Connect with us

Business

Rubio says Trump is ‘not happy’ about Israel’s strike on U.S. ally Qatar targeting Hamas operatives

Published

3 months ago

on



U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he will be seeking answers from Israeli officials about how they see the way forward in Gaza following Israel’s attack on Hamas operatives in Qatar that has upended efforts to broker an end to the conflict.

Rubio told reporters on Saturday before leaving for Israel that President Donald Trump remained unhappy with the Israeli strike but that it would not shake U.S. support for Israel.

“We’re going to talk about what the future holds, and I’m going to get a much better understanding of what their plans are moving forward,” Rubio said. “Obviously we’re not happy about it. The president was not happy about it. Now we need to move forward and figure out what comes next.”

Both Rubio and Trump met on Friday with Qatar’s prime minister to discuss the fallout from the Israeli operation, in a demonstration of how the Trump administration is trying to balance relations between key Middle East allies days after Israel targeted Hamas leaders in a strike on Doha.

The attack has drawn widespread international condemnation and appears to have ended attempts to secure an Israel-Hamas ceasefire and the release of hostages ahead of the upcoming U.N. General Assembly session at which the Gaza war is expected to be a primary focus.

Trump “wants Hamas defeated, he wants the war to end, he wants all 48 hostages home, including those that are deceased, and he wants it all at once,” he said. “And we’ll have to discuss about how the events last week had an impact on the ability to achieve that in short order.”

Rubio will have meetings in Jerusalem on Sunday and Monday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others.

Despite tensions between Trump and Netanyahu over the strike, Rubio will be in Israel for the two-day visit. It is a show of support for the increasingly isolated country before the United Nations holds likely contentious debate on the creation of a Palestinian state, which Netanyahu opposes.

On Friday, Rubio and Vice President JD Vance met Qatari Prime Ministers Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani at the White House. Later Friday, Trump and special envoy Steve Witkoff had dinner with the sheikh in New York, where Trump went to commemorate the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The Trump administration is walking a delicate line between two major allies after Israel took its fight with Hamas to the Qatari capital, where leaders of the militant group had gathered to consider a U.S. proposal for a ceasefire in the nearly two-year-old war in Gaza. Qatar is a key mediator, and while its leaders have vowed to press forward, the next steps are uncertain for a long-sought deal to halt the fighting and release hostages taken from Israel.

Condemning the strike but supporting Israel

Israel’s attack Tuesday also has ruptured Trump’s hopes to secure a wider Middle East peace deal, with the rulers of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar all uniting in anger.

Trump himself has distanced himself from the strike, saying it “does not advance Israel or America’s goals” and has promised Qatar that it would not be repeated. The U.S. also joined a U.N. Security Council statement condemning the strike without mentioning Israel by name.

While in Israel, Rubio plans to visit the City of David, a popular archaeological site and tourist destination built by Israel in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in contested east Jerusalem.

It contains some of the oldest remains of the 3,000-year-old city. But critics accuse the site’s operators of pushing a nationalistic agenda at the expense of Palestinian residents.

Israel captured east Jerusalem, home to the city’s most important religious sites, in the 1967 Mideast war and annexed the area.

Israel claims the entire city as its eternal, undivided capital while the Palestinians claim east Jerusalem as the capital of a future state, including the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The competing claims lie at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and frequently boil over into violence.

Fortune Global Forum returns Oct. 26–27, 2025 in Riyadh. CEOs and global leaders will gather for a dynamic, invitation-only event shaping the future of business. Apply for an invitation.



Source link

Related Topics:
Continue Reading

Business

Coupang CEO resigns over historic South Korean data breach

Published

2 hours ago

on

December 10, 2025

By



Coupang chief executive officer Park Dae-jun resigned over his failure to prevent South Korea’s largest-ever data breach, which set off a regulatory and political backlash against the country’s dominant online retailer.

