Trump threatens Houthi rebels that they’ll be ‘completely annihilated’ as airstrikes pound Yemen
Trump wrote on his Truth Social website that 'tremendous damage has been inflicted upon the Houthi barbarians'
On Wednesday, US strikes hit Yemen’s rebel-held capital Sanaa
Updated 19 March 2025
AP
DUBAI: US President Donald Trump threatened Yemen’s Houthi rebels on Wednesday that they’ll be “completely annihilated” as American airstrikes pounded locations under their control, while further pressuring the group’s main benefactor Iran.
Strikes hit Sanaa, Yemen’s rebel-held capital, as well as their stronghold of Saada in the country’s northwest on Wednesday night, the Houthi’s Al-Maisrah satellite news channel reported.
It also said strikes happened overnight Tuesday, though the US military has not offered a breakdown of places targeted since the airstrikes campaign began. The first strikes this weekend killed at least 53 people, including children, and wounded others.
As the strikes hit, Trump wrote on his Truth Social website that “tremendous damage has been inflicted upon the Houthi barbarians.”
“Watch how it will get progressively worse — It’s not even a fair fight, and never will be,” Trump added. “They will be completely annihilated!”
Meanwhile, Trump again warned Iran not to arm the Houthis, claiming without offering evidence that Tehran “has lessened its intensity on Military Equipment and General Support to the Houthis.”
“Iran must stop the sending of these Supplies IMMEDIATELY,” he wrote.
Iran had no immediate response to Trump’s post.
The Islamic Republic has long armed the Houthis, who are members of Islam’s minority Shiite Zaydi sect that ruled Yemen for 1,000 years until 1962.
Tehran routinely denies arming the rebels, despite physical evidence, numerous seizures and experts tying the weapons back to Iran. That’s likely because Tehran wants to avoid sanctions for violating a United Nations arms embargo on the Houthis.
The Houthi rebels attacked over 100 merchant vessels with missiles and drones, sinking two vessels and killing four sailors, from November 2023 until January this year when a ceasefire began in Gaza.
The campaign also greatly raised the Houthis’ profile in the wider Arab world and tamped down on public criticism against their human rights abuses and crackdowns on dissent and aid workers.
Remaining USAID staff fired, Trump says Myanmar will still get earthquake aid
Thousands of USAID staff and Foreign Service officers assigned to the agency learned in an internal memo that all positions not required by law would be eliminated in July and September
Updated 6 min 17 sec ago
Reuters
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump’s administration told Congress on Friday it would cut nearly all remaining jobs at the US Agency for International Development and shut the agency, even as Trump promised that the US would provide assistance to Myanmar following a devastating earthquake.
Humanitarian aid experts expressed alarm at the new cuts to an agency whose humanitarian aid has gained Washington influence and saved lives across the globe for more than 60 years. USAID plays a major role in coordinating earthquake assistance.
Thousands of USAID staff and Foreign Service officers assigned to the agency learned in an internal memo that all positions not required by law would be eliminated in July and September.
The memo reviewed by Reuters was sent to staff by Jeremy Lewin, the agency’s acting deputy administrator and a member of billionaire Elon Musk’s job-cutting Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE oversaw a first round of cuts to USAID last month.
The State Department notification to Congress of the job cuts, also seen by Reuters, said USAID missions worldwide would be closed and the agency’s remaining functions would be folded into State.
Cuts at the agency have thrown humanitarian efforts around the world into turmoil. The latest notice came on the day that a powerful earthquake hit Thailand and Myanmar, toppling buildings and killing scores of people. USAID has historically played a major role in coordinating disaster relief efforts.
A US appeals court on Friday
ruled that Musk and DOGE can keep making cuts to USAID while they appeal a lower court order that had barred them from doing so.
US Representative Gregory Meeks, top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement that closing USAID was illegal and aimed at withdrawing the US “from its global leadership role with as much cruelty and disruption as possible.”
