BEIJING (AP) – Faced with new global challenges, the leaders of China and Canada pledged Friday to improve relations between their two nations after years of acrimony. Xi Jinping told visiting Prime Minister Mark Carney that he is willing to continue working to improve ties, noting that talks have been underway on restoring and restarting cooperation.
WASHINGTON (AP) – The U.S. imposed sanctions Wednesday on alleged affiliates of the Tren de Aragua gang and increased the reward to as much as $5 million for information leading to the arrest or conviction of one of the leaders of the criminal group that the Trump administration has designated as a foreign terrorist organization.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Russia has not spared a single Ukrainian power plant from attack since its all-out invasion, Ukraine’s new energy minister said Friday, as a recent escalation of aerial bombardments left hundreds of thousands of people without heat or light for days during the coldest winter in years.
NEW YORK (AP) – A surging stock market and a flurry of deal making padded the profits of Wall Street’s two big investment banks, which both saw a double-digit jump in profits in the fourth quarter. Goldman Sachs’s net earnings rose 12% from a year earlier, posting a profit of $4.62 billion, or $14.01 a share. Meanwhile Morgan Stanley said it earned $4.4 billion.
NEW YORK (AP) – Elon Musk’s Grok keeps getting into trouble, and this time, more of the world’s governments are trying to intervene. First launched in 2023, Grok is Musk’s attempt to outdo rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini in building an AI assistant powered by a large language model, which is trained on vast pools of data.
HONG KONG (AP) – Taiwan-based TSMC, the world’s largest computer chipmaker, plans to increase its capital spending by as much as nearly 40% this year after it reported a 35% jump in its net profit for the latest quarter thanks to the boom in artificial intelligence, the company said Thursday.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) – As Iran returned to uneasy calm after a wave of protests that drew a harsh crackdown, a senior hard-line cleric called Friday for the death penalty for detained demonstrators and directly threatened U.S. President Donald Trump – evidence of the rage gripping authorities in the Islamic Republic.
Several Middle Eastern allies of the United States have urged the Trump administration to hold off on strikes against Iran for the government’s deadly crackdown on protesters, according to an Arab diplomat familiar with the matter. Top officials from Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have raised concerns in the last 48 hours that a U.S. military intervention would shake the global economy.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Russia has not spared a single Ukrainian power plant from attack since its all-out invasion, Ukraine’s new energy minister said Friday, as a recent escalation of aerial bombardments left hundreds of thousands of people without heat or light for days during the coldest winter in years.
WASHINGTON (AP) – President Donald Trump’s second term has been eventful. You wouldn’t know it from his approval numbers. An AP-NORC poll from January found that about 4 in 10 U.S. adults approve of Trump’s performance as president. That’s virtually unchanged from March 2025, shortly after he took office for the second time.


































































































