The company said in a statement on Wednesday that Park had stepped down over his role in the breach. It appointed Harold Rogers, chief administrative officer for the retailer’s U.S.-based parent company Coupang Inc., as interim head.

Park becomes the highest-profile casualty of a crisis that’s prompted a government investigation and disrupted the lives of millions across Korea. Nearly two-thirds of people in the country were affected by the breach, which granted unauthorized access to their shipping addresses and phone numbers.

Police raided Coupang’s headquarters this week in search of evidence that could help them determine how the breach took place as well as the identity of the hacker, Yonhap News reported, citing officials.

Officials have said the breach was carried out over five months in which the company’s cybersecurity systems were bypassed. Last week President Lee Jae Myung said it was “truly astonishing” that Coupang had failed to detect unauthorized access of its systems for such a long time.

Park squared off with lawmakers this month during an hours-long grilling. Responding to questions about media reports that claimed the attack had been carried out by a former employee who had since returned to China, he said a Chinese national who left the company and had been a “developer working on the authentication system” was involved.

The company faces a potential fine of up to 1 trillion won ($681 million) over the incident, lawmakers said.

Coupang founder Bom Kim has been summoned to appear before a parliamentary hearing on Dec. 17, with lawmakers warning of consequences if the billionaire fails to show.

Park’s departure adds fresh uncertainty to Coupang’s leadership less than seven months after the company revamped its internal structure to make him sole CEO of its Korean operations. In his new role, Rogers will focus on addressing customer concerns and stabilizing the company, Coupang said.

Join us at the Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit May 19–20, 2026, in Atlanta. The next era of workplace innovation is here—and the old playbook is being rewritten. At this exclusive, high-energy event, the world’s most innovative leaders will convene to explore how AI, humanity, and strategy converge to redefine, again, the future of work. Register now.



Source link

Continue Reading

Business

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi says company will be worth $1 trillion by doing these three things

Published

9 hours ago

on

December 9, 2025

By



Ali Ghodsi, the CEO and cofounder of data intelligence company Databricks, is betting his privately held startup can be the latest addition to the trillion-dollar valuation club.

In August, Ghodsi told the Wall Street Journalthat he believed Databricks, which is reportedly in talks toraise funding at a $134 billion valuation, had “a shot to be a trillion-dollar company.” At Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, he explained how it would happen, laying out a “trifecta” of growth areas to ignite the company’s next leg of growth.

The first is entering the transactional database market, the traditional territory of large enterprise players like Oracle, which Ghodsi said has remained largely “the same for 40 years.” Earlier this year, Databricks launched a link-based offering called Lakehouse, which aims to combine the capabilities of traditional databases with modern data lake storage, in an attempt to capture some of this market.

The company is also seeing growth driven by the rise of AI-powered coding. “Over 80% of the databases that are being launched on Databricks are not being launched by humans, but by AI agents,” Ghodsi said. As developers use AI tools for “vibe coding”—rapidly building software with natural language commands—those applications automatically need databases, and Ghodsi they’re defaulting to Databricks’ platform.

“That’s just a huge growth factor for us. I think if we just did that, we could maybe get all the way to a trillion,” he said.

The second growth area is Agentbricks, Databricks’ platform for building AI agents that work with proprietary enterprise data.

“It’s a commodity now to have AI that has general knowledge,” Ghodsi said, but “it’s very elusive to get AI that really works and understands that proprietary data that’s inside enterprise.” He pointed to the Royal Bank of Canada, which built AI agents for equity research analysts, as an example. Ghodsi said these agents were able to automatically gather earnings calls and company information to assemble research reports, reducing “many days’ worth of work down to minutes.”

And finally, the third piece to Ghodsi’s puzzle involves building applications on top of this infrastructure, with developers using AI tools to quickly build applications that run on Lakehouse and which are then powered by AI agents. “To get the trifecta is also to have apps on top of this. Now you have apps that are vibe coded with the database, Lakehouse, and with agents,” Ghodsi said. “Those are three new vectors for us.”