The exact number of personnel being fired was not immediately available. As of March 21, there were 869 US direct hire personnel on active duty and working, while 3,848 others were on paid administrative leave, according to Stand Up for Aid, a grassroots advocacy group.
The terminations also included thousands of Foreign Service officers on assignment to USAID around the globe, according to a source familiar with the matter.
In his memo, Lewin said agency personnel worldwide would shortly receive emailed termination notices giving them the choice of being fired on July 1 or September 2.
Over the next three months, the State Department would assume USAID’s remaining “life-saving and strategic aid programming,” he said, adding that USAID personnel will not automatically be transferred to the department, which would conduct “a separate and independent hiring process.”
Trump in January ordered a 90-day freeze of all US foreign aid and a review of whether aid programs were aligned with his policy. He claimed without evidence that Musk had found fraud at the agency, which he said was run by “radical left lunatics.”
Musk and DOGE gained access to USAID’s payment and email systems, froze many payments and told much of its staff they were being placed on leave. On February 3, Musk wrote on X that he had “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
On Friday, a statement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the State Department had notified the US Congress of its intent to reorganize USAID, saying the agency had “strayed from its original mission long ago.”
“We are reorienting our foreign assistance programs to align directly with what is best for the United States and our citizens,” Rubio said.
The decision to cut the remaining USAID jobs sparked concern among humanitarian aid experts, who said the firings and funding cuts would prevent a concerted US response to the earthquake that hit Myanmar and Thailand.
In a post on X, Jeremy Konyndyk, a former USAID official who is president of Refugees International, called the move “a total abdication of decades of US leadership in the world.”
He said the firings will cut “the last remnants of the team that would have mobilized a USAID disaster response” to the earthquake.
Trump on Friday said he had spoken with officials in Myanmar about the earthquake and that the US would provide assistance.
State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said the changes at USAID would not affect the administration’s ability to deploy a Disaster Assistance Response Team, or DART, adding she could not give a timeline.
The former USAID disaster response chief told Reuters the Trump administration’s massive personnel and funding cuts have “kneecapped” the agency’s ability to send disaster response teams to Thailand and Myanmar, opening the way to China and other US rival countries.
“I suspect we will see very shortly Chinese teams showing up, if they haven’t already, possibly Turkish, Russian, Indian teams really making their presence known in support of people that are really suffering right now in Thailand and Burma, and the US won’t be there,” said Sarah Charles, who served as assistant USAID administrator for humanitarian affairs until February 2024, using the former name of Myanmar.
Charles said contracts with urban search and rescue teams from Los Angeles and Virginia had been “turned back on” after being cut.
But, she said commercial contracts for transporting those teams remained cut and non-governmental aid groups that normally would provide emergency water, sanitation and medical help had laid off staff or run out of funds due to Trump’s foreign aid freeze.
“It’s really devastating to watch in real time,” she said.
Rubio said earlier this month that more than 80 percent of all USAID programs had been canceled.
SAN FRANCISCO: Elon Musk on Friday said his artificial intelligence startup xAI is buying his social networking platform X in a deal valuing the company once known as Twitter at $33 billion.
“This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach,” Musk said in a post on his social network.
X has more than 600 million users, and its future is “intertwined” with that of xAI, launched two years ago, according to Musk.
“Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk said of combining the two companies.
“This will allow us to build a platform that doesn’t just reflect the world but actively accelerates human progress.”
The companies are being combined in an all-stock deal that values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion, factoring in the social network’s $12 billion debt.
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late 2022 in a transaction that included debt and launched xAI the following year, spending billions of dollars on high-end Nvidia chips for the venture.
xAI in February released the latest version of its chatbot, Grok 3, which the billionaire hopes will find traction in a highly competitive sector contested by the likes of ChatGPT and China’s DeepSeek.
Musk has promoted Grok 3 as “scary smart,” with 10 times the computational resources of its predecessor that was released in August last year.
