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German Economy Minister Katherina Reiche speaks to reporters in Beijing, yesterday. (Reuters) Germany’s economy minister began a visit to China yesterday with Berlin saying it wanted to boost co-operation with a key partner while also warning of worsening trade imbalances.Katherina Reiche arrived in Beijing for the three-day trip, the latest senior German official to head to Berlin’s top trading partner as they seek to navigate increasingly complex ties.China — long a reliable market for German exports, from cars to factory machinery — has in recent years become a fierce competitor in many industries, turning the relationship on its head.Reiche, accompanied by a business delegation and German MPs, said that China and Germany “are linked by one of the most significant economic relationships in the world”.”In times of global uncertainty, we need dialogue, trust and robust partnerships. I will therefore advocate on the ground for modern co-operation — based on openness, competition and mutual benefit,” she said in a statement from her ministry.As well as Beijing, Reiche will visit the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.She will hold talks with Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng and Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao and visit companies.But there are many areas where Beijing and Berlin disagree, from trade practices to human rights, and Reiche will likely broach some of these.The economy ministry noted that in particular there was now a “clear trade imbalance” between the world’s number two and number three economies.German exports fell by around 10% in 2025, to roughly 80bn euros ($93bn), while imports from China rose to around 170bn euros, it said.Increasing competition for German businesses in China has been one factor weighing on Europe’s top economy, which has stagnated in recent years.Chancellor Friedrich Merz visited China in February, and the widening trade gap was also a key focus.Still, both Berlin and Beijing are keen to strengthen ties at a time of global uncertainty sparked by US President Donald Trump’s often erratic policies. Related Story Source link
Norway will come under France's nuclear umbrella, Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere told news agency NTB yesterday, as concerns grow in Europe over US commitment to the region's security. The move by Norway is significant as it has long been a so-called Atlanticist nation, one which believed its security was best achieved via close alignment with Washington.Stoere travelled to Paris yesterday afternoon to meet President Emmanuel Macron and sign a new defence agreement with France, which includes Norway joining a French-led nuclear weapons initiative. ‘We are doing this in light of the security policy situation in Europe, including Russia's massive rearmament, also in the nuclear domain, and that it is waging a full-scale war against another European country,’ Stoere told Norwegian news agency NTB. No nuclear weapons will be deployed in Norway in peacetime, he added. The Nordic nation of 5.6 mn inhabitants is a member of Nato, but not of the European Union, and shares a border with Russia in the Arctic. In March, France offered to extend the protection of its nuclear umbrella to other European countries which, in practice, means that an attack on Norway could trigger a French nuclear response. Norway becomes the latest country to receive France's nuclear protection, after Poland and Lithuania, which also share borders with Russia. Russia and the US are the world's biggest nuclear powers, with over 5,000 nuclear warheads each. China has about 500, France has 290 and Britain 225, according to the Federation of American Scientists. Source link
President Donald Trump during the cabinet meeting yesterday. (Reuters) President Donald Trump said yesterday the US and Iran still have issues to resolve in peace talks, after Washington dismissed an Iranian state television report of a framework deal to restore shipping through the Strait of Hormuz within a month and to lift a US naval blockade on Iranian ships.Trump told a cabinet meeting that Iran remained keen to end the war, which has choked global energy supplies through the strategic waterway, but that the terms did not satisfy Washington.”Iran is very much intent, they want very much to make a deal. So far they haven’t gotten there … We’re not satisfied with it, but we will be. Either that or we’ll have to just finish the job,” he said, without elaborating.”The deal has got to be perfect,” he later added, insisting that the Strait of Hormuz would be open immediately after a deal is reached and that no single country would have control over the waterway. Iranian state TV reported that it had obtained an unofficial draft of a memorandum of understanding under which the US would lift its blockade and withdraw its forces from Iran’s vicinity. It said the issue of US troops in the region needed further discussion, without elaborating. It did not mention Iran’s nuclear programme, which the US wants disbanded. In a statement on social media, the White House dismissed the report as a “complete fabrication”, while Tehran did not comment. Publicly, the two sides previously have outlined positions starkly at odds.US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the cabinet meeting: “There’s been some progress and some interest, and we’ll see over the next few hours and days whether progress could be made.””The bottom line is Iran’s never going to have a nuclear weapon,” he added.Key sticking points in the talks have included reopening and management of the Strait of Hormuz waterway, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas flowed before the conflict, and the issue of the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear capacity.Trump said that once a deal is struck, the US would monitor shipping there. He also said that Oman, on the southern shores of the strait, would have to play its part in the process as well. The strait is covered by international law that guarantees foreign vessels the right to pass through.”We’ll watch over it, but nobody’s going to control it – that’s part of the negotiation that we have…,” he said. Oil prices fell more than 5% after the Iranian television report, before retracing about a fifth of that fall.The US military has some 15,000 troops enforcing a blockade of Iran and has thousands of additional forces at bases throughout the region, including in Gulf states.US naval vessels, some with thousands of sailors and Marines aboard, regularly transit the region, stopping in ports including in Oman. