Entertainment
Salman Rushdie on Charlie Kirk’s murder, surviving his own assassination attempt – and AI
Sir Salman Rushdie has told Sky News that Charlie Kirk’s murder was a “consequence of US gun culture”.
In an interview with Sky News lead presenter Wilfred Frost, Sir Salman said he thought the assassination of Mr Kirk, a conservative US activist, was an “appalling act of violence”.
“But it seems to me to be a characteristic or a consequence of America’s terrifying gun culture,” said the Booker-prize-winning author, who survived an attempt on his life at the Chautauqua Institution in New York in 2022.
“When you have a situation where there are more guns in private ownership than there are people in the country, I mean, guns are everywhere.
“When children are brought up being taught by their parents how to use guns, and guns are being left in the home in unlocked cabinets, it’s a country in which violent gun-related crime happens almost every day. And this is one of the most brutal examples of it.”
Sir Salman being interviewed by Sky News lead presenter Wilfred Frost
The Indian-British author also addressed the attempted assassination of US President Donald Trump, saying: “Well, I guess I’m happy that it failed. Beyond that, I don’t have a lot to say about it.”
Sir Salman was attacked by Hadi Matar, who stabbed him in the head, neck, torso and left hand, leaving him with damage to his liver and intestines as well as blind in one eye. Matar was jailed for 25 years in May.
He wrote about the attack and his recovery in his 2024 memoir Knife. His new book, Eleventh Hour, is a return to fiction.
Sir Salman Rushdie says Charlie Kirk’s assassination was a ‘consequence’ of US gun culture
Discussing the book and writing in general, he suggested that he doesn’t think AI would be able to capture emotion, humour and creativity like humans can.
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“The couple of little experiments that I’ve carried out with AI suggest to me that at least this far, it doesn’t have a sense of humour. And it’s not original,” he said.
“What it can do is to duplicate things that have been fed into it. But good art is original, and I don’t think that AI has an original bone in its body.”
Watch the full interview, including Sir Salman’s comments on book bans and freedom of speech in the US, during Mornings with Ridge and Frost on Sky News.
Rescue and recovery and efforts are underway in parts of South and Southeast Asia where the number of those killed in devastating flooding continues to rise.
The extreme weather last week has killed at least 334 people in Sri Lanka, 502 in Indonesia, and 170 in Thailand, according to authorities.
Rescuers in Sri Lanka are still searching for 370 people after a cyclone hit the island nation, with downpours flooding homes, fields and roads and triggering landslides in the hilly central region.
Landslides in Sarasavigama village near Kandy, Sri Lanka. Pic: AP
A man wades through the flooded street, following heavy rainfall in Wellampitiya, Sri Lanka. Pic: Reuters
A man uses a makeshift raft at a flooded area, following Cyclone Ditwah in Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. Pic: Reuters
Nearly a million people have been impacted by the heavy rains and floods, which forced nearly 200,000 into shelters, the country’s disaster management centre said.
People were seen salvaging belongings from flooded homes along the banks of the Kelani river near capital Colombo on Monday.
Meanwhile, train and flight services have resumed after being disrupted last week, but schools stayed closed, officials said.
Cyclone Ditwah was the “largest and most challenging” natural disaster in Sri Lanka’s history, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake said.
A landslide survivor crosses a section of a damaged road in Sarasavigama village near Kandy, Sri Lanka. Pic: AP
Landslide survivors salvage belongings at the site of a landslide in Sarasavigama village near Kandy, Sri Lanka. Pic: AP
A man uses his scarf to protect himself from the rain in the aftermath of Cyclone Ditwah, in Chennai, India. Pic: Reuters
The cyclone also brought heavy rain to India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu over the weekend, with authorities saying three people were killed in rain-related incidents.
The storm, which is currently 50km (30 miles) off the coast of the state capital Chennai, has already weakened into a “deep depression” and is expected to weaken further in the next 12 hours, weather officials said on Monday.
