US Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent Taiwanese president-elect William Lai a message of congratulations following the result.
Beijing called the message aviolation of Washington’s commitment to maintain only unofficial ties with Taiwan.
Mr Lai has vowed to protect Taiwan from an increasingly aggressive China.
But Beijing sees Taiwan as its territory and fiercely challenges any government that says otherwise.
Messages of congratulations for Taiwan’s new leader poured in from all over the world after the election, including from Mr Blinken – who emphasised the partnership between Taipei and Washington, which he said was rooted in democratic values.
“We look forward to working with Dr Lai and Taiwan’s leaders of all parties to advance our shared interests and values,” he said in a statement.
Mr Blinken also stressed that the US, one of Taiwan’s biggest allies, is “committed to maintaining cross-strait peace and stability”.
Under the policy, the US recognises and has formal ties with China rather than the island of Taiwan, which China sees as a breakaway province to be unified with the mainland one day.
Mr Blinken’s remarks drew sharp criticism from Beijing, which views any statement of support for Taiwan as lending legitimacy to a candidate and political party it sees as a gang of separatists hoping to turn Taiwan into an independent sovereign nation.
In a statement, China’s foreign ministry said Mr Blinken’s congratulations violated the US’s promise to maintain “only cultural, commercial, and other unofficial relations” with Taiwan.
It stressed that the Taiwan question is “the first red line that must not be crossed in China-US relations” and said it had lodged a formal diplomatic complaint.
“China firmly opposes the US having any form of official interaction with Taiwan and interfering in Taiwan affairs in any way or under any pretext.”
Beijing’s statement will likely serve as a warning to Washington after it sent an unofficial delegation of former US officials to hold talks with leading political figures in Taiwan just hours after the self-ruled island elected Mr Lai.
Deployed by US President Joe Biden, who himself welcomed the election results, the delegation includes a former US national security adviser and a former deputy secretary of state.
Watch: The BBC’s Shaimaa Khalil joined DPP supporters at a rally celebrating their win
Other Western countries, including the UK, France and Germany, congratulated the new leader.
Beijing’s Communist government reviles Mr Lai’s pro-sovereigntyhttps://gondrongjabrik.com/ Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which has governed Taiwan for eight years.
That is because China sees any statement of support towards the DPP as lending legitimacy to politicians, which Beijing sees as a gang of separatists hoping to turn Taiwan into an independent sovereign nation.
Calon Presiden Nomor Urut 2 Prabowo Subianto merasa terharu mendapatkan sambutan antusias dari masyarakat Sumatera Utara di acara kampanyenya, Sabtu (13/1) di kota Medan. Menteri Pertahanan RI itu pun mengaku mendapat energi baru.
Setelah ditetapkan menjadi Calon Presiden berdampingan dengan Calon Wakil Presiden Gibran Rakabuming Raka, pada Oktober 2023 lalu, Prabowo baru kali ini menggelar kampanye di Sumut.
Prabowo juga sempat menyinggung angka rendah yang disematkan untuk kinerja Kementerian Pertahanan RI yang dipimpinnya. Diketahui saat debat ketiga pemilihan presiden (Pilpres) calon presiden Anies Baswedan sempat menyematkan nilai 11 dari 100 kepada Prabowo.
“Saya tambah semangat, tambah gembira, dan saya yakin mungkin nilai dari rakyat lebih dari nilai yang saya terima beberapa hari lalu di Jakarta. https://gondrongjabrik.com/Di Jakarta saya hanya dapat nilai 11 dari 100. Tapi hari ini saya rasanya mendapat 99 dari 100,” kata Prabowo disambut tepuk tangan meriah para pendukung.
Donald Trump remains the overwhelming favourite for the Republican presidential nomination, but Nikki Haley is surging. If the former president shows any signs of weakness when voting begins next week, her long-shot bid could become a real threat.
At the heart of her pitch was this: a Haley presidency would be a return to normalcy, a drama-free alternative to the current frontrunner, former president Donald Trump.
“Don’t you want that again? Because we could have that again,” she said.
The line won the loudest applause of the morning from the hundred-odd voters who had braved the icy roads to hear her speak in Waukee, on the edge of the state capital Des Moines.
Eleven months into her candidacy, Ms Haley, 51, seems to finally have the wind at her back.
Heading into the Iowa caucuses on Monday, the first contest in the 2024 Republican race, the former South Carolina governor has claimed a series of well-timed victories – consolidating support from deep-pocketed donors, racking up endorsements and steadily advancing in the polls.
“She’s engaging, she’s smart, she’s personable and I think she has a vision of where we should be 10 years from now,” said Haley supporter Doug Stout after watching her speak on Tuesday.