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Iranian sources have said talks on the nuclear issue will come in a second round of negotiations – something that may not be acceptable to some of Trump’s closest supporters. Iran says its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes only.Earlier yesterday, a senior Iranian official told reporters on the sidelines of the first International Security Forum in Moscow that reopening the Strait of Hormuz remained a sticking point.”As long as we have not agreed on all issues, we consider that nothing has been agreed,” Iran’s deputy secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Ali Bagheri Kani, told reporters when asked about a deal on reopening the waterway.Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Navy said yestersday that 23 ships including oil tankers, container ships and other commercial vessels passed through Hormuz with its permission in the previous 24 hours, a fraction of the daily 125 to 140 vessels passing through before the conflict. The war has killed thousands and caused an unprecedented oil supply shock, pushing up the costs of fuel, fertiliser and food.It has also created political problems for Trump at home. US polls show the war is deeply unpopular with the public six months before midterm elections. Related Story Source link
Youtube will in future automatically detect AI-generated content and flag the information to viewers on its platform, the Google-owned company said Wednesday.The move reverses a previous policy of relying on video creators to self-report if they had used generative AI tools.”If a creator doesn’t specify whether or not they used AI, but our systems detect significant photorealistic AI use, we will now automatically apply a label,” Youtube said in a blog post.The video platform’s last steps on generative AI date back to 2024, when it requested that creators flag content where they had used the technology.Since then there have been major strides in producing photorealistic images and video, with widely available AI models including Google’s Veo 3.1 and Seedance from Tiktok’s parent company Bytedance.Creators will be able to challenge the new flags if they think their content has been unfairly labelled as AI, Youtube said.The platform added that the flags would have no impact on its algorithm for recommending videos to users.Other platforms and social networks to introduce automatic flagging of AI content recently include music streamer Spotify.Many online spaces are flooded with AI-generated images, video or audio, which is growing increasingly difficult to tell apart from human creations as the tools become more capable.mng/tgb/js Source link
The Turkish city of Istanbul will host the third Global Islamic Economy Summit from June 3 to 6, bringing together policymakers, economists, investors, financial institutions, academics and industry representatives.The summit will focus on a range of global economic issues, including ethical finance, real-economy growth, sustainable development and inclusive economic expansion.The event is organized by the Al Baraka Forum for Islamic Economics in strategic partnership with Turkiye’s Presidential Investment and Finance Office, the Turkish Sovereign Wealth Fund, the Istanbul Financial Center, the Islamic Cooperation Youth Forum and Ibn Haldun University.Discussions over the four-day program are expected to examine the role of capital within the Islamic economic framework, with sessions addressing productive capital circulation, inclusive participation in economic activity and the development of ethical financing models that support sustainable growth.The summit will also feature dialogue sessions and strategic meetings involving representatives from central banks, global financial institutions and investment bodies, alongside experts in financial technology.Key topics include the global economy and capital flows, Islamic banking, sukuk markets, social finance and waqf (endowments), as well as artificial intelligence, digital financial technologies, entrepreneurship and small and medium-sized enterprise financing. Source link
Almost 50 countries condemned what they said were threats by Russia against embassies in Ukraine in a joint statement at the UN yesterday.Russia called on Washington to evacuate its Kyiv embassy on Monday, threatening “systematic strikes” on the Ukrainian capital amid similar warnings to other diplomatic missions.”We also condemn recent threats by Russia to diplomatic institutions and embassies in Kyiv. This is something which we cannot accept,” said the joint statement delivered by Ukrainian UN representative Andriy Melnyk.The statement was signed by European countries, Japan, South Korea and others. The US was not among the signatories.A weekend barrage by Russia — involving dozens of drones and missiles — killed four people and caused widespread damage across the Ukrainian capital.UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres registered his concern over Russian attacks.”I am deeply concerned by a recent announcement by the Russian Federation to launch consistent and systematic strikes against Ukrainian defense enterprises in Kyiv, as well as against decision making centers and command posts following reports of an Ukrainian drone attack on a college building and dormitory in the Ukrainian city of Starobilsk, presently occupied by the Russian Federation,” Guterres told the UN Security Council.”Now more than ever it is imperative to avoid any escalation of a conflict that has already exacted a devastating toll on civilians and that risks making the search for peace even more distant.”Among the weapons Russia used at the weekend was its Oreshnik hypersonic missile, which can travel 10 times the speed of sound and is capable of carrying nuclear warheads, according to Moscow.The strikes followed Russian accusations that Ukraine hit a vocational school in the Russian-occupied Lugansk region, killing 21 people. Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his military to retaliate. Source link
