Category: International

Archer Aviation on Thursday unveiled plans for a proposed air-taxi network in New York City, in partnership with United Airlines, as it seeks to tap into the airport commute market in Manhattan.

Shares of the air-taxi maker were up 7% in morning trading.

Archer plans to link Manhattan with nearby airports using its electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, Midnight — a four-passenger vehicle — designed to slash travel time from one-to-two hour drives to just 5-15 minutes.

Air-taxi startups are racing to commercialise eVTOL aircraft, betting on growing demand for faster, more sustainable urban transportation.

Backed by major airlines and defence contractors, these startups aim to ease congestion in crowded cities by offering short-haul flights between airports and urban centres.

Archer, backed by companies such as Stellantis and United Airlines, aims to leverage existing aviation infrastructure in the NYC region, with plans to establish vertiports at airports and helipads throughout the area.

“With its existing helicopter infrastructure, regulatory support and strong demand, New York could be one of the first markets for air taxis in the United States,” Archer CEO Adam Goldstein said.

The company’s flagship Midnight aircraft is yet to receive a “Type Certification” from the US aviation regulator.

Type Certification means an aircraft meets the Federal Aviation Administration’s design and safety standards. Once Archer receives the certification, it can integrate Midnight into service.

“Our strategic collaboration with Archer will be key to our efforts to build and optimise the infrastructure — such as real estate development, air space management and safety and security protocols — necessary to bring advanced air mobility to our customers,” said Andrew Chang, head of United Airlines Ventures.

United had previously placed an order for a fleet of Archer’s Midnight aircraft.

Archer said under its plans, passengers would book its flights as a complement to traditional airline travel.

United States President Donald Trump on Thursday hinted at a possible de-escalation in the ongoing tariff conflict between the US and China, which has unsettled global markets, and he signalled that a deal over the fate of social media platform TikTok may have to wait.

“I don’t want them to go higher because at a certain point you make it where people don’t buy,” Trump told reporters about tariffs at the White House.

“So, I may not want to go higher or I may not want to even go up to that level. I may want to go to less because you know you want people to buy and, at a certain point, people aren’t gonna buy.”

Trump’s remarks suggest a reduced likelihood of broad tariff increases on numerous countries,, following the market turmoil triggered by recently imposed tariffs.

On April 2, Trump introduced a 10% tariff on a wide range of imports but postponed further hikes while negotiations continue.

As tensions persist, tariffs on Chinese goods have surged to a staggering 145%, a response to China’s retaliatory measures. Although Beijing has indicated it will not engage in an escalating “numbers game with tariffs,” Trump’s comments reflect ongoing communication between the two nations.

While the two sides are in touch, sources told Reuters that free-flowing, high-level exchanges that would lead to a deal have largely been absent.

Speaking with reporters, Trump repeatedly declined to specify the nature of talks between the countries or whether they directly included Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Trump has repeatedly extended a legal deadline for China-based ByteDance to divest the US assets of the short video app used by 170 million Americans. On Thursday, he said a spin-off deal would likely wait until the trade issue is settled.

“We have a deal for TikTok, but it’ll be subject to China so we’ll just delay the deal ’til this thing works out one way or the other,” said Trump.

MIAMI: A mass shooting allegedly carried out by the son of a local deputy sheriff using her old service weapon left two people dead at a university in Florida, police in the southeastern US state said on Thursday.

Five people were hospitalised when the gunman – identified as Phoenix Ikner – rampaged through Florida State University, shooting at students, before he was shot and injured by local law enforcement.

The campus was locked down as gunfire erupted, with students ordered to shelter in place as first responders swarmed the site moments after the lunchtime shootings.

Leon County Sheriff Walt McNeil told reporters Ikner, 20, was a student at the university and the son of an “exceptional” 18-year member of his staff.

“Unfortunately, her son had access to one of her weapons, and that was one of the weapons that was found at the scene.”

He added that the suspect was part of Sheriff’s Office training programmes, meaning “it’s not a surprise to us that he had access to weapons.”

Ikner was taken to hospital after being shot. His condition was not immediately known.

Bystander footage aired by CNN appeared to show a young man walking on a lawn and shooting at people who were trying to get away.

Witnesses spoke of chaos as people began running through the sprawling campus as shots rang out near the student union.

“Everyone just started running out of the student union,” a witness named Wayne told local news station WCTV.

“About a minute later, we heard about eight to ten gunshots.”

The eyewitness said he saw one man who appeared to have been shot in the midsection.

“The whole entire thing was just surreal. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

“Everything was really quiet, then all chaotic.”

‘Make them take time’

The two people who died were not students, police said, but refused to give further details.

The university, a public institution with more than 40,000 students, cancelled all classes and told students who did not live on campus to leave.

