विश्व समाचार

Diwali, the festival of lights, was celebrated across the world on November 8, with members of the Indian diaspora and local communities joining the festivities. From diya-lighting ceremonies and rangoli displays to cultural performances and community gatherings, celebrations were held in several countries.

Indian diplomatic missions also organised events to mark the occasion, while leaders from several countries extended greetings, highlighting the festival's message of peace, hope and the triumph of good over evil. Here are some glimpses of Diwali celebrations from around the world.

Also Read: Music, lights, ‘BharatVerse’ quiz: Indian embassy in Iran celebrates Diwali

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Sunday that mediators striving for a peace deal between the US and Iran had not travelled at all since the "shock" of the US midterm elections.

"We now have to see how long it will take for them to digest these results, in order to determine how we are going to move forward," the top Iranian diplomat told state TV following the elections in which the Republican Party of US President Donald Trump suffered heavy losses.

Various regional powers, including Qatar and Pakistan, have been trying for months without success to bring a definitive halt to the war launched by the United States and Israel in late February.

Outright fighting has largely subsided, but Iran continues in its efforts to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, vital to global energy supplies, while the US Navy maintains its own counterblockade of Iranian ports.

"For the past few days, there has been no more travel (by mediators), and the reason for this is the shock that the election results in the United States have caused to everyone."

He said it would "take some time before the atmosphere is favourable for the resumption of mediator travel" and called for patience.

Earlier, Aragchi posted on X: "American voters have made their choice. Time for the White House to make its own."

He called on Washington to accept previously articulated Iranian demands or "choose war, and see our alert and battle-hardened warriors rain down hell".

In September, Iran proposed a seven-day plan to reopen the strait, with demands including ending the war on all fronts, unfreezing Iranian assets, lifting oil sanctions and ending its counter-blockade of Iranian ports.

It later proposed doing so in just two days, an offer Aragchi repeated in his X post on Sunday.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

US President Donald Trump on Sunday cast doubt on renewed fighting with Iran, telling CNN that it was "highly unlikely" so long as talks progressed.

In recent weeks, Trump has threatened to renew strikes with US media reports suggesting that hostilities could resume after the US midterm elections this week.

"The answer is highly unlikely it's going to be necessary... I would if necessary, but we hit them really hard. I hit them so hard. You don't know how hard I hit them," Trump said, while warning that any decision to resume hostilities "depends on whether or not they sign a very strong agreement."

Trump previously acknowledged that the highly unpopular war with Iran was at least partially responsible for the stinging defeat that his Republican Party suffered in Tuesday's vote.

In the CNN interview Sunday, Trump once again suggested that the economic pressure Iran is under will force its leaders into accepting a peace deal on the United States' terms.

"They're a failing nation. It just came out, you saw this year, 301 per cent inflation," Trump claimed. "They're withering away financially. We've hit them militarily. We could finish them off."

But earlier on Sunday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi suggested peace talks had been paused while the political fallout of the Democratic Party's landslide victory was being assessed.

"For the past few days, there has been no more travel (by mediators), and the reason for this is the shock that the election results in the United States have caused to everyone," Araghchi told state television. "We now have to see how long it will take for them to digest these results in order to determine how we are going to move forward."

Iran continues to at least partly block traffic through the strategic Strait of Hormuz, which has dented oil supplies out of the Gulf. That, in turn, has driven up gasoline prices in the United States, contributing to the unpopularity of the war.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Nvidia is opening an investigation into reports that CEO Jensen Huang was the "target of a foreign intelligence effort," the company's board of directors said Sunday.

The announcement came after Huang acknowledged to the board that he had been intimate with a business executive whom US intelligence determined was gathering information for Beijing, The New York Times reported.

Huang apologised in a message to the company, according to the Times. "I was unfaithful to my wife," he said. "My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry." Nvidia's board said in a statement it has "no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised," but that its inquiry would examine all available information. Huang "fully supports the review and has committed to cooperating with it," the board said.

Huang, 63, will remain CEO during the investigation.

The Times reported last month that US intelligence agencies had discovered that Huang had developed a close relationship with Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen and chip buyer, and determined that she was feeding information directly to Beijing. The two are not related, according to the Times.

Alice Huang was previously a television reporter in China before becoming a top executive at Singapore-based data centre company Megaspeed, which has become one of Nvidia's biggest customers in Southeast Asia. Megaspeed bought more than USD 4.8 billion worth of Nvidia chips over the past two years, according to the Times.

The White House briefing room has been without a press secretary since October 16, and on Saturday, President Donald Trump tried to fill it with a name known far more for the cage than the lectern. Dana White, who runs the UFC, was offered the job in a public post, and White answered with a picture of himself at the podium. By evening, social media users had found another Dana White and were joking that the president had picked the wrong one. For many, the joke brought back a famous moment from the 2020 election, when a press conference was held at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Both "mix-ups" happened exactly 6 years apart.

The Post That Set It Off

The offer arrived on Truth Social, in the president's usual style. "I am pleased to announce that the Great Dana White, a violent Fighter and Warrior, has been offered the job of Press Secretary of the United States. Dana, please take the job!" Trump wrote.

"Dana will be a Press Secretary like none other," he added.

