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A lawsuit filed this week accuses the University of California of racial discrimination in undergraduate admissions by favoring Black and Latino students over Asian American and white applicants. A ...

Complaint by local lawyers to supreme court follows US demands to reduce China’s alleged influence on waterway
Two Panamanian lawyers have lodged a lawsuit with the country’s supreme court in an attempt to cancel a Hong Kong-based company’s concession to operate two ports at either end of the Panama canal.
Their complaint – filed a day after the US secretary of state, , told Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, to reduce China’s alleged influence on the canal – argues that the contract for the two ports is unconstitutional.

Exclusive: cross-party backing likely for amendment to GB Energy bill aiming to block solar panels made by forced labour
The government is facing defeat next week over a move to guarantee that companies using forced labour do not drive the UK’s green energy transition.
The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have thrown their weight behind an amendment by the cross-bench peer David Alton to the Great British Energy bill, which is making its way through the House of Lords.

The junta’s brutality has failed to secure victory in the civil war, but is devastating the country
Myanmar’s coup must have looked like an easy win to the generals, given their long record of crushing dissent. Their grudging experiment with limited democracy reached its end when Aung San Suu Kyi’s party won a landslide second election victory – prompting the ousting and imprisonment of the National League for Democracy (NLD) leader and her colleagues in February 2021.
, resistance has flourished. A study by the BBC that the junta controls only 21% of Myanmar’s territory as it battles People’s Defence Force units set up by the national unity government formed from the NLD’s remnants, as well as the ethnic armed groups that have long fought Naypyidaw. More than 4 million people are displaced and half the population has been forced into poverty. Less than half has access to electricity. The UN Rakhine state is at imminent risk of acute famine and Rohingya Muslims there are particularly vulnerable, between the military – which has men – and the Arakan Army, which accuses them of siding with the junta.

The point is to show the world – not just Canada and Mexico – that he’s willing to mete out big punishments
Trump has struck to postpone for 30 days hefty tariffs on goods they export to the United States, temporarily averting a damaging trade war.
Over the next month, Mexico and Canada will negotiate with Trump.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at

Donald Trump’s additional 10% tax on Chinese imports said to be response to China’s failure to curb drug’s flow into US
Donald Trump has imposed tariffs of 10% on Chinese imports, framing the move as a way to pressure China into taking action on fentanyl.
The White House said on Tuesday: “Chinese officials have failed to take the actions necessary to stem the flow of precursor chemicals to known criminal cartels and shut down money laundering by transnational criminal organisations.”

Friends and allies of the US president will say his recent tariff threats delivered quick wins, but he may find there are no winners in a trade war
As the world reels from the first three weeks of Donald Trump’s shakedown diplomacy, it is divided between those who marvel at this display of raw American economic hegemony, and those who fear that the US’s president, fatally misreading how the globe has changed since his first term, is storing up trouble that will diminish the US as an economic and moral force in four years’ time.
At one level Trump’s antics are wearily familiar. After all, the last rites of the 70-year-old liberal world order were also read when Trump came to power in 2017, before that order was briefly disinterred under Joe Biden. The diplomatic pearls were collectively clutched when Trump 1.0 threatened to pull out of Nato, launched a trade war with China, introduced a travel ban on mainly Muslim countries, and withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the 12-nation trade agreement championed by Barack Obama. In 2019, Trump dropped the threat of a 5% tariff in return for Mexico sending 6,000 militarised police to the southern border. Grievances, and bargains, have always animated Trump’s thinking.

Tariffs on coal, LNG, crude oil and other goods announced after US imposes levy on imports
Donald Trump has fired the opening salvo of his trade war, imposing tariffs on China on Tuesday that sparked instant retaliation from Beijing, amid fears for the global economic repercussions.
Moments after US tariffs of 10% came into effect, China swiftly announced an anti-trust investigation into Google. China’s finance ministry also announced 15% tariffs on coal and liquefied natural gas, and 10% on crude oil, farm equipment, large-displacement vehicles and pickup trucks from the US.

President Donald Trump has implemented new tariffs on Chinese products, leading China to retaliate with tariffs on U.S. goods. "That's fine. It's fine. We're going to do very well against China and ...

President Donald Trump enacts new tariffs on Chinese products, prompting China to respond with its own tariffs on U.S. goods.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news, as Trump delays tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and China hits back with its own sanctions
The 10% US tariff on all imports from China that kicked in today is not a “game changer” for China’s growth forecasts, says European bank ABN Amro.
They predict Beijing will respond with “a further stepping up of monetary easing and fiscal support” – meaning interest rate cuts and more government spending.
Although the first tariff implementation now seems to have come even earlier than anticipated in our Global Outlook, The Year of the Tariff, in our base case we already anticipate a material (gradual) stepping up of US import tariffs on China to an average effective tariff rate of 45% per Q2-2026.
While talks between Trump and Xi may potentially smoothen the risk of a further escalation for now, Trump stated earlier this week that he sees the 10% tariffs as a first salvo, with tariffs on China potentially moving much higher if no agreement is reached.
“Although we will continue to monitor trade policy closely, our base case remains for the S&P 500 to rise to 6,600 by year-end.
If implemented, tariffs on Canada and Mexico are unlikely to be sustained, resilient US economic growth should support stocks, and we continue to believe that AI presents a powerful structural tailwind for earnings and equity markets.

Australia imported goods from companies blacklisted in the US for alleged links to forced labour of Uyghur people in China, according to the findings of an exclusive Guardian investigation. Guardian Australia’s chief investigations correspondent Christopher Knaus tells Nour Haydar how imports have been linked to allegations of forced labour

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