Contract chipmaker GlobalFoundries has appointed Tim Breen as its chief executive officer, the company said on Wednesday.

Breen will succeed Thomas Caulfield who will transition to become the company’s executive chairman, while Niels Anderskouv will be appointed President and Chief Operating Officer.

The changes will go into effect in April this year.

BRUSSELS : European Union antitrust regulators will decide by March 12 whether to clear U.S. chipmaker AMD’s $4.9 billion bid for server maker ZT Systems, a European Commission filing showed on Wednesday.

AMD announced the proposed acquisition in August last year which will strengthen its portfolio of artificial intelligence chips and hardware to better compete with Nvidia.

The EU executive can either approve the deal with or without remedies after its preliminary review or it can open a four-month-long investigation if it has serious concerns.

ZT makes AI infrastructure for the world’s largest hyperscale computing companies, with Microsoft and Meta Platforms among its customers.

HONG KONG: The United States Postal Service (USPS) said on Wednesday (Feb 5) it would accept parcels from China and Hong Kong, in a U-turn after a suspension following President Donald Trump ending a trade provision used by retailers including Temu, Shein, and Amazon to ship low-value packages duty-free to the US.

“The USPS and Customs and Border Protection are working closely together to implement an efficient collection mechanism for the new China tariffs to ensure the least disruption to package delivery,” it said in a statement.

The Trump administration imposed an additional 10 per cent tariff on Chinese goods and closed the “de minimis” exemption that allows US shoppers to avoid paying tariffs for shipments below US$800 from China.

USPS did not immediately comment on whether its temporary suspension had been tied to Trump’s order ending de minimis shipments from China, which was announced on Saturday and came into force from one minute past midnight on Tuesday.

“There has really been absolutely zero time for anyone to prepare for this,” said Maureen Cori, co-founder at New York-based consultancy Supply Chain Compliance.

“What we really need is direction from the government on how to handle this without warning or notice.”

Currently, de minimis parcels are consolidated so that customs can clear hundreds or thousands of shipments at once, but they will now require individual clearances, significantly increasing the burden for postal services, brokers and customs agents, said Cori.

SINGAPORE: A 30-year-old man has been arrested for allegedly stealing US$885 (S$1,120) in cash from a passenger on board a flight to Singapore, the police said on Wednesday (Feb 5). 

The police were alerted to the case on Tuesday at about 2pm. Preliminary investigations revealed that a passenger saw the man touching her bag, which was stored in the overhead compartment.

The passenger confronted the man and checked the contents of her bag. She discovered that a stack of US dollars was missing and suspected that the man had stolen her money. 

After the aircraft landed at Changi Airport, officers from the Airport Police Division conducted investigations. 

Together with the assistance of the cabin crew, they found the missing stack of cash in another overhead compartment. The man had passed through this area of the aircraft during the incident. 

The police did not provide further information on the airline or the flight’s city of departure. 

The man, a Chinese national, will be charged in court on Thursday with theft. The offence carries a jail term of up to three years, a fine, or both. 
 

Chuckling, his wife replied, “Well, he named our daughter Denise.”

Relieved, the husband asked, “What about our son?”

After a pause, she answered, “He named him… DeNephew.”

The Power of Laughter

Laughter connects people, offering a break from life’s stress. Jokes often work by playing with expectations, using wordplay, irony, and absurdity. Let’s look at three classic jokes: The Twin Naming Fiasco, The Farmer in Hell, and The Blind Bat.

The Twin Naming Fiasco plays on pun humor. A man learns his wife’s brother, Joe, named their twins. The girl is named Deniece (like “the niece”) and the boy DeNephew. It’s funny because it subverts the expectation of normal names and creates a ridiculous outcome based on family roles.

The Farmer in Hell involves a Texas farmer who isn’t fazed by extreme heat in hell. When it’s frozen, he celebrates, thinking the Cowboys won the Super Bowl. This joke relies on sports exaggeration and reversing expectations.

The Blind Bat is slapstick humor, where a bat covered in blood leads others to a tree and says, “Good, because I didn’t!” It’s funny due to the absurdity and relatable image of walking into something unexpected.

These jokes work because they surprise us, play on stereotypes, and paint memorable visuals.

The sudden push comes days after President Donald Trump nearly launched a trade war with Canada and Mexico over fentanyl and levied an additional 10% tariff on China over the deadly drug.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said on Tuesday that Congress must act now on how the government classifies fentanyl and related substances.

“We’ve played this game for long enough. It’s time to make this temporary scheduling permanent so that the drug cartels do not have the opportunity to flood our country with even deadlier versions of fentanyl,” Grassley said in the hearing on the need to schedule fentanyl.

The hearing took place days after Grassley joined Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM) to introduce the Halt All Lethal Trafficking of Fentanyl Act, or HALT Act. The bill would permanently classify fentanyl-related substances as Schedule I under the Controlled Substances Act, the highest possible rating. Seven Democratic senators have since co-sponsored the legislation.

The House is set to vote on the HALT Act as soon as Wednesday.

Since 2018, fentanyl has been rescheduled on a temporary basis as a Schedule I drug, but its classification is set to expire on March 31.

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), described getting fentanyl off the nation’s streets as a “Herculean task” that would require bipartisanship.

The Senate’s push comes at the same time as Trump’s efforts to force Canada, China, and Mexico to crack down on border security and fentanyl seeping into the United States.

The White House proposed 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports, but by Monday, Trump announced that those tariffs had been delayed by 30 days because those countries made concessions.

In a call with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday, Trump said his counterpart had agreed to place 10,000 “front-line personnel” on the border with the U.S. and appoint a “fentanyl czar” to stop the ingredients for fentanyl from seeping south of the border into America.

Sen. Ashley Moody (R-FL) praised Trump’s actions to enhance border security by threatening tariffs and said the problem was finally being addressed after too little action under former President Joe Biden.

“The last four years, this committee has not held one hearing on fentanyl,” said Moody, Florida’s former attorney general. “We’re going to talk about it moving forward.”

Nearly 90% of fentanyl seized was at the nation’s ports of entry, primarily between the U.S. and Mexico, where body smugglers, commercial trucks, and passenger vehicles attempted to transport it through customs inspection booths. But plenty more has managed to get through.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is a border state lawmaker whose home state has seized enough fentanyl since 2021 to kill 622 million people. Cruz blamed the border crisis seen under the Biden administration for the uptick in deaths due to fentanyl overdoses and poisonings.

“The American people in November issued a clear and unequivocal mandate the open borders we’ve had for the last four years must be closed. We can no longer allow criminals and cartels and gang members and deadly drugs to stream across our border,” Cruz said. “President Trump is doing his part to meet the mandate from the voters. We also in Congress must do our part to meet that mandate.”

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In 2022, more than 109,000 people in the U.S. died from drug overdoses, including 75,000 of whom died from synthetic opioids, including fentanyl. Fentanyl-related substances are the No. 1 cause of death in U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 45, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Drug Enforcement Administration considers 2 milligrams of fentanyl, the amount that could fit on the tip of a pencil, lethal because it can put a user in a coma or cause death.