White is the president and CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and one of Trump's longtime allies, and Trump said he hoped White would bring six UFC fighters into the White House as advisers, "even though some are not from our Country". Two of the fighters named are Russian and one is Brazilian, and Trump shared photos of all six. "We need these people to defend us against the Lunatic Left," he wrote.

White did not say outright whether he would accept, but he posted a photo, made with artificial intelligence, of himself standing behind the lectern in the White House briefing room, with the caption "On to the next chapter". He also shared a screenshot of Trump's post.

Later on Saturday, White was at a fight in London between British former world champion Chris Billam-Smith and Cheavon Clarke, and at a news conference afterwards he said he was flying to Washington for a meeting with Trump on Monday. "I got a lot of jobs already," he said. "I'm sure we'll have something to talk about after that."

Enter The Other Dana White

Social media users did not wait for Monday, and some went looking for another Dana White and found one.

Spencer T Hakimian, founder of the New York hedge fund Tolou Capital Management, posted a video about Dana W White, a former Assistant to the Secretary of Defence for Public Affairs. "I guarantee you 100%, somebody recommended her to Trump, and he mistook her for the UFC's Dana White, and now we all are in this mess," he joked.

Journalist and podcast host V Spehar joined in with a post on Instagram. "How bad do you think Donald Trump is gonna flip out when he realises that the Dana White being proposed as the next Press Secretary for him is not Dana White, the UFC President," they wrote.

The Joke That Called Up Four Seasons

For many people, the joke called up an older one from November 2020, when election results from Pennsylvania and other states were being released, and Trump's campaign announced a surprise press conference. Many assumed it would be held at the Four Seasons hotel near Broad Street, but it was held instead in the car park of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a commercial landscaping and snow removal business on State Road in north-east Philadelphia.

No one could say for sure whether it was planned or a mix-up, and the whole affair felt confused from start to finish. Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani spoke on behalf of his boss with the company's sign behind him, and the nearby businesses on State Road included a sex shop and a crematorium. Nobody ever confirmed that it was a mistake.

I could write jokes for 800 years and I'd never think of something funnier than Trump booking the Four Seasons for his big presser, and it turning out to be the Four Seasons Total Landscaping parking lot between a dildo store and a crematorium. https://t.co/P45HV1daD9

— Zack Bornstein (@ZackBornstein) November 8, 2020

READ | Will Dana White Take Trump's Job Offer? UFC Chief Keeps Reporters Guessing

The Owner Who Rolled With It

The firm's owner, Marie Siravo, played along with the attention, selling T-shirts with slogans such as "Make America Rake Again" and "Lawn and Order" and coining phrases like "in sod we trust". More than 35,000 T-shirts, sweaters and face masks were sold, bringing in over $1.3m in sales, with customers including Jake Tapper, Mike Myers and Emma Watson.

A Podium With a Revolving Door

The press secretary job has been vacant since October 16, when Katie Zacharia left after less than a week in the role. Trump had announced her on October 9 as the replacement for Karoline Leavitt, the youngest White House press secretary in history and a longtime member of his inner circle.

Ms Zacharia faced scrutiny after her first briefing, a 14-minute appearance with halting remarks, and then over claims that she had long described herself as a lawyer without having passed a bar exam.

READ | Did Trump Pick Wrong Dana White For Press Secretary? Internet Is Convinced

Who Is Dana White?

White, 57, runs the world's largest mixed martial arts organisation, and he also leads Power Slap, has just launched Zuffa Boxing, and was named to Meta's board last year.

He has a long history with Trump. When he and his partners bought the struggling UFC for $2m in 2001, the sport faced bans in 36 US states after Senator John McCain labelled it "human cockfighting". "None of the venues wanted [the UFC]," White said in 2025. He credits Trump with helping to save it by hosting two events at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, and he later spoke at the Republican National Conventions in 2016, 2020 and 2024 and joined Trump on stage after the 2024 victory. This summer, the UFC staged a cage match on the White House lawn.

White is also known for blunt exchanges with reporters, a point likely to be noted in a role built around the press, and he released a 2020 clip criticising journalists who questioned holding fights during the pandemic and a 2009 video tirade aimed at a reporter.

The US military has announced it will create a 20-member task force to find ways to disrupt land routes into Iran that it says are used for shipments of weapons and illicit materials.

The restrictions would expand on a US naval blockade of Iranian ports during the two countries' eight-month war, in which Tehran has also restricted passage through the critical Strait of Hormuz trade route, choking global energy supplies.

The task force's work "will further constrain Iran's ability to finance terrorism, rebuild weapons factories, and replenish their military," US Central Command chief Brad Cooper said in a statement posted on X on Saturday.

The team of both civilian and military personnel based in Florida would coordinate with US government agencies on "preventing the movement of advanced weapons systems, dual-use technologies, sanctioned materials, and illegal revenue streams across Iran's land borders and the Caspian Sea," the statement added.

The United States imposed a blockade on Iranian ports early in the war in response to Tehran seeking to limit traffic through the strategic Strait of Hormuz, where around a fifth of global oil trade normally passes.

That blockade has halted around $25 billion in crude oil exports from Iran, according to the US Central Command.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)