Arno Froese

Beijing reported the world’s largest-ever trade surplus—the value of goods and services sold overseas compared to its imports—at $1.19tn (£890bn). Trade with the US did weaken, but this was made up for by a rise in Chinese exports elsewhere, especially to South East Asia, Africa and Latin America. Wang Jun, the deputy director of China’s customs, said during a press conference that the figures are “extraordinary and hard-won” given the “profound changes” and challenges in global trade. He...

US chip giant Nvidia introduced its next-generation computing platform, made of six new chips that were partly developed in Israel. Nvidia’s R&D activities in Israel are the firm’s largest outside of the United States. “The amount of computation necessary for AI is skyrocketing… Rubin arrives at exactly the right moment, as AI computing demand for both training and inference is going through the roof,” said Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang. “With our annual cadence of delivering a new...

In the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, Assyria was the superpower in the Near East, ruling an empire that stretched from Egypt in the southwest to parts of modern-day Turkey in the north and all the way eastward to parts of modern-day Iran. At the time, the Jewish people were split into two kingdoms: Israel in the north and Judah in the south. As Assyria and Egypt faced off, the two kingdoms were forced to choose: would they side with Egypt to the south or Assyria to the north? King...