FSU President Richard McCullough said the university was working to support those affected by the attack.

“This is a tragic day for Florida State University,” he said.

“We’re absolutely heartbroken by the violence that occurred on our campus earlier today.”

Student Sam Swartz told the Tallahassee Democrat he had been in the basement of the student union when the shooting started.

“Everyone started freaking out,” Swartz said, adding he had heard around ten shots.

A group of eight people huddled in a hallway and barricaded themselves with rubbish bins and plywood.

“I remember learning to do the best you can to make them take time,” Swartz said, adding that mass shooters are “just trying to get as many people” as they can.

Footage on social media showed a stream of young adults walking through corridors with their hands in the air as they evacuated the building.

Mass shootings are common in the United States, where a constitutional right to bear arms trumps demands for stricter rules.

That is despite widespread public support for tighter control on firearms, including restricting the sale of high-capacity clips and limiting the availability of automatic weapons of war.

President Donald Trump called the shooting “a shame, a horrible thing,” but insisted that Americans should retain unfettered access to guns.

“I’m a big advocate of the Second Amendment. I have been from the beginning. I protected it,” he said, referring to the part of the US Constitution gun advocates say protects firearm ownership.

“These things are terrible, but the gun doesn’t do the shooting – the people do.”

A tally by the non-profit Gun Violence Archive shows there have been at least 81 mass shootings – which it defines as four or more people shot – in the United States so far this year.

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump has said that China has “reached out a number of times” to the United States in an effort to restart talks on a possible trade deal, which he believes the two major economic powers is possible to defuse trade tensions.

“Yeah, we’re talking to China,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I would say they have reached out a number of times.” 

Trump confirmed that the talks had taken place since he increased tariffs on China to a staggering 145 percent, after Beijing responded to his sweeping “Liberation Day” global levies.

But Trump was evasive when asked if he had spoken directly with Chinese President Xi Jinping, despite having previously dropped several hints that he had.

“I’ve never said whether or not they’ve happened,” he said when asked about talks with Xi. “It’s just not appropriate.”

Pressed by reporters on whether Xi had reached out to him, Trump replied: “You’d think it was pretty obvious that he has, but we will talk about that soon.”

Trump’s administration is entrenched in a trade war of soaring reciprocal tariffs with superpower rival China—a feud that has rattled global markets.

“I think we’re going to make a very good deal with China,” he said at the White House earlier, as Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni visited for talks aimed at ending US tariffs on the European Union.

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump has said he does not see Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky as responsible for the war with Russia, as he also signalled that a long-awaited minerals deal with Kyiv could be signed next Thursday.

Trump has repeatedly made the false claim that Ukraine started the war and this week accused Zelensky of responsibility for “millions” of deaths.

“I don’t hold Zelensky responsible but I’m not exactly thrilled with the fact that that war started,” Trump said at the White House alongside visiting Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

“I’m not blaming him, but what I am saying is that I wouldn’t say he’s done the greatest job, OK? I am not a big fan.”

Zelensky earlier this week invited Trump to visit Ukraine to see the war devastation for himself, in a Sunday interview with CBS that Trump responded to with threats against the TV network.

His invitation followed a heated row at the White House in late February between the Ukrainian president, Trump and US Vice President JD Vance, which played out in front of the press.

Meloni told reporters, “We’ve been defending the freedom of Ukraine together, together we can build a just and lasting peace. We support your efforts.”

The far-right leader has thrown Italy’s weight behind European efforts to shore up Ukraine’s defences since the full-scale Russian invasion began in early 2022.

Trump added Thursday that a deal with Ukraine on extracting the war-wracked country’s strategic minerals could be reached next week.

Kyiv and Washington had been close to signing a deal until a February clash between Trump and Zelensky temporarily derailed work on the agreement.

“We have a minerals deal which I guess is going to be signed on Thursday… next Thursday. Soon. And I assume they’re going to live up to the deal. So we’ll see. But we have a deal on that,” Trump said.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told AFP that a deal is targeted for April 26.

Saudi Defence Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman arrived in Tehran on Thursday for meetings with officials in a visit ahead of weekend talks between Iran and the United States over the Iranian nuclear programme.

The defence minister delivered a message from Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Thursday, Iran’s state media reported without giving further details about the content of the message.

Iran and the US are set to hold a second round of talks in Rome this weekend about Tehran’s disputed uranium enrichment programme.

“Our belief is that the relationship between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Saudi Arabia is beneficial for both countries,” Iranian state media cited Khamenei as saying in the meeting. Khamenei voiced Tehran’s readiness to overcome obstacles in the way of improving ties with Riyadh.

