Foreign News
Trump fires lead official on economic data as tariffs cause market drop
US President Donald Trump has fired the boss of one of America’s most important economic institutions hours after weaker-than-expected jobs data stoked further alarm about his tariff policy.
On social media Trump claimed – without any evidence – that Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), had “RIGGED” jobs figures “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad”.
US stock markets plunged following the unprecedented move by the White House, with some accusing Trump of destroying public trust by politicising data.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the president was “a bad leader” who “shoots the messenger” for weak statistics.
Markets were already rattled on Friday after Trump forged ahead with his plans to raise US import tariffs on goods from countries around the world.
Figures were then released by BLS showing that employers in the US added just 73,000 jobs in July, far below forecasts of 109,000 new roles.
It also revised down employment growth in May and June, reporting 250,000 fewer jobs than previously thought.
Trump insisted: “The Economy is BOOMING under “TRUMP”.”
But Heather Long, chief economist at the Navy Federal Credit Union, said the job figures were a “gamechanger”, adding that “the labor market is deteriorating quickly” because of uncertainty caused by Trump’s tariffs.
Trump has dismissed concerns about his tariff plans, which he says will boost manufacturing in the US and rebalance global trade.
But data this week and a string of updates from companies on tariff costs have made those forecasts harder to ignore.
On the decision to sack McEntarfer, former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, said: “Firing the head of a key government agency because you don’t like the numbers they report, which come from surveys using long established procedures, is what happens in authoritarian countries, not democratic ones.”
Friends of BLS, a group whose members include two former commissioners of the agency, said: “When leaders of other nations have politicized economic data, it has destroyed public trust in all official statistics and in government science.”
McEntarfer called her time as commissioner “the honour of my life”, while describing the agency’s work as “vital and important”.
Leading stock market indices all closed sharply lower on Friday.
Trump has attacked key economic figures in the past, most recently Jerome Powell, chair of the US Federal Reserve as the central bank continues to hold interest rates.
Trump is demanding a cut but the Fed is holding fire until it sees the full impact of tariffs on the US economy.
In the aftermath of the jobs report, Trump launched a further salvo at Powell, stating he “should also be put “out to pasture”.
A member of the Fed’s rate-setting committee, Adriana Kugler, is resigning giving Trump an opportunity to install someone new.
The head of the Labor Department, which oversees the BLS, wrote on social media that the agency’s deputy commissioner William Wiatrowski would step into the role during the search for a replacement.
The Labor Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The BLS revises jobs numbers every month as new data comes in, typically adding or subtracting ten of thousands of positions.
Though this month’s changes were significantly larger than usual, analysts said the updates were consistent with other data showing slowdown.
Some speculated that they could reflect a hit to small businesses, which are typically slower to respond to surveys and are especially vulnerable to tariffs.
McEntarfer had worked for the government for more than 20 years before being nominated to lead the BLS in 2023. She was later confirmed near unanimously by the US Senate.
Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, defended Ms Entarfer, saying she had conducted herself with “great integrity”.
“It is imperative that decisionmakers understand that government statistics are unbiased and of the highest quality. By casting doubt on that, the President is damaging the United States,” he wrote on social media.
Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the firing raised serious alarm.
“For six months, I’ve said that threats to economic data have been more collateral damage than intentional harm. No longer. Firing the head of the BLS is five-alarm intentional harm to the integrity of US economic data and the entire statistical system,” he wrote on social media.
Trump defended the decision and said her departure was needed to ensure there were “people that we can trust” in these posts.
“Why should anybody trust numbers?” the president told reporters when leaving the White House on Friday.
“I believe the numbers were phony, just like they were before the election, and there were other times – so you know what I did? I fired her, and you know what I did? The right thing.”
The fight over data comes as Trump remakes trade policy, hitting goods from countries around the world with new tariffs ranging from 10% to 50%.
When Trump put forward similar plans in April, shares in the US tumbled more than 10% in a week as concerns spread to the dollar and bond markets.
