Town Hall News

MOSCOW/KYIV (Reuters) -Russia fired cruise missiles at Kyiv on Tuesday and paraded troops across Moscow’s Red Square for its annual celebration of victory in World War Two, pared back amid shortages of manpower and arms at the front after a failed winter campaign in Ukraine. In a fiery 10-minute speech in front of the Kremlin, President Vladimir Putin thundered against “Western global elites” and said civilisation was at “a decisive […]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States strongly encourages the World Health Organization to invite Taiwan to participate as an observer at its annual meeting in Geneva from May 21-30, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Tuesday. “Inviting Taiwan as an observer would exemplify the WHO’s commitment to an inclusive, ‘health for all’ approach to international health cooperation,” Blinken said in a statement. U.S. support for Taiwanese participation is in […]

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – The world’ largest economies grouped in the G20 will hold their annual heads of state or government summit next year in Rio de Janeiro, state Governor Claudio Castro said. Brazil will take over the rotating presidency of the G20 from India on Dec. 1. “It’s official,” Castro announced in a Twitter post on Monday night. The meeting of economic power houses will take place Nov. […]

By Stephen Nellis (Reuters) – Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup backed by Google owner Alphabet Inc, on Tuesday disclosed the set of written moral values that it used to train and make safe Claude, its rival to the technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The moral values guidelines, which Anthropic calls Claude’s constitution, draw from several sources, including the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights and even Apple Inc’s data privacy rules. […]

By Jody Godoy NEW YORK (Reuters) – Ishan Wahi, a former Coinbase Global Inc product manager, was sentenced on Tuesday to two years in prison in what U.S. prosecutors have called the first insider trading case involving cryptocurrency. U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska sentenced Ishan Wahi, 32, in Manhattan federal court after the defendant pleaded guiltyin February to two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. It is one of […]

BEIRUT (Reuters) – From bloody frontlines to buzzing construction sites and even high-end parties, the amphetamine commonly known as captagon – has entrenched itself in the Middle East. Curbing the captagon trade has become a key demand by Arab states seeking to restore ties with Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, whose government is accused of benefiting from the trade. Here is a look at the drug’s history and current use. FROM […]

By Raphael Satter and Christopher Bing WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The FBI has sabotaged a suite of malicious software used by elite Russian spies, U.S. authorities said on Tuesday, providing a glimpse of the digital tug-of-war between two cyber superpowers. Senior law enforcement officials said FBI technical experts had identified and disabled malware wielded by Russia’s FSB security service against an undisclosed number of American computers, a move they hoped would deal […]

By Laura Matthews and Iain Withers NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) – The dollar clung to modest gains against major currencies on Tuesday but remained rangebound as traders awaited U.S. debt ceiling talks and tried to digest how a host of conflicting economic data will influence monetary policy and global growth. Chinese imports contracted sharply in April from a year earlier while exports grew more slowly than in March, which had a […]

By Raphael Satter and Christopher Bing WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The FBI has sabotaged a suite of malicious software used by elite Russian spies, U.S. authorities said Tuesday, providing a glimpse of the digital tug-of-war between two of the world’s cyber superpowers. Senior law enforcement officials said technical experts at the FBI had identified and disabled malware wielded by Russia’s FSB security service against an undisclosed number of American computers – […]