World Echo

The United Arab Emirates is quietly revising plans for a 5-gigawatt AI data centre project – one of the biggest outside the US – after the Iran ​war prompted a rethink of how and where critical infrastructure should be built, six people familiar with the matter told Reuters. Originally envisaged as a 10-square-mile (26-square-kilometre) campus in Abu Dhabi, the project will ‌now likely comprise a network of data centres spread across the UAE, according to four of the sources, who all spoke on condition of anonymity. Authorities are also considering ways to better protect the facilities from drone and missile attacks, including with air defences and by building some underground, they said. The likely modifications to the project’s blueprint have not previously been reported. Data centre project is central to UAE's global AI ambitions Plans for the UAE-US AI Campus, which is being built in partnership with American tech companies, were announced du...

The lightning Houthi advance down Yemen's Red Sea coast this week ​came with direct guidance from Iran's Revolutionary Guards seeking to open a new front in Iran's war with the U.S., according to Yemeni government, Iranian and ‌regional sources. By seizing the southwestern port city of Mocha, the Houthis have strengthened their chokehold on the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a key waterway whose disruption further constricts global energy supplies after Iran blockades the Strait of Hormuz. Six months into the wider regional conflict between the Houthis' Iranian allies and the United States, the group now looks focused on consolidating that grip on the strait even as opposing government forces backed by Saudi Arabia focus on an offensive in ​the north. Two Iranian sources claimed that Iran told the Houthis last week to escalate their attacks on Saudi Arabia and promised more funding, weapons and senior officers to help them...

When US President Donald Trump campaigned for a second term in the White House, he promised to be a “president of peace” who would stop foreign wars, not start them. Now, a quarter-century after the September 11, 2001, attacks that triggered America’s global “war on terror,” he is entangled in an unpopular conflict of his own making that analysts say risks becoming his version of a “forever war." With the 9/11 anniversary at hand, Trump’s war against Iran is drawing comparisons in foreign policy circles to the ​long, divisive conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq that preceded it. It is also prompting questions about whether the US has again failed to learn the lessons of past conflicts or prepare a clear exit strategy. “Trump ‌has broken an important post-Iraq and Afghanistan constraint in Washington against launching another major, open-ended war in the Middle East,” said Sina Toossi of the Centre for International Po...

Israeli authorities are considering plans to build 1,670 new housing units in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission said late Wednesday. In a statement, the commission said the development came shortly after 12 Western countries decided to impose trade restrictions on products from Jewish settlements and called on Israel to halt settlement expansion. It said the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has approved 104 new Jewish settlements and established 160 agricultural settlement outposts since taking office in late 2022. The plans, which have reached the final approval stage, include 365 new housing units in the Maale Amos settlement southeast of Bethlehem and 200 in the Talmon settlement northwest of Ramallah. Read: FO welcomes UK's steps against Israel as 'clear rejection of illegal actions' in occupied Palestine The commission said the plans also include establishing thre...

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's daughter and apparent successor is believed to have a younger sibling, South Korea's spy agency said on Thursday, offering a more detailed view of the ruling family's structure. Seoul's spy agency has previously said Kim is believed to have three children, but there has been uncertainty about their order of birth. Kim's daughter, Kim Ju Ae, was first introduced to the public in 2022 when she accompanied her father to the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile. The Kim family has ruled North Korea with an iron grip for decades, and a cult of personality surrounding their "Paektu bloodline" dominates daily life in the diplomatically isolated country. Read: North Korea, Russia open their first road bridge "The National Intelligence Service currently assesses that Kim Ju Ae is being groomed as the successor and understands she has a younger sibling of unknown gender," the agency said in a state...

President George W Bush was jogging around a Florida golf course before dawn when I first saw him on September 11, 2001. As one of two Reuters correspondents travelling with Bush that day, I was covering what was expected to be a routine event with schoolchildren to promote his education policies. He had been president of the United States for less than eight months. Within hours, the untested Bush was confronting the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbour in 1941. The tragedy unfolded as Bush visited the Emma E Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida. As the president was meeting staff and students, I was in a nearby press centre set up for reporters. We watched a live television broadcast showing smoke pouring from one of the World Trade Centre twin towers in New York. It had been hit by a plane in what we initially assumed was an accident. Then, as we watched, a second plane struck. Bush was at the school, reading to children. Cameras captured the shocked...