “massive crime scene”, with large piles of bodies heaped throughout its streets as the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) work to destroy evidence of the scale of their massacre.

Six weeks after the RSF seized the city, corpses have been gathered together in scores of piles to await burial in mass graves or cremated in huge pits, analysis indicates.

While the final death toll of the massacre remains unclear, British MPs have been briefed that at least 60,000 have been murdered in El Fasher. Sarah Champion, chair of the Commons international development select committee, said: “Members received a private briefing on Sudan, at which one of the academics stated: ‘Our low estimate is 60,000 people have been killed there in the last three weeks.’”

As many as 150,000 residents of El Fasher remain unaccounted for since the city fell to the RSF. They are not thought to have left the city, and this grisly development comes amid increasingly gloomy speculation about their fate.

Ireland, Spain, Slovenia and the Netherlands will boycott next year’s Eurovision after Israel was given the all-clear to compete in the 2026 song contest despite calls by several participating broadcasters for its exclusion over the war in Gaza.

No vote on Israel’s participation was held on Thursday at the general assembly of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the body that organises the hugely popular international annual singing competition.

Instead, participating broadcasters voted only to introduce new rules designed to stop governments and third parties from disproportionately promoting songs to influence voters.

The testimony, collected by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), is the most recent of at least four reports of dogs being used in the sexual torture of detainees at the Sde Teiman facility and elsewhere.

“They know once they rape someone with a dog or with a stick that these people won’t be able to carry out their jobs or live their lives normally,” Basel Alsourani, international advocacy officer at PCHR, told Novara Media. “It’s part of their genocidal intention to destroy [Palestinians].”

“We were stripped completely. Soldiers brought dogs that climbed on us and urinated on me,” he said. “Then one of the dogs raped me – the dog… inserted its penis into my anus, while the soldiers kept beating and torturing us and spraying pepper spray in our faces.

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic PBC today announced it had made its first acquisition in acquiring developer tools startup Bun for an undisclosed price.

Founded in 2019, Bun offers an all-in-one JavaScript/TypeScript toolkit that aims to simplify and accelerate full-stack development. The company’s offering is similar in purpose to Node.js but also includes tools developers usually pull in separately, including a package manager, a bundler, a test runner and script runner, all shipped as a single executable.

Bun is built using the Zig programming language and leverages Apple’s JavaScriptCore under the hood to yield much faster startup times and lower memory usage compared with runtimes based on the V8 engine, the engine used by Node.js and others. Bun is often significantly faster in key developer workflows, such as package installation, build/bundling, test execution and runtime, making it appealing to Anthropic.