Hundreds still missing in Indonesia
In Southeast Asia, close to 700 people were killed as two different cyclones hit the region. Rescuers in Indonesia are still searching for at least 508 people missing, according to official figures.
People have started clearing mud, trees and wreckage from roads on the weekend as recovery operations continued.
More than 28,000 homes have been damaged, with 1.4 million people affected by the rare tropical storm.
The country’s president, Prabowo Subianto, called it a catastrophe and pledged to rebuild infrastructure as he visited the three affected provinces on Monday, where nearly 300,000 people have been displaced by the flooding.
Rescuers search for flood victims in Tanah Datar, West Sumatra, Indonesia. Pic: AP
A flooded field in Indonesia’s West Sumatra province. Pic: Reuters
Rescuers search for victims at a village affected by flash flooding, in Agam, West Sumatra, Indonesia. Pic: AP
In Thailand, flooding in eight southern provinces affected about three million people and led to a major mobilisation of its military to evacuate critical patients from hospitals and reach people stuck in floodwaters for days.
In the worst-affected city of Hat Yai, a southern trading hub, 335 mm (13 inches) of rain fell on 21 November, its highest single-day tally in 300 years, followed by days of unrelenting downpours.
At least 82 people have died and more than 3 million people have been impacted by floods in 12 southern Thai provinces.
People move a car damaged by floods in Songkhla province, southern Thailand. Pic: AP
Prime Minister Anutin Charnivirakul expects residents to be able to return home within seven days, a government spokesperson said on Monday.
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The first batch of compensation payments is set to be distributed on Monday, starting with 239m baht (£5.6m) for 26,000 people, the spokesperson added.
In Malaysia there have been at least three deaths and authorities are still on alert for a second and third wave of flooding as 11,600 remain in evacuation centres.
Intel stock held a sharp hike in pretrading on Monday, after the stock surged on Friday when an analyst predicted the chip giant was nearing a deal to supply Apple in 2027.
Shares in Intel rose 10% on Friday after TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo posted on X that he expected Intel to begin shipping its lowest-end M processor to Apple as early as second or third quarter 2027.
He said that his latest industry surveys indicate that “visibility on Intel becoming an advanced-node supplier to Apple has recently improved significantly.”
Intel stock fell 0.59% as of 6.26am ET on Monday in early pretrading.
Kuo added that the timeline of the partnership is contingent on the development process after Intel releases its process design kit — the blueprint from which Apple’s engineers can build the chips — which is expected early 2026.
Apple’s silicon chips for its iPhone, iPad and Mac products are currently supplied by TSMC.
In his post, Kuo played down the potential Intel-Apple partnership’s impact on the Taiwanese chip maker, saying that Apple is expected to remain “highly dependent” on the company’s advanced nodes for the “foreseeable future.”
“In absolute terms, order volumes for the lowest-end M processor are relatively small and virtually no material impact on TSMC’s fundamentals or its technology leadership over the next several years.”
Kuo added a deal with Intel would signal strong support from Apple for the Trump administration’s push for its homegrown companies to manufacture in the U.S.
Neither Intel nor Apple immediately responded to a request for comment from CNBC.
‘If Intel pulls it off, there is potential to win higher volume and value business from Apple’
Intel’s stock has seen a resurgence over the past 12 months after years of decline. Share price fell as low as $17.66 in April, before recovering over the past few months.
“Apple is a potential major reference customer whose presence validates Intel’s high-performance foundry offering,” Paul Markham, investment director at GAM Global Equities, told CNBC.
“If Intel pulls it off, there is potential to win higher volume and value business from Apple, for example CPU production for the iPhone, and win business from other large chip designers.”
Intel has had an up and down relationship with Apple since it first announced the chip giant’s processors would power some products in 2005. The iPhone maker transitioned away from the company’s processors at the start of the 2020s.
Last week Intel was on the subject of a lawsuit filed by TSMC, in which it alleged one of its former senior vice president had leaked “confidential information” to the company. Intel did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment at the time.
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