Grok 3 is also going up against OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT — pitting Musk against collaborator-turned-arch rival Sam Altman.
Musk and Altman were among the 11-person team that founded OpenAI in 2015.
Created as a counterweight to Google’s dominance in artificial intelligence, the project got initial funding from Musk.
Musk left three years later, and then in 2022 OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT created a global technology sensation — which made Altman a tech world star.
Their relationship has become increasingly toxic and litigious ever since.
X’s billionaire owner, the world’s richest person, is a major financial backer of US President Donald Trump and heads a Department of Government Efficiency that has been slashing the ranks of government employees.
Industry analysts at Emarketer this week forecast that ad revenue at X will grow this year as brands fear retaliation by politically connected Musk if they don’t spend on the platform.
“Many advertisers may view spending on X as a cost of doing business in order to mitigate potential legal or financial repercussions,” said Emarketer principal analyst Jasmine Enberg.
Offensive Iraq-Palestine World Cup qualifier video ‘fabricated,’ says Jordan Football Association
Fake video shared widely on social media claimed to show Jordanian fans chanting offensive slogans at the Iraqi players and supporters
Association says it verified the video was fabricated and is dismayed that some people seem set on inciting conflict, extremism and hatred among sports fans
Updated 51 min 25 sec ago
Arab News
AMMAN: The Jordanian Football Association expressed regret on Friday over a video widely shared on social media this week that appeared to show Jordanian fans chanting offensive slogans during a World Cup qualifier between Iraq and Palestine.
The footage was fabricated, it said.
The video, which claimed to show Jordanian fans directing insulting chants at the Iraqi players and supporters, began to spread online after Palestine defeated Iraq 2-1 in the match at the Amman International Stadium on Tuesday. It provoked heated exchanges online among the two sets of fans.
The JFA said it regretted the fabricated video and affirmed the depth of the historical, deep-rooted ties between the Jordanian and Iraqi peoples, which it said could not be damaged by people who act in ways that do not reflect true sporting values, the Jordan News Agency reported on Friday.
The association said it had verified the video was fake, and was dismayed that some individuals seem set on inciting conflict, extremism and hatred among sports fans. It urged supporters in Jordan to avoid being drawn into online exchanges of disrespectful remarks that “do not reflect the values of Jordanians.”
It praised the efforts of Jordanian and Iraqi sports journalists who had attempted to alert their followers on social media to the fact that the video was fake and urge them not to fall victim to such “provocative and inciteful” videos.
The association also reminded fans of the tremendous efforts made by Prince Ali bin Hussein, the president of the JFA, to help lift a long-running FIFA ban on international games in Iraq, and that Jordan had played Iraq in 2017 in the first international game played at Basra International Stadium, which was also the first international game to take place in the country in four years.
The JFA added: “While we support our national team in its quest for direct qualification to the World Cup with all our capabilities, we emphasize the importance of adhering to the spirit of sportsmanship and the depth of shared Arab relations.
“We wish all other Arab teams success in their journey in the 2026 World Cup qualifiers.”
How Saudi Arabia’s Circular Carbon Economy Framework is setting a global benchmark for emissions reduction
The Kingdom aims to achieve net-zero emissions by 2060 through its G20-backed strategy
NEOM is a living lab for CCE, integrating zero-carbon infrastructure and smart energy systems
Updated 26 min 21 sec ago
Lama Alhamawi
RIYADH: Introduced during Saudi Arabia’s G20 presidency, the Circular Carbon Economy Framework has gained significant traction, advancing emissions cuts, renewable energy investments, and carbon capture efforts.
In 2020, G20 leaders endorsed the framework to promote a sustainable, cost-effective approach to addressing climate change while ensuring clean energy access.
Building on this, the Kingdom launched its Circular Carbon Economy National Program in 2021 to reduce and offset carbon dioxide emissions through strategies of reduction, recycling, reuse, and removal.
