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Orforglipron also reduced blood sugar levels in participants with type 2 diabetes
A significant trial of a daily weight-loss pill has found that it helped people to shed the pounds and reduce their blood sugar levels, making it a contender to join the new wave of drugs that combat obesity and diabetes.
People who took a 36mg pill of orforglipron lost an average of 7.3kg (16lbs) over nine months, according to results from a phase 3 clinical trial reported by the drug’s manufacturer, Eli Lilly, on Thursday.

Growth in international hotels coincides with government effort to push region as a tourism destination
Almost 200 international hotels are operating or planning to open in Xinjiang, despite calls from human rights groups for global corporations not to help “sanitise” the Chinese government’s human rights abuses in the region, a report has said.
The report by the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) identified 115 operational hotels which the organisation said “benefit from a presence in the Uyghur region”. At least another 74 were in various stages of construction or planning, the report said. The UHRP said some of the hotels also had exposure or links of concern to forced labour and labour transfer programmes.

Jensen Huang causes stir on social media and is reported to have met founder of AI company DeepSeek
The chief executive of the American chip maker Nvidia visited Beijing on Thursday, days after the US on sales of the only AI chip it was still allowed to sell to China.
Jensen Huang’s surprise visit was on the invitation of a trade organisation, according to a social media account affiliated with state media.

The administration dared China, Harvard and the supreme court to blink. They haven’t
It was bound to happen.
Encouraged by the ease with which many big US institutions caved in to their demands, the Trump regime – that is, the small cadre of bottom-feeding fanatics around Donald Trump (JD Vance, Elon Musk, Russell Vought, Stephen Miller and RFK Jr) along with the child king himself – have overreached.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at

Shein says ‘operating expenses have gone up’ as both Chinese retailers also drop ad spending in US
Two of China’s largest fast fashion retailers, Temu and Shein, have warned US customers that they will face price increases from next week, as Donald Trump’s hefty tariffs on Chinese imports come into force.
Both companies will be hit by new import levies, which will mean taxes of up to 145% being applied to Chinese goods. They will also suffer from Trump’s cancellation of the “de minimis” exemption, under which shipments worth less than $800 (£600) could be imported duty-free.

The firms said operating expenses have risen "due to recent changes in global trade rules and tariffs".

Beijing is using a mix of carrots and sticks to try to prevent other countries from siding with the United States in isolating China.

Online dissent is a serious crime in China. So why did a Weibo censor help me publish posts critical of the Communist party?
It is 2013. For four full months, Liu Lipeng engages in dereliction of duty. Every hour the system sends him a huge volume of posts, but he hardly ever deletes a single word. After three or four thousand posts accumulate, he lightly clicks his mouse and the whole lot is released. In the jargon of censors, this is a “total pass in one click” (一键全通), after which all the posts appear on China’s version of X, Sina Weibo, to be read by millions, then reposted and discussed.
He logs on to the Weibo management page, where many words are flagged. Orange designates sensitive words that require careful examination – words like freedom and democracy, and the three characters that make up Xi Jinping’s name. While such words regularly appear in newspapers or on TV, that does not mean ordinary citizens can use them at will.

A protracted trade war could trigger a global recession and shift the balance of power in ways that fundamentally undermine U.S. standing in the world.

As the Washington-Beijing trade war grows deeper, who will blink first? Amy Hawkins reports
After a fortnight in which Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs evolved into an escalating trade war with China, a sense of defiant nationalism has been building in the east Asian country. The Chinese foreign ministry has even been sharing historic video clips from the former leader Mao Zedong:
“As to how long this war will last, we are not the ones to decide … We’ll fight until we completely triumph!”

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US attorney general Pam Bondi on Wednesday unveiled legal action against Maine, in an escalation of Donald Trump’s conflict with the state for refusing to ban transgender athletes from participating in women’s and girls’ sports.
Reuters reports that the lawsuit comes five days after the administration tried to cut off all of Maine’s federal funding for public schools and its school lunch program over the issue, following a 21 February meeting of Trump and a group of US governors where he clashed with Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills.
Nothing in Title IX or its implementing regulations prohibits schools from allowing transgender girls and women to participate on girls’ and women’s sports teams. Your letters to date do not cite a single case that so holds.
It was a compelling meeting. And toward the end, we actually came up with – I’m going to say ‘finally,’ but I don’t mean it in the way that we were waiting, I mean it in the way that it took a while for us to get to this place – what Putin’s request is to get, to have a permanent peace here.

A new initiative aims to boost the local economy by attracting elderly travellers to remote parts of the country.