Ghodsi did not provide a timeframe for attaining the trillion-dollar goal. Currently, only a handful of companies have achieved the milestone, all of them as publicly traded companies. In the tech industry, only big tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta have managed to cross the trillion-dollar threshold.

To reach this level would require Databricks, which is widely expected to go public sometime in early 2026, to grow its valuation roughly sevenfold from its current reported level. Part of this journey will likely also include the expected IPO, Ghodsi said.

“There are huge advantages and pros and cons. That’s why we’re not super religious about it,” Ghodsi said when asked about a potential IPO. “We will go public at some point. But to us, it’s not a really big deal.”

Could the company IPO next year? Maybe, replied Ghodsi.



Source link

Continue Reading

Business

New contract shows Palantir working on tech platform for another federal agency that works with ICE

Published

9 hours ago

on

December 9, 2025

By



Palantir, the artificial intelligence and data analytics company, has quietly started working on a tech platform for a federal immigration agency that has referred dozens of individuals to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for potential enforcement since September.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency—which handles services including citizenship applications, family immigration, adoptions, and work permits for non-citizens—started the contract with Palantir at the end of October, and is paying the data analytics company to implement “Phase 0” of a “vetting of wedding-based schemes,” or “VOWS” platform, according to the federal contract, which was posted to the U.S. government website and reviewed by Fortune.

The contract is small—less than $100,000—and details of what exactly the new platform entails are thin. The contract itself offers few details, apart from the general description of the platform (“vetting of wedding-based schemes”) and an estimate that the completion of the contract would be Dec. 9.Palantir declined to comment on the contract or nature of the work, and USCIS did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

But the contract is notable, nonetheless, as it marks the beginning of a new relationship between USCIS and Palantir, which has had longstanding contracts with ICE, another agency of the Department of Homeland Security, since at least 2011. The description of the contract suggests that the “VOWS” platform may very well be focused on marriage fraud and related to USCIS’ recent stated effort to drill down on duplicity in applications for marriage and family-based petitions, employment authorizations, and parole-related requests.

USCIS has been outspoken about its recent collaboration with ICE. Over nine days in September, USCIS announced that it worked with ICE and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct what it called “Operation Twin Shield” in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where immigration officials investigated potential cases of fraud in immigration benefit applications the agency had received. The agency reported that its officers referred 42 cases to ICE over the period. In a statement published to the USCIS website shortly after the operation, USCIS director Joseph Edlow said his agency was “declaring an all-out war on immigration fraud” and that it would “relentlessly pursue everyone involved in undermining the integrity of our immigration system and laws.” 

“Under President Trump, we will leave no stone unturned,” he said.

Earlier this year, USCIS rolled out updates to its policy requirements for marriage-based green cards, which have included more details of relationship evidence and stricter interview requirements.

While Palantir has always been a controversial company—and one that tends to lean into that reputation no less—the new contract with USCIS is likely to lead to more public scrutiny. Backlash over Palantir’s contracts with ICE have intensified this year amid the Trump Administration’s crackdown on immigration and aggressive tactics used by ICE to detain immigrants that have gone viral on social media. Not to mention, Palantir inked a $30 million contract with ICE earlier this year to pilot a system that will track individuals who have elected to self-deport and help ICE with targeting and enforcement prioritization. There has been pushback from current and former employees of the company alike over contracts the company has with ICE and Israel.

In a recent interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit, Karp was asked on stage about Palantir’s work with ICE and later what Karp thought, from a moral standpoint, about families getting separated by ICE. “Of course I don’t like that, right? No one likes that. No American. This is the fairest, least bigoted, most open-minded culture in the world,” Karp said. But he said he cared about two issues politically: immigration and “re-establishing the deterrent capacity of America without being a colonialist neocon view. On those two issues, this president has performed.”



Source link

Continue Reading

Trending

Copyright © Miami Select.