“With the creation of the Circular Carbon Economy National Program, Saudi Arabia has made several critical decisions that directly contribute to sustainability and climate change mitigation,” Jorge Gascon, a chemical engineering professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, told Arab News.
These decisions include “policy integration, renewable energy investment, and carbon capture initiatives.”
The program also recognizes the importance of natural carbon absorption and sets an ambitious goal to sustainably manage, restore, and preserve 1 billion hectares of degraded land by 2040 using all available mitigation strategies.
Jorge Gascon
“Saudi Arabia has embedded the CCE framework into its national policies, notably through the Saudi Green Initiative,” said Gascon.
“The SGI aims to achieve net-zero emissions by 2060 through implementing CCE principles and accelerating the transition to a green economy through emissions reduction, afforestation, and protection of land and sea.”
He noted that Saudi Arabia is shifting its energy mix toward sustainability, with a goal of 50 percent renewable energy.
DID YOU KNOW?
• Saudi Arabia has launched more than 30 Circular Carbon Economy initiatives across its energy system.
• In 2021, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced plans to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2060.
• The circular economy reduces fossil fuel reliance, cuts greenhouse gas emissions, and boosts energy security.
On carbon capture, Gascon said: “The Kingdom is engaged in international advocacy, notably during its G20 presidency and beyond, as well as various collaborative efforts and knowledge-sharing initiatives through institutions such as KAPSARC and KAUST.”
KAUST is a partner in the development of the CCE Strategy, along with Aramco, the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center, AEON Strategy, and numerous other organizations.
The CCE’s development aligns with earlier efforts to promote sustainability. At the Future Investment Initiative forum in 2019, Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman discussed the CCE.
The following year, at the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Riyadh, King Salman introduced the National Program for the Circular Carbon Economy during the “Safeguarding the Planet” event, urging global cooperation to address climate change “by developing the economy and increasing human prosperity.”
"Family Photo" for annual G20 Summit World Leaders is projected onto Salwa Palace in At-Turaif. (AN file)
Before the national program, Saudi Arabia had many initiatives focusing on carbon capture and conversion into valuable raw materials.
“Numerous areas of research at KAUST intersect with CCE, including catalysis, clean combustion, advanced membranes, and porous materials,” Gascon said. “KAUST supported a parallel Circular Carbon Initiative to capture the contributing science and technology.”
He added: “CCE builds on the principles of the circular economy while recognizing that removal must play a key role in achieving this circularity.
“In this way, a 4R (reduce, reuse, recycle, remove) approach is proposed to manage carbon emissions effectively, resulting in a closed loop that minimizes waste and CO2 emissions.”
Illustration image courtesy of Aramco.com
Gascon highlighted that “the paradigm shift of the CCE occurs when we recognize carbon as a friend rather than an enemy.”
Through the Circular Carbon Economy Framework and various energy initiatives, Saudi Arabia is strategically establishing itself as a global leader in CCE.
This position is backed by the Kingdom’s abundant natural resources, significant technological investments and a strong commitment to sustainable development.
Majed Al-Qatari, a sustainability leader, ecological engineer, and UN youth ambassador, said that since the G20 launch of the CCE framework, “Saudi Arabia has introduced relevant and impactful initiatives such as the Saudi Green Initiative and the National Renewable Energy Program.”
He told Arab News that “these bold efforts demonstrate tangible progress in reducing emissions, investing in renewable energy and deploying carbon capture technologies.”
Al-Qatari cited NEOM, one of the Kingdom’s flagship projects, as a “real-world testing ground for these efforts, embedding zero-carbon infrastructure, smart energy systems, and net-zero mobility.”
Ecological engineer and UN youth ambassador Majed Al-Qatari. (AN file)
He added: “In 2025 and beyond, I expect further scaling of blue and green hydrogen projects, along with enhanced regional cooperation in carbon management.”