The vision was for the “shining city on the hill” type of Republican Party, he said. “The one I grew up with.”
The unfortunate reality for the Haley campaign, however, is that not enough voters seem to be buying that vision. Most polls, including in Iowa, suggest Mr Trump maintains a lead of around 30 points.
Observers say Nikki Haley is running a campaign for the wrong era of Republican politics; that her candidacy ignores the reality of the modern Republican party, whose base has turned so definitively toward Mr Trump that the establishment-friendly conservatism favoured by Ms Haley no longer makes sense.
“Ms Haley’s campaign represents a misunderstanding of where the base is and what the base wants,” said Gunner Ramer, political director for the Republican Accountability Project.
“To those that want the old Republican party back, Haley is offering a very attractive candidacy. But there aren’t enough Republicans out there who do.”
Image caption,Nikki Haley made her pitch to voters in an Iowa pub on Tuesday
They insist that as the field narrows, and Ms Haley becomes the clear alternative to Mr Trump, she will pull ahead, propelled by moderates and a growing swathe of Republican voters who have tired of the former president, or are concerned about his chances in the general election.
In Iowa, Ms Haley looks poised to swipe the second place spot from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
At a Wednesday evening debate between the two, Ms Haley strained to position herself as Mr Trump’s sole rival. “I wish Donald Trump was on this stage. He’s the one I’m running against,” she said.
Campaign aides told the BBC that the goal for Ms Haley in Iowa is simple: build momentum. A strong showing, they said, would carry her into New Hampshire – where polls with Mr Trump are much tighter – and then on to South Carolina, her home state.
Less helpful was Mr Christie’s hot-mic moment, when he was caught saying she would “get smoked”, presumably by Mr Trump.
“She’s not up to this,” he said.
Image caption,Ms Haley seems poised to overtake Ron DeSantis for second place
Long-time observers counter that Ms Haley has a knack for defying expectations.
“If you look at her career, a lot of people have underestimated her and a lot of people have been wrong,” said Randy Covington, a veteran journalist from South Carolina.
Even her critics acknowledge that she is a master of retail politics – the door-knocking and handshaking that delivered her to the statehouse in 2005. She stunned her own party in the primary by unseating Larry Koon, then the longest-serving member of the House. At the time, Ms Haley had no political experience and was a bookkeeper for her family’s clothing shop.
Nearly 20 years later, the state representative-turned-governor-turned-UN-ambassador still likes to introduce herself first as an accountant. She points out that she is a mom of two, the wife of a combat veteran and the child of Indian immigrants, running to make her family proud. In televised debates, in pancake houses and town halls, Ms Haley pauses mid-speech for a smile and pointed eye contact. She’s a down-home American hard at work for your vote.
“She connects, she has the X factor,” said David Wilkins, a former South Carolina House speaker who led Ms Haley’s transition to the governor’s house. “The more people who are exposed to her, the more support she’s going to get, it’s just that simple.”
Ms Haley’s campaign often looks and sounds like something out of 2012: more compromise and pragmatism, fewer grievances and conspiracy theories. She is a staunch conservative, but she speaks with nuance on hot button issues like abortion and immigration, and is less eager to wade into the country’s culture wars.
In Iowa this week, it was clear this was central to her appeal. Voters said they valued Ms Haley’s tone and her civility – a clear departure from Mr Trump, who spent part of this week in a federal appeals court for one of the four separate criminal cases he now faces.
“She’s boring,” one Iowan said of Ms Haley, before quickly clarifying he meant it as a compliment. “We need to get out of the era of politics that is dominated by what someone tweeted.”
Polls suggest Ms Haley’s measured approach could make her the most formidable opponent to President Joe Biden in November’s general election.
“Trump is head-to-head with Biden on a good day,” she said this week, before citing a Wall Street Journal poll from late last year. “I defeat Biden by 17 points.”
But she has to defeat Mr Trump first.
“This is still the party of Donald Trump, until the Republican party says otherwise,” said Jimmy Centers, an Iowa Republican political consultant.
Image caption,Ms Haley has cast herself as Mr Trump’s main rival
At least one-third of Republican primary voters are thought to be in the “always Trump” camp – a group both devoted to the former president and repelled by the establishment politics embodied by Ms Haley.
“I think she’s just more of the same… and Trump isn’t,” said Mike Williams, an Iowa resident. “I want someone who’s a bit of an outsider.”
The vice-like grip Mr Trump has on the party doesn’t give Ms Haley much room for manoeuvre.
