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U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has told Panama’s president in a face-to-face meeting that the Central American ally must reduce alleged Chinese influence over the Panama Canal or face potential ...

Fears grow for global trade, with major indices likely to plunge as US trading partners quickly retaliate, raising chance China and EU will follow suit
Investors are bracing for stock market falls after Canada and Mexico hit back against this weekend.
Trading on the brokerage IG’s weekend markets indicated shares were likely to fall on Monday after the US president signed an order on Saturday to , a move that with some of the country’s largest trading partners.

Donald Trump’s initiative echoes past mistakes and could provoke adversaries and undermine efforts toward nuclear diplomacy
With a stroke of his pen, Donald Trump last week ordered an “” – an act that risks sparking a destabilising global arms race. Mr Trump’s proposal takes its name from Israel’s air defence system, but it is cast in more ambitious terms for the US: a space-based interception system designed to counter nuclear, hypersonic and cruise missile threats.
It is also the latest turn of the wheel in a cycle of escalation. Moves by Washington to “increase security” have repeatedly ended up making the world more volatile and unsafe. The historic chance to eliminate nuclear weapons in slipped away over Ronald Reagan’s insistence on America’s unproven “Star Wars” missile defence system. In 2002, George W Bush – citing the threat from North Korea – ditched the anti-ballistic missile treaty, which was built on the idea that mutual vulnerability cools the nuclear arms race while unchecked defences fuel it. In The New Nuclear Age, Ankit Panda points out that Russia and China responded with countermeasures to ensure “their nuclear forces would have the ability to penetrate a sophisticated US system”.

President Donald Trump’s tariffs against China, Canada and Mexico target a trade provision that helped spur the rise of low-cost retailers, including Temu and Shein.

Trump accuses the US's main trading partners of not addressing concerns over illegal drugs and migration - his main election pledges.

DeepSeek’s success embodies China’s ambitions in artificial intelligence. But it could also threaten the grip on power the nation’s leaders hold.

Trump has imposed a 10% levy - but his campaign included promises of 60% tariffs against Chinese imports.

While privacy fears are justified, the main beef Silicon Valley has is that China’s chatbot is democratising the technology
No, it was not a “Sputnik moment”. The launch last month of , the Chinese generative AI or chatbot, created mayhem in the tech world, with stocks plummeting and much chatter about the US losing its supremacy in AI technology. Yet, for all the disruption, the Sputnik analogy reveals less about DeepSeek than about American neuroses.
The original Sputnik moment came on 4 October 1957 when the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching Sputnik 1, the first time humanity had sent a satellite into orbit. It was, to anachronistically borrow a phrase from a later and even more momentous landmark, “one giant leap for mankind”, in Neil Armstrong’s historic words as he took a “small step” on to the surface of the moon.

Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, announces tit-for-tat 25% tariffs and warns of impeded access to ‘vital goods critical to US security’
The leaders of Canada and Mexico have hit back after signed an order authorizing drastic tariffs of up to 25% on their exports to the US, while China said it would complain to the World Trade Organization after it was also targeted by the president.
Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, on Saturday night made a televised address announcing concrete measures including a tit-for-tat 25% tariff phased in across C$155bn ($107bn) worth of American products. Trudeau said Trump had put at risk US consumers’ and industries’ access to much-needed Canadian critical minerals and resources including oil, energy and timber. The prime minister promised to work with Canada’s provinces to review dealings with the United States.

The cheap Chinese chatbot has stunned tech giants – and opened up the possibility that other countries, not just China, could now afford to enter the AI race
At 2.16pm California time last Sunday, the US billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen called it. “DeepSeek R1 is AI’s Sputnik moment,” he posted on X.
A Chinese startup, operating since 2023 and helmed by a millennial mathematician, had unveiled a new chatbot that seemed to equal the performance of America’s leading models at a fraction of the cost.

When asked about his plans to visit the crash site, Trump made a joke: ‘The water? You want me to go swimming?’
Every day, the world seems to get stupider and stupider and our leaders seem to get nastier and nastier. Nobody expects empathy or accuracy from Donald Trump but, even by the extremely low standards to which he is held, his reaction to the that killed 67 people on Wednesday night was shocking.