Residents of western Europe turned to fans and fountains as they sweltered through a record-breaking heat wave yesterday, with temperatures set to soar even further.Hit by a so-called ‘heat dome’ of warm air from northern Africa that is pushing the mercury well above normal levels for May, some Europeans even admitted they were considering getting air conditioning, in a region famously averse.Baking in a bright London sun, 47-year-old Gurjit Gill, who works in banking, said he was happy to be going into work — because of the air con.’I'm thinking about actually maybe getting an AC unit, because the bedrooms at nighttime are quite unbearable,’ he told AFP.People across western Europe swarmed beaches, braved the streets clutching handheld fans and umbrellas to fend off the sun, and went for a dip or splashed themselves wherever they could — including Rome's Barcaccia fountain and the bubblers in the Jardin du Palais Royal in Paris.The UK reported its hottest-ever day for May, at 35C near London — breaking a record of 33.5C set Monday — as a high-pressure system trapped warm air over western Europe.In France, which also logged its hottest-ever May day Monday and then again yesterday, the weather agency said the heat wave could last through the week, predicting temperatures could go as high as 39C in some areas.Scientists say human-driven climate change is amplifying such extremes, with weather events like heatwaves, droughts and floods becoming more intense and frequent.’This record-breaking heat has the fingerprints of climate change all over it,’ said Friederike Otto, a professor of climate science at Imperial College London.’Temperatures on this scale were once exceptional even at the height of summer… But the science is very clear — climate change makes these heatwaves hotter, longer and far more frequent.’Swiss tourist Philippe Bignens, 56, visiting London with his father, told AFP they had to change plans and retreat to their hotel to avoid being outside at the hottest time of day.’If you're not concerned about global warming, you must be deaf, blind altogether, right? So it is there, yes. We have to be concerned and try to do something about it,’ he said.— Deadly turn —Across the English Channel, tennis fans in Paris baked in temperatures of 33C at the French Open, with players battling through heat that Norway's Casper Ruud said left him feeling ‘like a zombie’.Government authorities also noted the heat had taken a deadly turn.French authorities yesterday reported at least seven deaths linked to the heatwave — five of which were drownings, as many people sought relief on beaches and in the water, even though lifeguard supervision is not due to start in many areas until July.Authorities in Britain said four teens had drowned in England since Sunday.A record May temperature of 28.8C was recorded at two of Ireland's weather stations amid the current blast of heat, Met Eireann data showed.In France, news channel BFMTV said its journalists had received threats and insults ‘from climate-sceptic internet users’ over the channel's weather maps — covered in red and ‘based on broadly accepted scientific facts’, it said.— Work affected —Benjamin Boisson, a fruit grower in southern France, worried the extreme fluctuation in temperature would cause a sharp drop in production, as well as complicate storage.Already, a previous warm weather spell forced him to harvest apricots five days earlier than planned this year, on May 1, he said.’That may not seem like much, but it changes everything. The major retailers weren't ready and are still selling Spanish apricots when they should have switched over to French ones,’ he said.Spain's State Meteorological Agency (Aemet) also warned of ‘extraordinarily high temperatures for this time of year’ that will continue all week.’Widespread tropical nights’ are also forecast in southwestern Spain from today, with temperatures peaking from today to Friday at between 36C and 38C, it wrote on X.Farther east, Italy's Lazio region, which includes Rome, on Monday approved rules limiting work in conditions ‘with prolonged exposure in the sun’ between 12:30pm and 4:00pm.In Austria, Vienna set up special misters to help passersby keep cool on the street.Europe is the continent that has experienced the fastest warming since 1990, closely followed by Asia, with North America in third place, according to data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Source link
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi and Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar attend a joint press…
The United States said early Tuesday it carried out strikes on missile launch sites in southern Iran and boats it accused of attempting to lay mines, in what it described as defensive action.US Central Command spokesperson Tim Hawkins said in a statement that American forces conducted “defensive strikes in southern Iran to protect our forces from threats posed by Iranian forces.”He did not provide further details, saying only that the targets included missile launch sites and vessels allegedly involved in mine-laying activity.In related remarks, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said a potential agreement with Iran remains possible, noting ongoing discussions over key elements of an initial draft.He added that President Donald Trump had expressed a desire to reach a deal and that the Strait of Hormuz must remain open. Source link
A gunman opened fire near the White House on Saturday evening, with US Secret Service agents killing the assailant in a shoot-out during which a bystander was also struck, authorities said. President Donald Trump was in the White House at the time – on a day when he was working to negotiate a deal with Iran – but was not impacted by the incident, Secret Service communications chief Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement. The confrontation took place just after 6pm (2200 GMT) when a man near the White House security perimeter “pulled a weapon from his bag and began firing”. “Secret Service Police returned fire striking the suspect who was transported to an area hospital where he was pronounced deceased. During the shooting one bystander was also struck by gunfire,” Guglielmi said, without details on the bystander’s condition. No Secret Service officers were hurt. Multiple US media identified the suspect as Nasire Best, 21, of Maryland, reporting that Best had a history of mental health concerns and had multiple prior interactions with Secret Service members.Trump, 79, has been the target of three alleged assassination attempts, the most recent of which took place on April 25 when an armed man stormed a security checkpoint in a hotel where Trump was attending a media gala. – AFP Source link