Russia’s ruble has surged to become the best performing global currency, posting this year’s strongest gains against the dollar to outpace even the traditional safe haven of gold.
The ruble has strengthened 38% versus the dollar on the over-the-counter market since the beginning of this year, data compiled by Bloomberg shows. While the greenback has reeled from mounting pressure caused by US President Donald Trump’s escalating tariff wars, Russia’s currency has also been buoyed by factors unique to the country, including record-high local interest rates.
China has halted all imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the United States for more than ten weeks
According to the Financial Times, shipping data revealed that no LNG shipments have taken place between the two nations since a 69,000-tonne tanker from Corpus Christi, Texas, arrived in China’s Fujian province on 6 February.
A second vessel destined for China was redirected to Bangladesh after it failed to arrive before Beijing imposed a 15 per cent tariff on US LNG on 10 February.
The tariff has now been raised to 49 per cent, effectively pricing US gas out of the Chinese market.
The current freeze on US LNG mirrors a similar halt during United States President Donald Trump’s first term, which lasted over a year.
Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some online advertising technology, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, adding to legal troubles that could reshape the $1.86 trillion company and alter its power over the internet.
Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said in a 115-page ruling that Google had broken the law to build its dominance over the largely invisible system of technology that places advertisements on pages across the web. The Justice Department and a group of states had sued Google, arguing that its monopoly in ad technology allowed the company to charge higher prices and take a bigger portion of each sale.
Astronomers say they've found "the most promising signs yet" of chemicals on a planet beyond our Solar System that could indicate the presence of life on its surface.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, the team found a possible 'biosignature' – the potential fingerprint of life – within its atmosphere, although they say they're remaining "cautious", and that this isn't a confirmed detection.
The chemicals detected are the same as those produced by marine-dwelling organisms on Earth.
U.S. President Donald Trump does not want to transfer additional Patriot anti-aircraft missile systems to Kyiv, even if he receives $50 billion from EU funds in return. He refused a corresponding lucrative deal, while making new accusations against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, UNN reports, citing BILD.
The White House said China is now facing up to a 245 percent tariff on imports to the U.S. "as a result of its retaliatory actions," another escalation in a trade war between the world's two largest economies.
The top potential tariff is higher than previously stated and was referenced in a fact sheet published by the White House late on Tuesday.
No, it's not just you — people really are less smart than they used to be.
As the Financial Times reports, assessments show that people across age groups are having trouble concentrating and losing reasoning, problem-solving, and information-processing skills — all facets of the hard-to-pin-down metric that "intelligence" is supposed to measure.
These results, the FT reports, are gleaned from benchmarking tests that track cognitive skills in teens and young adults. From the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future study documenting concentration difficulties of 18-year-old Americans to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) that measures the learning skills of 15-year-olds around the world, years of research suggest that young people are struggling with reduced attention spans and weakening critical thinking skills.
In an unprecedented move, the Japan Fair Trade Commission on Tuesday issued a cease-and-desist order against Google for violating the country's anti-monopoly law by forcing manufacturers to preinstall the company’s apps on their Android smartphones.
This is the first time that Japan has issued such an order against any of the major U.S. technology companies referred to collectively as GAFAM — Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft.
The Federal Trade Commission and Meta will square off in a long-awaited antitrust trial on Monday over the tech giant's past acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram.
In an Oval Office meeting with President Trump on Monday, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador said that he would not return a Maryland man who was wrongly deported from the United States and sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
“Of course I’m not going to do it,” Mr. Bukele said when reporters asked if he was willing to help return the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whose case is at the heart of a legal battle that has gone to the Supreme Court.
Mr. Bukele said returning Mr. Abrego Garcia would be akin to smuggling “a terrorist into the United States.” As the Salvadoran president talked, Mr. Trump smiled in approval, surrounded by cabinet members who spoke in support of the president on cue.
Beijing has suspended exports of certain rare earth minerals and magnets that are crucial for the world’s car, semiconductor and aerospace industries.
