World
Trump vowed to end Ukraine war in first 24 hours of his presidency – nearly 200 days in, could he be close?
Seven hours is a long time in US politics.
At 10am, Donald Trump accused Russia of posing a threat to America’s national security.
By 5pm, Mr Trump said there was a “good prospect” of him meeting Vladimir Putin “soon”.
There had, he claimed, been “great progress” in talks between his special envoy Steve Witkoff and the Russian president.
It’s difficult to gauge the chances of a meeting between the two leaders without knowing what “great progress” means.
Is Russia “inclined” towards agreeing a ceasefire, as Ukraine’s president now claims?
Is Mr Putin prepared to meet with his Ukrainian foe, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, too?
The very fact that we’re asking those questions suggests something shifted on a day when there was no expectation of a breakthrough.
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Mr Trump repeatedly vowed to end the war within 24 hours of becoming president.
On day 198 of his presidency, he might, just might, be one step closer to achieving that.
Staff at a zoo in Germany which culled 12 baboons and fed some of their carcasses to the lions say they have received death threats.
Tiergarten Nuremberg euthanised the healthy Guinea baboons at the end of July due to overcrowding in their enclosure.
Some remains were used for research while the rest were fed to the zoo’s carnivores.
Plans to kill the baboons were first announced last year after the population exceeded 40, and protestors gathered outside the zoo to show their outrage.
When the site closed last Tuesday to carry out the cull, several activists were arrested after climbing the fence.
The director of the zoo defended the decision, saying efforts to sterilise and rehome some baboons had failed.
“We love these animals. We want to save a species. But for the sake of the species, we have to kill individuals otherwise we are not able to keep up a population in a restricted area,” Dr Dag Encke told Sky News.
These are not the specific animals involved. File pics: Reuters
‘The staff are suffering’
He said police are investigating after he and the staff were sent death threats.
“The staff are really suffering, sorting out all these bad words, insults and threats,” Dr Encke said.
“The normal threat is ‘we will kill you, and we’ll feed you to the lions’.
“But what is really disgusting is when they say that’s worse than Dr Mengele from the National Socialists, who was one of the most cruel people in human history.
“That is really insulting all the victims of the Second World War and the Nazi regime.”
Josef Mengele was a Nazi officer who performed deadly experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Second World War.
Dr Dag Encke
Zoo animals ‘treated as commodities’
Culling animals and feeding them to predators isn’t unheard of in zoos.
In 2014, Copenhagen Zoo caused controversy by euthanizing an 18-month-old male giraffe called Marius and feeding his body to the lions.
At the time, the zoo said it was due to a duty to avoid inbreeding.
Dr Mark Jones, a vet and head of policy at Born Free Foundation, a charity which campaigns for animals to be kept in the wild, denounced the practice and said thousands of healthy animals are being destroyed by zoos each year.
“It reflects the fact animals in zoos are often treated as commodities that are disposable or replaceable,” he said.
Marius the giraffe was put down and publicly fed to lions at at Copenhagen Zoo in Denmark. Pic: Keld Navntoft/AFP/Getty
Zoo asks for unwanted pets
Earlier this week, a zoo in Denmark faced a backlash for asking for unwanted pets to be donated to be used as food for its predators.
In a Facebook post, Aalborg Zoo said it could take smaller live animals such as chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs, as well as horses under 147cm. It said the animals would be euthanised by specially trained staff before being fed to carnivores like the European lynx.
While some people supported the scheme, saying they had donated animals in the past, others are outraged.
“The very idea of a zoo offering to take unwanted pets in order to kill them and feed them to their predators will, I think, horrify most right-minded people,” said Dr Jones.
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Dr Mark Jones
Aalborg Zoo has now closed the post to comments and said in a statement: “For many years at Aalborg Zoo, we have fed our carnivores with smaller livestock.
“When keeping carnivores, it is necessary to provide them with meat, preferably with fur, bones, etc., to give them as natural a diet as possible.
“Therefore, it makes sense to allow animals that need to be euthanised for various reasons to be of use in this way.
“In Denmark, this practice is common, and many of our guests and partners appreciate the opportunity to contribute.”