The stock market recovered after he suspended some of the most drastic measures, leaving in place a less punishing, more expected 10% levy. In recent weeks, indexes in the US have been trading around all-time highs.
The latest measures are less extreme than what Trump first put forward in April, but they will still push the average tariff rate to roughly 17%, up from less than 2.5% at the start of the year.
“The reality is Trump got emboldened by the fact that markets came right back,” Michael Gayed, a portfolio manager for The Free Markets ETF, told the BBC’s Opening Bell. “Now he’s going to try his luck again.”
[BBC]
Father Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the architect of Qatar’s remarkable transformation into an ultra-wealthy modern nation with global influence, has been laid to rest in Doha following his death at the age of 74.
Sheikh Hamad’s death was announced on Sunday morning, and his simple funeral ceremony was held after the daily evening prayer at sunset at the Imam Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab Mosque in the capital.
Mourners wearing traditional Qatari dress stood with their hands clasped in front of them during a funeral prayer, facing the shrouded body of Sheikh Hamad.
Afterwards, close family members, including his son and successor as emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, carried his body out of the mosque. Sheikh Hamad was laid to rest at the Lusail Cemetery north of Doha.
Al Jazeera’s Zein Basravi said the ceremony was “a humble event” and Sheikh Hamad was “buried in a simple grave”.
“The simplicity really is in keeping with Islamic tradition but also emblematic of how the father emir carried himself in his life,” Basravi said. “He did not concern himself with the trappings of wealth but was focused on the welfare of his own people.”
During Sheikh Hamad’s reign from 1995 to 2013, Qatar’s gross domestic product rose more than 24-fold, largely because of his focus on developing the country’s massive gas resources. By 2006, the small nation had become the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG).
[Aljazeera]
The Indian state of West Bengal has been on the boil for the past few days over the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl.
The body of the child was fished out from a pond on Sunday – a day after her family reported her missing.
The incident in Surjyapur village in Baruipur, on the outskirts of Kolkata, has triggered days of violent protests, a mob lynching of an innocent man and the police killing of one of the suspects. Three other men who have been arrested remain in custody.
Warning: This story contains details that some readers may find distressing.
The child’s rape and murder – and the subsequent killing of the suspect – has snowballed into a huge political row, with the opposition parties accusing the state’s newly-elected Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of failing to protect women.
Family members of the girl said they last saw her on Saturday afternoon when she went out to buy a birthday gift for a friend. When she didn’t return home, they went to the police station at around 20:30 to seek help in finding her.
The family and villagers alleged that the police did not take their pleas seriously and said they would look into it the next day.
Desperate family members and villagers then themselves looked through the CCTV footage from nearby shops and spotted her walking with Prabhash Mondal – a local man who has since been killed by the police.
Early Sunday morning, a mob went to Mondal’s house, caught him and handed him over to the police.
A few hours later, a sack containing the girl’s body was pulled out from the pond, with media reports saying Mondal had led the police to the exact spot.
According to the post-mortem report, the cause of death is drowning, leading to claims that she was alive when she was dumped in the pond.
“Had the police acted earlier, she could have been saved,” her relatives have said.
The police complaint has since been amended to include charges under the Pocso, India’s stringent law on child sexual abuse. The police have yet to hold a press conference on the case or respond to the allegations.
The government has formed a special investigation team (SIT) to inquire into the case.
The recovery of the body saw anger pour out onto the streets, with a mob vandalising roads, shops and a local railway station. A young man was beaten to death by the crowd – Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari has since said he was innocent.
Several police officers were injured and vehicles damaged as they tried to contain the mob. Police have registered three cases and detained 40 people so far.
The area remains tense, with a ban on public gatherings and heavy police and paramilitary deployment to maintain order.
The unrest poses a huge challenge for the BJP, which swept to power in West Bengal for the first time ever in May, campaigning heavily on the issue of making the state safe for women.
