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InterNations
Turkey

NBC News Correspondent Richard Engel And Team Freed From Syrian Captors

NBC NEWS(USA)

Worldcrunch

ISTANBUL – NBC News' chief correspondent Richard Engel and members of his production team were freed from captors in Syria after a firefight at a checkpoint on Monday, NBC News said early Tuesday.

"After being kidnapped and held for five days inside Syria by an unknown group, NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel and his production crew members have been freed unharmed. We are pleased to report they are safely out of the country," the network said in a statement.


Monday evening local time, the prisoners were being moved to a new location in a vehicle when their captors ran into a checkpoint held by members of the Ahrar al-Sham brigade, a Syrian rebel group. There was a confrontation followed by a firefight.

The captors remain unidentified and are not believed to be loyal to the Assad regime, reports NBC News. Two of the captors died in the assault while an unknown number of others escaped.

None of the NBC team were harmed and they are reported to be in good health. They made their way to the border and re-entered Turkey Tuesday morning, according to the network.

The 39 year old reporter along with other employees disappeared shortly after crossing into Syria from Turkey on Thursday.

There has been no claim of responsibility from the captors and no request for ranson, the network says.

Richard Engel was named chief foreign correspondent of NBC News in April 2008. He is one of America's most respected war correspondents and covered several conflicts including Iraq and Libya.

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Economy

Tea Be Damned! Inside The Massive Starbucks Bet On China's Shift To Coffee

A gigantic and multi-faceted new location near Shanghai epitomizes the American giant's ambition to quench China's growing but still-nascent thirst for coffee.

Photo of a Starbucks coffee shop in China

Starbucks coffee in Yangshuo, China

Frédéric Schaeffer

Updated Dec. 7, 2023 at 4:05 p.m.

SHANGHAI — The town of Kunshan, an hour's drive from Shanghai, is the launchpad of Starbucks's latest Chinese offensive. In mid-September, the American giant inaugurated an 80,000 square meter site that includes a roasting plant, an integrated distribution centre, and an immersive experience centre.

Grandly named as the "China Coffee Innovation Park", this $220 million project is the Seattle-headquartered company's biggest investment outside the United States. And the Kunshan model of vertical integration, from bean to cup, has no equivalent anywhere else in the world for the Starbucks group.

The site is a symbol of Starbucks’s hefty ambitions in China – it plans to open a location in the country every nine hours between now and 2025. The aim is to have more than 9,000 shops in 300 Chinese cities by then, compared with 6,500 today. "The 9,000 stores are just a milestone", said Laxman Narasimhan, the company's new boss, who rushed to China at the end of May in the wake of his appointment.

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Is the competition getting tougher? Has the end of the China’s "Zero-COVID" policy failed to deliver on its promise of an economic rebound? Is Washington pushing its multinationals to reduce their dependence on China?

Starbucks doesn't care. In the land of tea-drinkers, coffee is enjoying a meteoric rise, becoming a trendy drink for a young, urban middle class sensitive to Western influences.

The China focus comes amid news this week that McDonalds is launching a new kind of cafe-restaurant: CosMc's, which could be a direct competitor worldwide to Starbucks, serving customizable drinks like "s'mores and cold brew", "churro frappes", and "tumeric latte."

Some 10,000 CosMc locations are planned for opening over the next four years, with Starbucks expanding to 55,000 stores worldwide by 2030.

All of this speaks to coffee fever globally, which really began in China just a decade ago, and now registering double-digit growth rates that have manufacturers salivating.

"We expect China to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest market we have in the world," Narasimhan predicts.

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