Shipments of the magnets, essential for assembling everything from cars and drones to robots and missiles, have been halted at many Chinese ports while the Chinese government drafts a new regulatory system. Once in place, the new system could permanently prevent supplies from reaching certain companies, including American military contractors.
The official crackdown is part of China’s retaliation for President Trump’s sharp increase in tariffs that started on April 2.
The UK government is taking control of Chinese-owned British Steel after emergency legislation was rushed through Parliament in a single day.
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds told MPs the government's likely next step would be to nationalise the Scunthorpe plant, which employs 2,700 people.
But he said he was forced to seek emergency powers to prevent owners Jingye shutting down its two blast furnaces, which would have ended primary steel production in the UK.
President Donald Trump’s administration exempted smartphones, computers and other electronics from its so-called reciprocal tariffs, potentially cushioning consumers from sticker shock while benefiting electronics giants including Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.
The exclusions, published late Friday by US Customs and Border Protection, narrow the scope of the levies by excluding the products from Trump’s 125% China tariff and his baseline 10% global tariff on nearly all other countries.
A sweeping crackdown on posts on Instagram and Facebook that are critical of Israel—or even vaguely supportive of Palestinians—was directly orchestrated by the government of Israel, according to internal Meta data obtained by Drop Site News. The data show that Meta has complied with 94% of takedown requests issued by Israel since October 7, 2023.
Israel is the biggest originator of takedown requests globally by far, and Meta has followed suit—widening the net of posts it automatically removes, and creating what can be called the largest mass censorship operation in modern history.
The Yuan dipped to a 17-year low against the U.S. dollar early on Thursday after President Donald Trump excluded Beijing from his 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs and cranked up his tariff on Chinese goods imports to 125 percent.
Nvidia will be permitted to continue selling H20 graphics processing units in China following a visit to Mar-a-Lago by CEO Jensen Huang, according to NPR. Huang attended a dinner last Friday at the resort that was priced at $1 million per head, though it is unclear whether he spoke with President Trump.
James Cameron appeared on the “Boz to the Future” podcast and said the future of blockbuster filmmaking hinges on being able to “cut the cost of [VFX] in half,” and the Oscar winner is trying to figure out how AI might help bring costs down without replacing crew members. Cameron announced in September 2024 that he was joining the board of directors for Stability AI, the company behind the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion.
Albert Saniger, the founder and former CEO of Nate, an AI shopping app that promised a “universal” checkout experience, was charged with defrauding investors on Wednesday, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Founded in 2018, Nate raised over $50 million from investors like Coatue and Forerunner Ventures, most recently raising a $38 million Series A in 2021 led by Renegade Partners.
Nate said its app’s users could buy from any e-commerce site with a single click, thanks to AI. In reality, however, Nate relied heavily on hundreds of human contractors in a call center in the Philippines to manually complete those purchases, the DOJ’s Southern District of New York alleges.
US stocks sank on Thursday, pulling back from the previous day's historic rally amid concerns that President Trump's broad trade offensive has become a direct confrontation with China.
The S&P 500 (GSPC) dropped over 2.8%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (IXIC) tumbled 3.5%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) fell nearly 1,000 points, or 2.2%. The 10-year Treasury yield, (^TNX) in high focus amid bond market whiplash, fell to around 4.35%.
This was the news we and everyone on the Street was waiting for as the pressure on Trump took on a life of its own and the eye-popping rise of the 10-year yield was ultimately too much to hold his line on the self-inflicted Armageddon tariff unleashed at midnight.
Now we would expect massive negotiations across the board over the coming months including China being front and center as the biggest wild card.
China's finance ministry has announced an 84% tariff on goods imported from the US as it retaliates against new levies imposed by the White House.
The hike in tariffs, from 34%, came as US President Donald Trump's 104% tariff on Chinese goods came into force.
Beijing says the new charges will take effect from Thursday.
U.S. Treasuries extended heavy losses on Wednesday in a sign investors are dumping even their safest assets as a global market rout unleashed by U.S. tariffs takes an unnerving turn towards forced selling and a dash for the safety of cash.