Al-Qatari also highlighted the four pillars of the CCE framework: reduce, reuse, recycle, and remove.
“The Kingdom applies this through initiatives like energy efficiency standards (reduce), CO2 utilization in industrial processes (reuse), circular water reuse in agriculture (recycle), and large-scale carbon capture and storage projects such as those by Aramco/SABIC (remove),” he said.
Asked what he believes was the motivating factor for Saudi Arabia’s adoption of the Circular Carbon Economy Framework during the G20, Al-Qatari said: “Saudi Arabia sought to play a leading role in advancing a global dialogue that aligns climate goals with economic mandates.
“The CCE framework was introduced in order to showcase an inclusive, technologically neutral mechanism that takes into account relevant pathways to mitigate carbon emissions without compromising energy security or economic development.”
Al-Qatari noted that the framework has become a global reference model, particularly for hydrocarbon-reliant economies.
“The framework offers a transition pathway that is practical and inclusive of conventional sources of energy like oil and gas while advancing climate goals,” he said. “Other jurisdictions are considering the Kingdom’s model in order to customize it for their local contexts.”
Saudi Green Initiative illustration
Looking to the future, Al-Qatari highlighted Saudi Arabia’s target of net-zero emissions by 2060. “Such targets will be fostered by innovation, renewables, hydrogen, carbon management, and circular practices,” he said.
“Future goals would involve expanding circularity practices into other sectors and materials such as water, and waste sectors, while also crystallizing local environmental, social, and governance markets and strengthening regulatory frameworks for corporate sustainability and sustainable finance.”
When asked about the role of innovation and technology in advancing CCE, Gascon stressed KAUST’s importance in research and development.
“KAUST is pioneering breakthroughs in CO2 capture, including direct air capture, cryogenic CO2 capture, and other point-source technologies, as well as nature-based carbon sequestration strategies and geological storage solutions,” he said.
KAUST is pioneering breakthroughs in CO2 capture, including direct air capture, cryogenic CO2 capture, and other point-source technologies. (KAUST photos)
“It also drives advancements in synthetic fuels, such as clean ammonia and hydrogen carriers, alongside the integration of renewable energy and the optimization of industrial processes.
“KAUST collaborates with industry leaders, including Saudi Aramco and NEOM, to accelerate the deployment of carbon capture and sustainable fuel technologies.”
Gascon emphasized that KAUST’s research and public-private partnerships align with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 sustainability goals.
“Implementing national policies, such as Vision 2030, ensures strategic alignment with circular economy principles, focusing on reducing pollution and improving resource utilization,” he said.
Brazil fires coach Dorival Júnior after worst defeat in World Cup qualifying
Júnior’s replacement has yet to be picked
Brazil are fifth in South American qualifying for the 2026 World Cup
Updated 29 March 2025
AP
SAO PAULO: Brazil coach Dorival Júnior was fired on Friday after 14 months amid poor results and disappointing performances from the national team.
Júnior’s sacking by Brazilian Football Confederation president Ednaldo Rodrigues came three days after a 4-1 defeat to bitter rival Argentina in Buenos Aires, Brazil’s heaviest defeat in a World Cup qualifier.
Júnior’s replacement has yet to be picked.
Brazil are fifth in South American qualifying for the 2026 World Cup. The top six qualify automatically.
Under the 62-year-old Júnior, Brazil won seven matches, drew another seven, and lost two. The team scored 25 goals and conceded 17.
In the Copa America last year, Brazil were eliminated in the quarterfinals by Uruguay on penalties.
Rodrigues was just re-elected on Monday to head the confederation to 2030. In 2023, he bet on Real Madrid coach Carlo Ancelotti to take over one year later. While waiting for Ancelotti, Brazil retained Fernando Diniz as their coach.
Diniz was fired in January 2024 after six matches on the job after Ancelotti extended his contract in Spain.