She needs to appeal to two very different groups of Republicans: the “never Trumpers” who despise the former president, as well as those who still like him but worry he will lose to Biden. She has to distance herself from him without alienating his supporters who might yet be persuaded to back someone else.
Ms Haley has been cautious in her criticism of her old boss. At a televised town hall in Iowa, a prospective backer sheepishly admitted he had voted for Mr Trump twice. “Me too,” she quipped, beaming.
In nearly every speech, she performs a tightly rehearsed juggling act. Mr Trump “was the “right president at the right time”, she’ll say. “But rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him”.
Those close to Ms Haley shot down the suggestion that she may eventually join his ticket as the vice-presidential nominee – something the Trump campaign has also dismissed. But Ms Haley has said yes to him before, when she became his ambassador at the United Nations.
Mr Trump, for his part, has turned his ire increasingly on Ms Haley, whom he dubbed “birdbrain” in September. “She is a globalist,” he said last week. “She likes the globe. I like America first.”
The escalating critiques are perhaps the clearest sign that the frontrunner is taking her campaign seriously. Some Trump aides have also been downplaying expectations of a blowout victory in Iowa.
The Republican race will not be decided this month. But the upcoming votes in Iowa and New Hampshire will be the first test of whether Mr Trump’s power is as strong as it seems. If not, Ms Haley will be waiting in the wings.https://gondrongjabrik.com/
General Motors’ Cruise on Thursday announced internally that it will lay off 900 employees, or 24% of its workforce, the company confirmed to CNBC.
The layoffs, which primarily affected commercial operations and related corporate functions, are the latest turmoil for the robotaxi startup and come one day after Cruise dismissed nine “key leaders” for the company’s response to an Oct. 2 accident in which a pedestrian was dragged 20 feet by a Cruise self-driving car after being struck by another vehicle.
The company had 3,800 employees before Thursday’s cuts, which also follow a round of contractor layoffs at Cruise last month. Affected employees will receive paychecks until Feb. 12 and at least an additional eight weeks of pay, plus severance based on tenure.
In a statement, a Cruise spokesperson said, “We shared the difficult news that we are reducing our workforce, primarily in commercial operations and related corporate functions. These changes reflect our decision to focus on more deliberate commercialization plans with safety as our north star. We are supporting impacted Cruisers with strong severance and benefits packages and are grateful to the departing employees who played important roles in building Cruise and supporting our mission.”
A Cruise representative also told CNBC that the company’s goal is now to work on a fully driverless L4 service, as well as relaunching ride-hailing in one city to start.
GM added, “GM supports the difficult employment decisions made by Cruise as it reflects their more deliberate path forward, with safety as the north star. We are confident in the team and committed to supporting Cruise as they set the company up for long-term success with a focus on trust, accountability and transparency.”
A barrage of safety concerns and incidents have plagued Cruise, majority-owned by GM, since it received approval in August for round-the-clock robotaxi service in San Francisco.
Since the October accident, Cruise’s robotaxi fleet has been grounded, pending the results of independent safety probes; its leadership has been gutted; production of a new robotaxi has been halted; hundreds of vehicles have been recalled; and local and federal government officials have launched their own investigations, among other concerns.
In October, the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise’s deployment and testing permits for its autonomous vehicles, alongside a statement that said, “When there is an unreasonable risk to public safety, the DMV can immediately suspend or revoke permits.”
Cruise’s decision to suspend all trips on public roads last month came after a board meeting at the company’s headquarters, after which it also announced a reorganization, more oversight from GM, an independent “safety expert” that would assess the company’s safety operations and an expanded probe into Cruise’s tech and safety systems by Exponent, the engineering consulting firm Cruise hired to analyze the Oct. 2 crash. Exponent’s investigation is still ongoing, according to Cruise.
Video of the brown bovine moving down the tracks went viral on the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, as the New Jersey Transit urged passengers to steer clear of Newark Penn Station and take alternate routes on PATH trains connecting to New York.
The transit agency tweeted a photo of the long-horned bull staring from the tracks in Newark as officials said rail service to and from New York was subject to 45-minute delays due to police activity dealing with the high-stakes chase.
Last year, Southwest canceled close to 17,000 flights over the crucial Christmas and New Year’s holiday period as it failed to recover from severe weather that gripped most of the country. Rival carriers were also affected but recovered more quickly.
Southwest struggled with staffing issues as storms left flight attendants and pilots out of position for their next flights, thousands of passenger bags piled up and planes were behind on de-icing.
The carrier has been stocking up in de-icing and other winter-weather equipment to prepare for the season throughout the year. It has also upgraded technology.
