ISRAEL
Growth slows on investment
The nation’s economy expanded slower than previously estimated last year as exports and capital investment declined, the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics said on Thursday. GDP rose 2.3 percent from 2014, driven largely by private consumption, the bureau said. The bureau previously estimated 2.5 percent expansion. Earlier this week, the Bank of Israel cut its growth estimate for last year to 2.8 percent, from 3.3 percent three months ago. Exports fell 3 percent for last year, while capital investment declined 1.5 percent, the bureau said.
PETROLEUM
US ships crude oil overseas
The first US shipment of crude oil to an overseas buyer departed a Texas port on Thursday, just weeks after a 40-year ban on most such exports was lifted. The Theo T tanker left NuStar Energy LP’s dockside facility in Corpus Christi, Texas, along the western shore of the Gulf of Mexico, NuStar spokeswoman Mary Rose Brown said in an e-mail. The ship is carrying a cargo of oil and condensate from ConocoPhillips Co’s wells in south Texas that was sold to Swiss trading house Vitol Group.
FINANCE
India to curb cooperatives
India is to crack down on errant financial firms that raise funds, mainly from millions of poor rural customers, through loosely regulated credit cooperative societies, the Indian Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare said. The federal government plans to penalize cooperatives that fail to repay investors when deposits come due or engage in other violations of regulations. One measure under discussion is to either have an independent regulator supervise credit cooperatives or bring them under the purview of an existing regulator, such as the Securities and Exchange Board of India.
CARMAKERS
General Motors to face trial
General Motors Co must face a jury trial this month on allegations that injuries from a 2014 car crash arose from the automaker’s ignition switch defect, a New York federal judge ruled. Despite having reached settlements with hundreds of victims, the Wednesday decision sets the stage for the first jury trial this year on the defect on Jan. 11, which turns off airbag deployment and has been linked to 124 deaths and hundreds of injuries.
BANKING
Bank admits tax evasion
Large cash and gold withdrawals were some of the ways Bank Lombard Odier & Co Ltd allowed US clients to sever a paper trail on their assets and cheat the US Internal Revenue Service, the Swiss lender admitted, agreeing to pay US$99.8 million to avoid prosecution. That penalty is the second-largest paid under a program to help the US clamp down on tax evasion through Swiss banks. Total penalties have reached more than US$1.1 billion. DZ Privatbank (Schweiz) AG is also to pay almost US$7.5 million under accords released on Thursday.
DATA STORAGE
EMC puts price on job cuts
EMC Corp, the data storage equipment company being acquired by Dell Inc for about US$67 billion in the biggest technology deal ever, on Thursday said its previously announced job cuts would result in an estimated US$250 million charge. The reduction is expected to be “substantially completed by the end of the first quarter of this year, with all the cuts finished by the end of the year,” EMC said in a regulatory filing, without specifying the number of jobs being cut.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) would not produce its most advanced technologies in the US next year, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. Kuo made the comment during an appearance at the legislature, hours after the chipmaker announced that it would invest an additional US$100 billion to expand its manufacturing operations in the US. Asked by Taiwan People’s Party Legislator-at-large Chang Chi-kai (張啟楷) if TSMC would allow its most advanced technologies, the yet-to-be-released 2-nanometer and 1.6-nanometer processes, to go to the US in the near term, Kuo denied it. TSMC recently opened its first US factory, which produces 4-nanometer
PROTECTION: The investigation, which takes aim at exporters such as Canada, Germany and Brazil, came days after Trump unveiled tariff hikes on steel and aluminum products US President Donald Trump on Saturday ordered a probe into potential tariffs on lumber imports — a move threatening to stoke trade tensions — while also pushing for a domestic supply boost. Trump signed an executive order instructing US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick to begin an investigation “to determine the effects on the national security of imports of timber, lumber and their derivative products.” The study might result in new tariffs being imposed, which would pile on top of existing levies. The investigation takes aim at exporters like Canada, Germany and Brazil, with White House officials earlier accusing these economies of
Teleperformance SE, the largest call-center operator in the world, is rolling out an artificial intelligence (AI) system that softens English-speaking Indian workers’ accents in real time in a move the company claims would make them more understandable. The technology, called accent translation, coupled with background noise cancelation, is being deployed in call centers in India, where workers provide customer support to some of Teleperformance’s international clients. The company provides outsourced customer support and content moderation to global companies including Apple Inc, ByteDance Ltd’s (字節跳動) TikTok and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. “When you have an Indian agent on the line, sometimes it’s hard
PROBE CONTINUES: Those accused falsely represented that the chips would not be transferred to a person other than the authorized end users, court papers said Singapore charged three men with fraud in a case local media have linked to the movement of Nvidia’s advanced chips from the city-state to Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepSeek (深度求索). The US is investigating if DeepSeek, the Chinese company whose AI model’s performance rocked the tech world in January, has been using US chips that are not allowed to be shipped to China, Reuters reported earlier. The Singapore case is part of a broader police investigation of 22 individuals and companies suspected of false representation, amid concerns that organized AI chip smuggling to China has been tracked out of nations such
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