DUBAI: DP World, one of the world’s largest port operators, said on Thursday it was confident it would meet full-year market expectations as it reported a flat half-year net profit.
The Dubai-headquartered firm made a profit of $606 million attributable to the owners of the company in the six months to June 30, according to a bourse statement.
The earnings, which were in line with analyst estimates, according to Thomson Reuters data, compared with a $608 million profit in the same period a year earlier.
Revenue increased 9.6 percent to $2.29 billion, and in July the company said gross container volumes rose 8.2 percent in the first half to 34 million twenty-foot equivalent units `(TEUs).
“Looking ahead to the second half of the year, we expect higher levels of throughput to be maintained,” said Chairman Sultan bin Sulayem.
The chairman said he was confident market expectations for the year would be met following the company’s first-half performance. He did not elaborate.
The company said it invested $595 million in capital expenditure in key growth markets in the first half, and announced over $170 million of acquisitions.
In June, subsidiary P&O Maritime acquired Spanish maritime services operator Reyser from Bergé y Cía SA in June.
Qatari vessels have been banned from the company’s terminals in the United Arab Emirates since June as part of an ongoing dispute between four Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.
DP World did not mention the dispute in its statement.
— REUTERS
DP World reports flat first half but confident about full year
DP World reports flat first half but confident about full year
White House says still opposes Ukraine using US arms against Russia
WASHINGTON: The White House on Tuesday rejected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s pleas for an end to restrictions on Kyiv using US-supplied arms to strike Russian territory.
“There’s no change to our policy at this point. We don’t encourage or enable the use of US-supplied weapons to strike inside Russia,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told a briefing.
Palestinian militants release video of Israeli hostage alive in Gaza
GAZA STRIP: Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad released a video on Tuesday showing an Israeli hostage alive and held in the Gaza Strip.
The captive, identified by Israeli media as Sasha Trupanov, 28, is seen speaking in Hebrew in the 30-second clip.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum campaign group identified him as Alexander (Sasha) Trupanov, and called on the Israeli authorities to secure the release of all captives held in Gaza.
It was unclear when the footage, in which he is seen wearing a T-shirt, was taken.
Trupanov, a Russian-Israeli dual national, was captured on October 7 from Kibbutz Nir Oz along with his mother, grandmother and girlfriend.
The three women were freed during a truce between Hamas and Israel at the end of November, which led to the release of 105 hostages.
“Seeing my Sasha on television today is very heartening, but it also breaks my heart that he has been in captivity for such a long time,” said his mother, Yelena Trupanov, in a short message published by the families’ forum.
Israel’s government has instructed its negotiating team to continue talks with mediators to secure a deal for the release of the hostages, but no new round of talks has begun.
“The Israeli government must give a significant mandate to the negotiating team, which will be able to lead to a deal for the return of all the hostages — the living to rehabilitation and the murdered to burial,” a families’ forum statement said after the release of Trupanov’s video.
Trupanov’s father was killed in the October 7 attack on southern Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,189 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Militants also took 252 hostages, 121 of whom remain in Gaza, including 37 the army says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 36,096 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Prosecutor urges jury to convict Trump, citing ‘powerful evidence’
NEW YORK: Donald Trump engaged in “conspiracy and a cover-up” to hide from voters that he had paid hush money to a porn star, prosecutors told a jury Tuesday in closing arguments at the first ever criminal trial of a former US president.
Less than six months before an election in which Trump is seeking to return to the White House, the stakes riding on the verdict are high — both for the 77-year-old personally and for the country.
Trump is accused of falsifying business records to reimburse his ex-lawyer Michael Cohen for a $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, afraid that her account of an alleged sexual encounter could doom his 2016 presidential campaign against Hillary Clinton.
Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass delivered the summation for the prosecution after Trump’s defense lawyer, Todd Blanche, called for his acquittal, insisting the case against the former president was based on lies.
Steinglass said Daniels’s story about her 2006 tryst with the married Trump was the motive for the alleged crime, but the “case at its core is about a conspiracy and a cover up” on the eve of an election.
“The people have presented powerful evidence of the defendant’s guilt,” he said.
Blanche told the jury that Trump was “innocent.” The only outcome should be a “very quick and easy not guilty verdict.”
Cohen, the one-time Trump fixer who became the star prosecution witness, was motivated by “outright hatred” for his former boss, Blanche said.
“He told you a number of things on that witness stand that were lies, pure and simple,” he said.
Blanche said Trump was busy “running the country” when the reimbursements were made to Cohen and he did not closely inspect all the invoices that came across his desk.
“There was no intent to defraud and beyond that there was no conspiracy to influence the 2016 election,” Blanche said.
But Steinglass countered that there was a mountain of corroborating evidence in addition to Cohen’s testimony.
“They want to make this case about Michael Cohen,” he said. “This case is about Donald Trump and whether he should be accountable for causing false entries in his own business records and whether he did that to cover up his own election violations.”
Speaking to reporters before entering the Manhattan courtroom, Trump called it a “very dangerous day for America.”
“We have a rigged court case that should have never been brought,” he said as three of his five children — Don Jr, Eric and Tiffany — stood behind him.
The 12 anonymous jurors were to start deliberations as early as Wednesday.
Polls show Trump neck and neck against President Joe Biden and the verdict will inject new tension into the White House race.
Speaking on behalf of the Biden campaign outside court, legendary actor Robert De Niro berated Trump as a “clown” intent on destroying the country.
The first former or sitting president under criminal indictment, Trump faces charges ranging from the relatively minor hush money case to accusations he took top secret documents and tried to overthrow the 2020 election.