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters near Air Force One at the the Lehigh Valley International Airport on August 03, 2025 in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images
After months of speculation, U.S. President Donald Trump has divulged more of his semiconductor tariff plans, but his latest threats might raise more questions than answers.
On Wednesday, Trump said he will impose a 100% tariff on imports of semiconductors and chips, but not for companies that are “building in the United States.”
As semiconductors represent an over $600 billion industry at the heart of the modern digital economy, any potential tariffs hold massive weight.
However, experts say the President has yet to provide key details on the policy, which will ultimately determine their full impact and targets.
“It’s still too early to pin down the impact of the tariffs on the semiconductor sector,” Ray Wang, research director of semiconductors, supply chain and emerging technology at The Futurum Group, told CNBC.
“The final rule is likely still being drafted and the technical details are far from clear at this point.”
Big players win?
One of the biggest questions for chip players and investors will be how much manufacturing a company needs to commit to the U.S. to qualify for the tariff exemption.
The U.S. has been working to onshore its semiconductor supply chain for many years now. Since 2020, the world’s largest semiconductor companies such as TSMC and Samsung Electronics have committed hundreds of billions of dollars to building plants in the U.S.
Speaking to CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Thursday, James Sullivan, Managing Director and Head of Asia Pacific Equity Research at J.P. Morgan, said this could mean most major chip manufacturers receiving exemptions.
If this is the case, the policy could have the effect of “continuing to consolidate market share amongst the largest cap players in the space,” Sullivan said.
Indeed, shares of major Asian chip companies like TSMC, which has significant investments in the U.S., rose in Thursday morning trading following Trump’s announcement. Early this year, TSMC announced it would expand its investments in the U.S. to $165 billion.
Shares of South Korea’s Samsung and SK Hynix — which have also invested in the U.S. — were also trading up after a Korean trade envoy reportedly said on radio that the duo would be exempt from the 100% tariffs.
An exemption on what?
Beyond the question of exemptions, many other aspects of the potential tariffs remain unclear.
Speaking on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia,” on Thursday, Stacy Rasgon, senior U.S. semiconductor analyst at Bernstein, noted that most of the semiconductors that enter the U.S. come inside consumer goods such as smartphones, PCs and cars.
For example, in 2024, the U.S. imported $46.3 billion of semiconductors — only about 1% of all U.S. imports, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
While Rasgon said tariffs on these imports may be manageable, broader tariffs would be harder to deal with.
“What we don’t know with [Trump’s] comments on tariffs, is it just raw semiconductors? Are there going to be tariffs on end devices? Are you going to be looking at tariffs on components within end devices?,” Rasgon asked.
The confusion and questions around semiconductor tariffs were brought to the forefront after the U.S. Department of Commerce started a national security investigation of semiconductor imports in April, just as the sector was exempted from Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs.
The vague language from the Trump administration — though not invoked in the president’s latest proclamations — could theoretically be used to apply broad tariffs to an enormous segment of the electronics supply chain. It’s also unclear on the extent that semiconductor materials and manufacturing equipment used to manufacture chips would fall under the tariffs.
Complex supply chains
Potential tariff strategies could also be complicated by the intricate and interdependent nature of the semiconductor supply chain.
Rasgon gave the example of American chip designer Qualcomm, which sends their designs to TSMC to be manufactured in Taiwan and then imported to the U.S.
“Does that mean those [chip imports] would not be tariffed, because they’re made at TSMC, and TSMC is building in the U.S.?… I don’t know. Hopefully that’s how it would be,” he said.
Another large buyer of semiconductors in the U.S. are cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services and Google, which are essential to power Washington’s AI plans.
According to a recent report from ITIF, semiconductors contribute $7 trillion in global economic activity annually by underpinning a range of downstream applications including AI and “big data.”
In a potential sign of American companies seeking to move their chip supply chains into the U.S., Apple CEO Tim Cook, alongside Trump at the White house Wednesday, announced that it will be supplied chips from Samsung’s production plant in Texas.
The company also announced an additional $100 billion in U.S. investments, raising its total investment commitments in the country to $600 billion over the next four years.
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