“Winter will not be perfect,” Jordan said. But he added that the airline is prepared for the season, pointing to a quick recovery after heavy snowfall in October at its key airport in Denver.
The largest of the layoffs were expected. They include 945 workers at Orion Assembly who build Chevrolet Bolt models, which are ending production after this year.
The final production date is scheduled for the week of Dec. 18. However, layoffs will not occur until Jan. 1.
The other 369 workers to be laid off are at GM’s Lansing Grand River Assembly/Stamping, which will no longer produce the Chevrolet Camaro. GM had previously announced the end of the vehicle but not how many employees would be laid off at the plant, which continues to produce Cadillac sedans.
The carrier plans to add 11 nonstop flights from Austin in April, giving it almost 50 peak-day flights, the airline said Friday.
Flight additions include Midland-Odessa and McAllen in Texas, as well as Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina, Nashville and Cincinnati. The announcement comes weeks after rival American Airlines said it planned to cut 21 Austin routes.
“This is the first time we’ll be using Austin as a connecting point to access our network with the addition of McAllen and Midland,” Eric Beck, managing director of network planning, said in an interview. “For us here at Delta, Texas has historically been a white space for opportunity on our network.”
Austin’s population has grown rapidly in recent years and the city has drawn investment from big companies such as Apple, Tesla and IBM.
Beck said no single company drove the decision to expand in Austin. But “over time as we talk to our corporate accounts and look to where they’re traveling that we don’t have service,” McAllen and Midland, a base for the oil-rich Permian Basin, topped the list,he added.
Austin’s airport served more than 7.1 million passengers last year, up 11% from 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium. Passenger counts fell 5% in the U.S. overall during that period.
Delta had a market share of close to 14% in Austin as of September, behind Southwest Airlines’ 40% share and American’s 22%, according to airport data.
After the bell Wednesday, Roku reported a net loss of $330.1 million for the third quarter, or $2.33 per share, nearly triple the loss of $122.2 million, or 88 cents per share, which is what the company reported in the year-ago quarter.
But revenue was up 20% year over year, the company reported, largely driven by “strong performance in content distribution and video advertising, along with unit sales of Roku-branded TVs, which launched in March 2023,” Roku said in a shareholder letter.
Roku-branded smart TV’s come pre-installed with the Roku interface users would experience on an external plug-in Roku Streaming Player. The smart TVs were first made available at Best Buy earlier this year and drove a device segment revenue increase of 33% from the year-ago quarter, the company said during its earnings call Wednesday.
“Branded TVs also drove a higher portion of net adds in active accounts than the streaming players in international markets,” Roku Devices President Mustafa Ozgen said during Wednesday’s earnings call.
“We had a solid rebound in video ads in the third quarter,” Roku Media President Charlie Collier said during the earnings call. “We expect year-over-year growth in the fourth quarter to be similar, but we remain cautious about the ad market recovery going forward.”
Active accounts also beat the Street’s estimates, coming in at 75.8 million for the quarter, compared to StreetAccount estimates of 75.33 million. That’s a net increase of 2.3 million active accounts from the previous quarter.
For the fourth quarter, Roku expects revenue of roughly $955 million, topping the $952 million expected by Wall Street, according to LSEG.
In September, Roku said it was laying off 200 employees in a bid to reduce the company’s year-over-year operating expense growth rate. The move followed rounds of layoffs earlier this year in March and November 2022. The company also committed to various cost-cutting measures including consolidating office space and slowing hiring, CNBC reported at the time.
Starz Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Hirsch announced the news in an email to staff obtained by CNBC on Friday. Starz has about 670 employees. He also addressed staff in a companywide town hall.
The cuts will be in the high double digits but less than 100, according to a person familiar with the matter. A Starz spokesperson declined to comment on the number of cuts but confirmed the authenticity of the letter to staff.
Lionsgate and Starz have been part of the same company since December 2016, when Lionsgate acquired Starz for $4.4 billion. That marriage will end in the first quarter, when the company plans to spin off Lionsgate as a separately traded company.
“We are making these changes to align our organization with the growth areas of the business and to prepare us for our next chapter as a standalone company,” Hirsch wrote in the note.
Starz announced last quarter it planned to exit Latin America to focus on the U.S., U.K. and Canada. Departing the U.K. will scale down the company’s operations and potentially prepare it to merge with or acquire another U.S.-based media asset, such as A&E Networks or Paramount Global’s BET.
Starz ended last quarter with about 12 million domestic streaming subscribers and about 20 million total customers when including those who sign up through traditional pay TV. The entertainment company has focused on female and Black audiences with series including “Outlander” and “Power.”
