News in Brief

Date: 12 August 2025 - 21:46

News ID: ۱۴۲۴۹۴

WASHINGTON/BEIJING (Reuters) -- The United States and China have extended a tariff truce for another 90 days, staving off triple-digit duties on each other’s goods as U.S. retailers get ready to ramp up inventories ahead of the critical end-of-year holiday season. U.S. President Donald Trump announced on his Truth Social platform on Monday that he had signed an executive order suspending the imposition of higher tariffs until 12:01 a.m. EST (0501 GMT) on November 10, with all other elements of the truce to remain in place. China’s Commerce Ministry issued a parallel pause on extra tariffs early on Tuesday, also postponing for 90 days the addition of U.S. firms it had targeted in April to trade and investment restriction lists. The new order prevents U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods from shooting up to 145%, while Chinese tariffs on U.S. goods were set to hit 125% - rates that would have resulted in a virtual trade embargo between the two countries. It locks in place - at least for now - a 30% tariff on Chinese imports, with Chinese duties on U.S. imports at 10%.

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GENEVA (Reuters) -- United Nations investigators said on Tuesday they have found evidence of systematic torture by Myanmar security forces and identified some of the senior perpetrators. The Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM), formed in 2018 to analyze evidence of serious violations of international law, said victims were subject to beatings, electric shocks, strangulations and other forms of torture like the removal of fingernails with pliers. The torture sometimes resulted in death, the report said. Children, who are often unlawfully detained as proxies for their missing parents, were among those tortured, it said. The list of perpetrators identified so far includes high-level commanders, the report said.

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ISLAMABAD (Reuters) -- Pakistan’s military said on Tuesday it had killed 50 militants along the border with neighboring Afghanistan over four days, in a restive southwestern region home to key Chinese Belt and Road projects. The militants were killed in an operation started on Thursday, it said in a statement, in Balochistan, where both takfiri militants and separatist insurgents demanding a bigger share of the province’s mineral wealth operate.

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BEIJING (Reuters) -- Chinese authorities have urged local companies to avoid using Nvidia’s H20 processors, particularly for government-related purposes, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Authorities have sent notices to a range of firms discouraging use of the less-advanced semiconductors, with the guidance taking a particularly strong stance against the use of Nvidia’s H20s for any government or national security-related work by state enterprises or private companies, the report said. Nvidia said in July that its products have no “backdoors” that would allow remote access or control after China raised concerns over potential security risks in the chipmaker’s H20 artificial intelligence chip. U.S. President Donald Trump suggested on Monday that he might allow Nvidia to sell a scaled-down version of its next-generation advanced GPU chip, Blackwell, in China, despite deep-seated fears in Washington that China could harness U.S. AI capabilities to supercharge its military.

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MADRID (AFP) -- A man died from burns and thousands of people were forced to flee as wildfires swept through parts of Spain on Tuesday, fuelled by strong winds during a searing heatwave. Hundreds of residents in Tres Cantos were evacuated from their homes. “In barely 40 minutes, the fire advanced six kilometers,” Carlos Novillo, Madrid’s regional environment chief, told reporters. Elsewhere, about 2,000 people were evacuated from hotels and homes near the popular beaches of Tarifa in the southern region of Andalusia. In the northwestern region of Castile and Leon, more than 30 blazes were reported Monday, including one threatening Las Medulas, a UNESCO World Heritage site known for its ancient Roman gold mines.

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PARIS (AFP) – French President Emmanuel Macron signed into law a modified bill that bars a bee-killing pesticide from being reintroduced after a petition signed by more than two million people. The legislation has been at the heart of a major debate in France and sparked a student-initiated petition that was wildly successful. Critics of the bill, adopted in July in a fractured lower house of parliament, say it was rushed through without proper debate. The law was published in the government’s official journal on Tuesday after the Constitutional Council, the country’s highest court, struck down the contested provision about the reintroduction of acetamiprid. The court said that the insecticides known as neonicotinoids posed “risks to human health” and was unconstitutional as it undermined the right to live in a balanced and healthy environment as guaranteed in the country’s environmental charter.