"This is beyond fundamentals right now. This is about liquidity," said Jack Chambers, senior rates strategist at ANZ in Sydney.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday said the U.S. will soon announce a "major" tariff on pharmaceutical imports.
Speaking to an event at the National Republican Congressional Committee, Trump said the tariff will incentivize drug companies to move their operations to the U.S.
US stocks lost steam in afternoon trading on Tuesday after the White House said it plans to move forward on a threat to add a 50% tariff on Chinese goods in a move that would bring the overall tariff rate on Chinese goods to 104%. That tariff rate will go into effect at 12:01am ET.
In the small town of Kawara in Fukuoka Prefecture, something unexpected is happening at the Saidosho Community Center. While kids in most parts of Japan are obsessed with Pokémon cards — or perhaps the franchise’s latest smartphone game, Pokémon TCG Pocket — the children of Kawara are clutching to something a little closer to home.
They are playing a trading card game (TCG) where the stars aren’t fantasy creatures, anime heroes or even famous baseball players, but ojisan (middle-aged or older men) from the local community of Saidosho.
Senior Defense Department officials are considering a proposal to withdraw as many as 10,000 troops from Eastern Europe, sparking concern on both continents that it would embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to six U.S. and European officials who have been briefed on the matter.
The units under consideration are part of the 20,000 personnel the Biden administration deployed in 2022 to strengthen the defenses of countries bordering Ukraine after the Russian invasion. The numbers are still being discussed, but the proposal could involve removing up to half of the forces sent by Biden.
Microsoft terminated the employment of two software engineers who protested at company events on Friday over the Israeli military’s use of the company’s artificial intelligence products, according to documents viewed by CNBC.
Ibtihal Aboussad, a software engineer in the company’s AI division who is based in Canada, was fired on Monday over “just cause, wilful misconduct, disobedience or wilful neglect of duty,” according to one of the documents.
Another Microsoft software engineer, Vaniya Agrawal, had said she would resign from the company on Friday, April 11. But Microsoft terminated her role on Monday, according to an internal message viewed by CNBC. The company wrote that it “has decided to make your resignation immediately effective today.”
Two of President Donald Trump's richest supporters have broken with him over his tariff hikes.
Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who endorsed Trump last summer, warned of an "economic nuclear winter" if Trump doesn't immediately pause his sweeping tariffs.
And Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla who is an adviser to Trump and leading the Trump administration's efforts to downsize the government as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, has also spoken out against the tariff policies.
At a time when the world is down to a single drug that can reliably cure gonorrhea, the U.S. government has shuttered the country’s premier sexually transmitted diseases laboratory, leaving experts aghast and fearful about what lies ahead.
The STD lab at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — a leading player in global efforts to monitor for drug resistance in the bacteria that cause these diseases — was among the targets of major staff slashing at the CDC this past week. All 28 full-time employees of the lab were fired.
Asian stock markets plunged across the region on Monday, kicking off the trading week on the weakest footing in more than a decade, as the world braced for shock waves from the tit-for-tat tariff war between China and the US.
Hong Kong’s benchmark Hang Seng Index plunged as much as 13 per cent to 19,868 at 2:25pm, marking its biggest intraday decline in more than a decade.
All 14 major equity gauges in the Asia-Pacific markets fell, with 11 of them hitting their lowest in at least 52 weeks. Japan’s Nikkei 225 slid 6.2 per cent, South Korea’s Kospi Index retreated 4.7 per cent, Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 lost 4 per cent and Singapore’s Straits Times Index crashed 8.1 per cent.
U.S. stock futures opened sharply lower late on Sunday, suggesting a continuation of the two-day selloff that wiped trillions from equity values after the Trump administration's tariffs announcement last week.
Investors had been anticipating another week of turbulence as global trading partners react to the harsher-than-expected tariffs. U.S. S&P 500 E-minis stock futures were last down 4%. Dow E-minis were down 3.8%, while Nasdaq 100 E-minis were down 4.6% at the open on Sunday.