Analysts say one of the main reasons three-term chief minister Mamata Banerjee lost the election was growing concern over women’s safety and her government’s shoddy handling of the rape and murder of a junior doctor at a government hospital.
This case has also become mired in a political controversy and is threatening to take on religious overtones as the victim was Muslim whereas the arrested men are Hindus.
A local BJP leader, Sushant Mondal’s home was attacked and ransacked by a mob that accused him of helping the suspects. He denied the allegations saying they were “false” and that he had in fact “helped catch the perpetrators”.
To contain the public anger, Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari visited the village on Tuesday and met the victim’s family.
“Our government is committed to curb any such incidents in the state. The police is doing what needs to be done. The family has spoke to me, they have lost their beloved daughter. I believe that they are satisfied talking to me.”
Less that 24 hours later, Prabhash Mondal was killed in a “police encounter”.
In a statement on Wednesday morning, Baruipur police said Mondal had been taken to the pond to recreate the crime scene as part of the investigation, but he attempted to snatch the weapon from a policeman and opened fire at them. The police retaliated and fired back, striking him. The injured accused was taken to hospital, where he was declared dead, the statement said.
Even though no allegations had been proven against Mondal, his mother appeared to have disowned her son and refused to accept his body.
“Two policemen came to my house. I had just woken up. They told me that my son had died and asked if I wanted to go to the hospital. I told them I couldn’t because my husband was ill,” she told news agency ANI. “I said, do whatever you want to do. I have no objection. My son has been punished for what he did. I will not accept his body. I will not even bring his body home,” she added.
Opposition politicians and rights activists, however, have questioned the killing, saying it went against the rule of law.
Ranjit Sur of the Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights called the matter “suspicious”. Sur said the story of police encounters in many states of the country is almost the same – the accused tries to escape by snatching the police weapon and is then killed in the encounter.
In 2019 in a similar incident, four men accused of gang-raping and murdering a young woman in Hyderabad were killed by the police in an encounter.
[BBC]
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney paid a visit to Saudi Arabia, marking the first state visit in more than a quarter-century as Ottawa and Riyadh explore deeper mining and energy ties.
Carney visited on Thursday, on the heels of the NATO summit in Turkiye, doubling down on calls to diversify trade relationships as United States President Donald Trump imposed tariffs that have weighed on the Canadian economy. The visit included agreements covering mining, energy and artificial intelligence, which Carney’s office said would be finalised next year.
The two countries signed 13 new agreements and memorandums of understanding (MoUs) covering areas including health and defence. The agreements are worth $1bn. Among the deals are agreements that would help Canadian companies develop mining and clean energy projects in Saudi Arabia.
During his visit, Carney also met with Amin Nasser, head of state oil giant Saudi Aramco. On energy, Carney’s office said the two countries are working together on agreements related to liquefied natural gas, hydrogen and carbon capture and storage.
Carney’s office also said he would lead “a delegation of Canada’s pension funds” as part of efforts to invest in Saudi Arabia’s energy and AI sectors.
In talks with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Carney signed agreements aimed at expanding several key partnerships between the two nations following years of strained relations under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Trudeau, Carney’s predecessor, had been critical of Saudi Arabia’s treatment of human rights activists, including Saudi writer Raif Badawi and his sister, Samar. In response, Saudi Arabia expelled the Canadian ambassador and cut trade and investment ties in 2018.
Ottawa and Riyadh began restoring diplomatic ties in 2023.
Carney was asked by reporters about the decision to re-engage with Saudi Arabia, to which he responded:
“Engaging with the country doesn’t mean that we agree with everything that a country is doing.”
“We are actively engaging with key partners around the world,” Carney said.
“Lecturing countries from afar is an ineffective strategy. It’s satisfying, but it’s ineffective.”
Carney was also asked about ongoing negotiations with the United States. Reporters pressed him on whether there had been any progress in trade negotiations with Trump amid tensions surrounding the North American Free Trade Agreement. “I’ll keep you posted,” Carney said.
[Aljazeera]
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