Iran and Saudi Arabia agreed in a 2023 deal brokered by China to re-establish relations after years of hostility that had threatened stability and security in the Gulf and helped fuel conflicts in the Middle East from Yemen to Syria.

Saudi Arabia welcomed Iran’s nuclear talks with the US, saying it supported efforts to resolve regional and international disputes, in a statement published by the country’s official news agency on Saturday.

“Ties between the Saudi and Iranian armed forces have been improving since the Beijing agreement,” Iran’s armed forces chief of staff Mohammad Bagheri said after meeting the Saudi minister in Tehran, according to Iranian state media.

Russia on Thursday suspended its ban on the Taliban, which it had designated for more than two decades as a terrorist organisation, in a move that paves the way for Moscow to normalise ties with the leadership of Afghanistan.

No country currently recognises the Taliban government that seized power in August 2021 as US-led forces staged a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years of war. But Russia has been gradually building ties with the movement, which President Vladimir Putin said last year was now an ally in fighting terrorism.

The Taliban was outlawed by Russia as a terrorist movement in 2003. State media said the Supreme Court on Thursday lifted the ban with immediate effect.

Russia sees a need to work with the Taliban as it faces a major security threat from militant groups based in a string of countries from Afghanistan to the Middle East.

In March 2024, gunmen killed 145 people at a concert hall outside Moscow in an attack claimed by Daesh. US officials said they had intelligence indicating it was the Afghan branch of the group, Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), that was responsible.

The Taliban says it is working to wipe out the presence of Daesh in Afghanistan.

Western diplomats say the movement’s path towards wider international recognition is stalled until it changes course on women’s rights. The Taliban have closed high schools and universities to girls and women and placed restrictions on their movement without a male guardian. It says it respects women’s rights in line with its strict interpretation of Islamic law.

Discussions with the United States President Donald Trump’s team are progressing positively, the Kremlin said on Sunday but cautioned that immediate results are unlikely due to the extensive damage to US-Russia relations under the previous president, Joe Biden.

Trump, who aims to be seen as a peacemaker, has expressed a desire to end the ongoing war in Ukraine, which his administration now frames as a proxy conflict between the US and Russia — a view that aligns with Moscow’s perspective.

Following talks with President Vladimir Putin, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump said on Saturday that discussions aimed at ending the war may be going OK, but “there’s a point at which you just have to either put up or shut up”.

“Everything is going very well,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian state television’s most prominent Kremlin reporter, Pavel Zarubin, when asked about the differing views of the state of relations between Moscow and Washington.

Contacts were underway at several levels, Peskov said, including via the foreign ministry, intelligence agencies and Putin’s investment envoy Kirill Dmitriev.

“But, of course, it is impossible to expect any instant results,” Peskov said, citing what he called the damage done to bilateral relations under Biden.

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine triggered the worst confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis – which is considered to be the time when the two Cold War superpowers came closest to intentional nuclear war.

As Witkoff held talks with Putin on Friday in the former Russian imperial capital St. Petersburg about the search for a peace deal for Ukraine, Trump told Russia to “get moving”.

Putin was shown on state TV greeting Witkoff, who held his hand to his heart in greeting, at the start of the talks, and state news agencies later said they lasted over four hours.

Asked if a Putin-Trump meeting was getting nearer, the Kremlin’s Peskov said the two powers were “walking along this path together very patiently” but that trying to restore relations took serious and painstaking work.

His words suggested that such a meeting “requires more work, requires more time”.

European leaders and Ukraine describe the 2022 invasion as an imperial-style land grab by Putin, and European leaders have repeatedly demanded that Russia be defeated on the battlefield, although Moscow forces control nearly one-fifth of Ukraine.

Putin casts the war in Ukraine as part of a battle with a declining West, which he says humiliated Russia after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 by enlarging the NATO military alliance and encroaching on what he considers Moscow’s sphere of influence, including Ukraine.

WASHINGTON: In one of the first rounds of face-to-face negotiations since his barrage of duties on global imports roiled markets and stoked recession fears, President Donald Trump touted “big progress” in tariff talks with Japan on Wednesday.

Viewing them as a preliminary, fact-finding mission, a sign that Trump wants to keep tight control over negotiations with dozens of countries expected over coming days and weeks, Japan had not expected the president to get involved in Wednesday’s talks.

Tokyo had also been hoping to limit the scope of the talks to trade and investment matters. But announcing his involvement early Wednesday, Trump said thorny issues including the amount Japan pays towards hosting US troops were among discussion topics.

“A Great Honour to have just met with the Japanese Delegation on Trade. Big Progress!” Trump said in a social media message that contained no details of the discussions.

Opposite Trump was Ryosei Akazawa, a close confidant of Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba who serves in the relatively junior cabinet position of economic revitalisation minister.