Ron Vara has appeared as a cryptic voice of economic wisdom more than a dozen times in five of Mr. Navarro’s 13 books, dispensing musings like “You’ve got to be nuts to eat Chinese food” and “Only the Chinese can turn a leather sofa into an acid bath, a baby crib into a lethal weapon and a cellphone battery into heart-piercing shrapnel.”
But Ron Vara, it turns out, does not exist. At least not in corporeal form. He is apparently a figment of Mr. Navarro’s imagination — an anagram of Mr. Navarro’s surname that the trade adviser created as a Hitchcockian writing device and stuck with as something of an inside joke with himself.
Japan could lose $17 billion in car export potential in the U.S. following President Donald Trump's decision to introduce 25% tariffs on the automotive sector, the International Trade Centre said on Friday.
"Japan's automotive sector comprises 20% of the country's total exports and the majority of exports are headed to the U.S. market. Now the flat 25% tariff on the sector that came into force yesterday means that Japan could lose 17 billion dollars in export potentials in the U.S., according to our calculations," Julia Spies, ITC chief of trade and market intelligence, told reporters in Geneva.
President Trump put up a wall between the U.S. economy and the rest of the world, and the market tanked. And then the market tanked again.
The message from Wall Street’s epic two-day rout, which destroyed $6.6 trillion in market value: There is nowhere to hide from Trump’s steep tariffs on goods imported from nearly every corner of the planet.
The global tariff rout deepened Friday, with the Nasdaq dropping more than 5% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling about 1,900 points after China's decision to match U.S. duties escalated the worst trade war in decades.
China's decision to apply 34% levies on all imported goods from the U.S. next Thursday, after President Trump's tariffs go into effect, rattled markets in part because it further deflated hopes on Wall Street that a global settlement could be reached soon.
China has struck back at President Trump.
On Friday evening in Beijing, in a rapid-fire series of policy announcements including 34 percent across-the-board tariffs, China showed that it has no intention of backing down in the trade war that Mr. Trump began this week with his own steep tariffs on imports from around the world.
China’s Finance Ministry said it will match Mr. Trump’s plan for 34 percent tariffs on goods from China with its own 34 percent tariff on imports from the United States.
US stock markets tumbled on Thursday as investors parsed the sweeping change in global trading following Donald Trump’s announcement of a barrage of tariffs on the country’s trading partners.
All three major US stock markets closed down in their worst day since June 2020, during the Covid pandemic. The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 6%, while the S&P 500 and the Dow dropped 4.8% and 3.9%, respectively. Apple and Nvidia, two of the US’s largest companies by market value, had lost a combined $470bn in value by midday.
The director of the powerful wiretapping and cyberespionage service, the National Security Agency, was fired Thursday, according to two current and one former U.S. officials.
Gen. Timothy Haugh, who also heads U.S. Cyber Command, was let go along with his civilian deputy at the NSA, Wendy Noble, according to the officials. Like others in this report, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel moves.
The firings were advocated for by far-right activist Laura Loomer during a meeting with President Donald Trump on Wednesday, she confirmed to The Washington Post on Thursday evening.
In the meeting, Loomer, a fervent Trump supporter, pressed for the dismissals of a number of officials besides Haugh and Noble — in particular, National Security Council staff whose views she saw as disloyal to the president.
South Korea's president has been removed from office after the Constitutional Court voted unanimously to uphold his impeachment.
Yoon Suk Yeol was suspended from duty in December after being impeached by parliament, following his failed attempt to impose martial law.
The ruling on Friday was met with tears of joy and sadness among Yoon's critics and supporters, who had gathered in various parts of Seoul to watch the verdict live.
A snap election to vote for Yoon's replacement must be held by 3 June.
The tech industry has long prided itself on its many immigrant founders, executives and software programmers. Now, fears are growing among foreign tech workers that their lives and careers may be upended by the Trump administration’s more stringent immigration policies.