The New York case, which featured more than 20 witnesses over five weeks and gripping testimony by Daniels and Cohen, is the only one likely to come to trial by election day.
If convicted, Trump faces up to four years in prison on each of 34 counts, but legal experts say that as a first-time offender he is unlikely to get jail time.
A conviction would not bar him from appearing on the ballot in November.
Trump chose not to testify in his defense.
Instead, he used his trips to court to stage tirades against “corrupt” Judge Juan Merchan, and to claim the trial is a Democratic ploy to keep him off the campaign trail.
To return a guilty or not guilty verdict requires the jury to be unanimous. Just one holdout means a hung jury and a mistrial, although prosecutors could seek a new trial.
Biden’s blurred red lines under scrutiny after Rafah carnage
WASHINGTON: Joe Biden’s red lines over Israel’s assault on Rafah have kept shifting, but the US president faces growing pressure to take a firmer stance after a deadly strike in the Gazan city.
Despite global outrage over the attack in which 45 people were killed, the White House insisted on Tuesday that it did not believe Israel had launched the major operation that Biden has warned against.
John Kirby, the US National Security Council spokesman, said that Biden had been consistent and was not “moving the stick” on what defined an all-out military offensive by key ally Israel.
But Biden faces a difficult balancing act both domestically and internationally over Gaza, especially in a year when the 81-year-old Democrat is locked in an election battle with Donald Trump.
“Biden wants to appear tough on Rafah, and has really tried to be stern with (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu, but in an election year, his red lines are increasingly blurred,” Colin Clarke, director of research at the Soufan Group, told AFP.
“I think he’ll continue shifting those lines, ducking and weaving, largely in response to events on the ground.”
Facing US campus protests over his support for Israel, Biden said earlier this month that he would not supply Israel with weapons for a major military operation in Rafah, and he halted a shipment of bombs.
Yet he has since taken no action even as Israel has stepped up air attacks and, as of Tuesday, moved tanks into central Rafah.
Instead, the White House has largely retreated to arguing about what does, and does not, constitute an invasion.
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said last week there was “no mathematical formula” and said that “what we’re going to be looking at is whether there is a lot of death and destruction.”
At the White House on Tuesday, his colleague Kirby faced intense questioning over the Israeli strike, which sparked a fire at a displaced persons camp in which dozes of people burned to death.
Kirby said the deaths were “heartbreaking” and “horrific” but again said there would be no change in policy toward Israel.
“We have not seen them smash into Rafah,” he said.
“We have not seen them go in with large units, large numbers of troops, in columns and formations in some sort of coordinated maneuver against multiple targets on the ground.”
But internationally the pressure is growing on Biden, a self-described Zionist who has stuck by Netanyahu despite deep disagreements since the war began with the October 7 Hamas attack.
Questions are mounting over how long the United States can tolerate an Israeli assault on Rafah when the International Court of Justice — the UN’s top court, of which both the US and Israel are members — ordered it to stop.
Political pressure is also mounting on Biden at home.
Protests against his support for Israel have roiled university campuses across the United States, while many on the left wing of his Democratic Party also oppose his stance.
Republicans however have assailed Biden over what they say is his faltering support for Israel, with US House Speaker Mike Johnson inviting Netanyahu to address Congress.
“It is indeed a difficult balancing act,” Gordon Gray, a former US ambassador who is now a professor at George Washington University, told AFP.
“Threading the proverbial needle — as the Biden administration is apparently seeking to do — will only disappoint voters who feel strongly about the issue one way or another.”
Gray however said he believed Biden’s decades-old support for Israel meant he would unlikely change his position, saying he was a “rare politician who is acting out of genuine conviction rather than for his own electoral benefit.”
Algeria to present UN resolution on end to Rafah ‘killing’
UNITED NATIONS: Algeria will present a draft UN resolution calling for an end to “the killing” in Rafah as Israel attacks Hamas fighters in the crowded Gaza city, its ambassador said Tuesday after a Security Council meeting.
Defying pressure from the United States and other western countries, Israel has been conducting military operations in Rafah, which is packed with people who have fled fighting elsewhere in Gaza.
An Israeli strike Sunday killed 45 people at a tent camp for displaced people, said the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza, drawing a chorus of international condemnation.
“It will be a short text, a decisive text, to stop the killing in Rafah,” Ambassador Amar Bendjama told reporters.
It was Algeria that requested Tuesday’s urgent meeting of the council after the Sunday strike.
A civil defense official in Gaza said another Israeli strike on a displacement camp west of Rafah on Tuesday killed at least 21 more people.
The Algerian ambassador did not say when he hoped the resolution might be put to a vote.
“We hope that it could be done as quickly as possible because life is in the balance,” said Chinese ambassador Fu Cong, expressing hope for a vote this week.
“It’s high time for this council to take action. This is a matter of life and death. This is a matter of emergency,” the French ambassador Nicolas de Riviere said before the council meeting.
The council has struggled to find a unified voice since the war broke out with the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, followed by Israel’s retaliatory campaign.
After passing two resolutions centered on the need for humanitarian aid to people in Gaza, in March the council passed a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire — an appeal that had been blocked several times before by the United States, Israel’s main ally.
Washington, increasingly frustrated with how Israel is waging the war and its mounting civilian death toll, finally allowed that resolution to pass by abstaining from voting.
But the White House said Tuesday that Israel’s offensive in Rafah had not amounted to the type of full-scale operation that would breach President Joe Biden’s “red lines,” and said it had no plans to change its policy toward Israel.
Asked about the new Algerian draft resolution, US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said, “we’re waiting to see it and then we’ll react to it.”