Speaking to reporters after the talks, Akazawa gave few details but said the parties had agreed to hold a second meeting later this month and that Trump had said getting a deal with Japan was a “top priority”.

Exchange rates, which the Trump administration has said Japan and others manipulate to get a trade advantage, were not part of the talks, Akazawa added.

The dollar strengthened against the yen JPY=EBS after his remarks on forex, up around 0.5% on the day. Tokyo denies it manipulates its yen currency lower to get make its exports cheaper.

Akazawa held a 50-minute meeting with Trump at the White House before another session with his Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer that stretched to almost an hour and a half, according to Japanese readouts of the talks.

Japan’s prime minister, who has previously said he won’t rush to reach a deal and does not plan to make big concessions, sounded a more cautious tone speaking to reporters later in Tokyo.

“Of course, the negotiations will not be easy going forward, but President Trump has stated that he wants to give top priority to the talks with Japan,” Ishiba said.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni heads to the White House on Thursday to discuss tariffs imposed on the European Union with Trump, while Bessent has invited South Korea’s finance minister to Washington for talks next week.

The Indian Supreme Court recently upheld the use of Urdu on the signboard of a municipal council building in Maharashtra, in a significant ruling emphasising linguistic and cultural diversity in the country.

A bench comprising Justices Sudhanshu Dhulia and K Vinod Chandran firmly stated that “language is culture” and should not be a cause for division, highlighting Urdu as “the finest specimen of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb or the Hindustani tehzeeb.”

The Indian apex court dismissed a petition filed by a former councillor challenging the use of Urdu on the Patur Municipal Council building’s signboard in the Akola district of Maharashtra, the Indian Express reported.

The bench refused to interfere with the Bombay High Court’s earlier finding that the use of Urdu is not prohibited under the Maharashtra Local Authorities (Official Languages) Act, 2022, or any other existing law.

Writing a judgement for the bench, Dhulia articulated that the court’s views on Urdu and languages in general, urging for a re-evaluation of potential biases.

“Our misconceptions, perhaps even our prejudices against a language, have to be courageously and truthfully tested against the reality, which is this great diversity of our nation: our strength can never be our weakness. Let us make friends with Urdu and every language,” the SC asserted.

The court directly addressed the “misconception that Urdu is alien to India,” firmly stating that “it is a language which was born in this land”.

“Language is not religion. Language does not even represent religion. Language belongs to a community, to a region, to a people; and not to a religion,” Dhulia elaborated.

The court emphasised the primary function of language as a communication, stating: “Before language became a tool for learning, its earliest and primary purpose will always remain communication… The purpose here for the use of Urdu is merely communication.

“All the municipal council wanted to do was to make effective communication. This is the primary purpose of a language, which the Bombay High Court has laid emphasis on.”

Linguistic diversity

The Indian SC went on to underscore the country’s vast linguistic diversity, citing census data from 2001, which recorded 122 major languages and 234 mother tongues, with Urdu being the sixth most spoken scheduled language, present across most of India.

The 2011 Census further increased the number of mother tongues to 270 (considering those with 10,000 speakers), suggesting the actual number could be in thousands.

Addressing the historical context, the court noted that the “prejudice against Urdu stems from the misconception that Urdu is alien to India,” clarifying that Urdu, like Marathi and Hindi, is an Indo-Aryan language that developed in India due to the need for inter-cultural communication.

“Over the centuries, it attained… greater refinement and became the language of choice for many acclaimed poets,” the judegement said.

The court also pointed out that the pervasive influence of Urdu in everyday Hindi and even in Indian legal parlance, citing examples like “adalat” (court), “halafnama” (affidavit), and “peshi” (appearance before court), as well as terms used in the top court like “vakalatnama” (document of power of attorney).

It also noted that several Indian states and union territories have adopted Urdu as a second official language.

“When we criticise Urdu, we are in a way also criticising Hindi, as, according to linguists and literary scholars, Urdu and Hindi are not two languages, but one language,” it said.

The court said that “under Article 343 of the Constitution, Hindi is the official language, while the use of English was made permissible for official purposes for a period of 15 years.

“But this does not mean that Hindustani and Urdu have become extinct. This was never the intention of the framers of the Constitution.”

“Even today, the language used by the common people of the country is replete with words of the Urdu language, even if one is not aware of it.”

Ultimately upholding the High Court’s view, the SC bench concluded that for a municipal council aiming to serve its local community, using Urdu on a signboard alongside the official language (Marathi) is a matter of effective communication and should not face objection if a segment of the population is familiar with it.

“Language is a medium for exchange of ideas that brings people holding diverse views and beliefs closer and it should not become a cause of their division,” the bench firmly stated.