US stocks nosedived on Thursday, with the Dow tumbling more than 1,000 points as President Trump's surprisingly steep "Liberation Day" tariffs sent shockwaves through markets worldwide.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) led the sell-off, plummeting over 4%. The S&P 500 (^GSPC) dove 3.1%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) tumbled roughly 3%.
Among megacap techs, Apple (AAPL) shares fell over 8% amid concerns about disruption to its supply chain. China, the source of key iPhone components, was hit with additional US tariffs that raised its overall rate to 54%. Nvidia (NVDA) and other chip stocks also tumbled thanks to similar concerns.
China has vowed to hit back after President Donald Trump announced major new tariffs on its exports to the United States as part of his radical overhaul of a century of American global trade policy.
Trump unveiled 54% tariffs on all Chinese imports into the US Wednesday, in a move poised to push a major reset of relations and escalate a trade war between the world’s two largest economies.
“China firmly opposes this and will resolutely take countermeasures to safeguard its own rights and interests,” China’s Ministry of Commerce said in a statement Thursday morning.
Tesla's first-quarter sales slumped 13%, its weakest performance in nearly three years, as backlash to CEO Elon Musk's embrace of far-right politics grows and as consumers seek out newer models from rival electric-vehicle makers.
The EV maker's stumbling sales indicate that the one-time leading brand is reeling from the fallout of the company not refreshing its vehicle lineup in years, and Musk's foray into politics in the United States and Europe. The company posted weak sales in numerous European markets and in China, even as more consumers are opting for EVs.
China, Japan and South Korea agreed to jointly respond to U.S. tariffs, a social media account affiliated with Chinese state media said on Monday, an assertion Seoul called "somewhat exaggerated", while Tokyo said there was no such discussion.
The state media comments came after the three countries held their first economic dialogue in five years on Sunday, seeking to facilitate regional trade as the Asian export powers brace against U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs.
NATO member Finland plans to quit a global convention banning anti-personnel landmines and boost defence spending to at least 3% of GDP by 2029 in response to the evolving military threat from Russia, the government said on Tuesday.
Poland and the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania said last month they would withdraw from the 1997 Ottawa convention due to threats posed by neighbouring Russia.
Earlier this month, a threat actor going by Rose87168 claimed to have breached Oracle Cloud's federated SSO servers and exfiltrated around 6 million records, affecting over 144,000 Oracle clients.
The hacker provided an internal customer list and threatened to sell the data unless clients paid to remove their data from the trove, which included single sign-on credentials, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol passwords, OAuth2 keys, tenant data, and more. Rose87168 has also solicited help from the hacking community to crack the hashed passwords in trade for some of the data.
California-based researchers have developed an AI-powered system to restore natural speech for paralyzed people in real time and using their own voices.
This new technology from researchers at University of California Berkeley and University of California San Francisco, takes advantage of devices that can tap into the brain to measure neural activity, along with AI that actually learns how to build the sounds of a patient's voice.
That's far ahead of advancements as recent as last year in the field of brain-computer interfaces for synthesizing speech.
The new duties are due to take effect immediately after Trump announces them, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday, while a separate 25% global tariff on auto imports will take effect on April 3.
Trump for weeks has said his reciprocal tariff plans are a move to equalize generally lower U.S. tariff rates with those charged by other countries and counteract their non-tariff barriers that disadvantage U.S. exports. But the format of the duties was unclear amid reports that Trump was considering a 20% universal tariff.
The Trump administration accidentally sent a Salvadorian immigrant to a notorious Salvadorian prison and says it can’t do anything to get him back.
That’s even though the man had protected immigration status in the U.S., specifically barring him from being sent back to that country for fear of persecution.
On Monday, in a filing in Maryland federal court, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) admitted to mistakenly sending Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal CECOT prison.
“On March 15, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government wrote.
Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has gained access "to a payroll system that processes salaries for about 276,000 federal employees across dozens of agencies," despite "objections from senior IT staff who feared it could compromise highly sensitive government personnel information" and lead to cyberattacks, The New York Times reported today.