
Oil tanker costs hit record $1.2mn a day as Iran war disrupts shipping
Shortage of biggest supertankers has more than doubled rates on key Middle East-China routes since late August

Shortage of biggest supertankers has more than doubled rates on key Middle East-China routes since late August

Authorities examine extent of switches made by US company in state-backed data centres

The US relationship is stabilising, but how will Europe face up to Russia and China if President Le Pen is in power? I addressed a group of more than 100 European ambassadors recently on the big challenges facing the continent this year and next. My main point to these senior diplomats was that, perhaps counterintuitively, Europe’s biggest external challenges over the next 12 months will come from Russia and China, rather than the US. Europe’s relationship with Trump’s America remains difficult. The US president has weakened confidence in Nato, raised new transatlantic trade tensions and introduced uncertainty into everything from US support for Ukraine to his territorial designs on Greenland. Yet paradoxically, and notwithstanding Trump’s latest tariff threats over the EU’s outreach to Canada, the transatlantic relationship is becoming the more stable part of Europe’s external environment. Not stable, but more stable. Mujtaba Rahman is the managing director for Europe at Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm Continue reading...

Fears persist about Trump ‘sucking up’ to Xi on Taiwan, but few concrete outcomes anticipated from US meeting When Xi Jinping, China’s leader, touches down in Maryland on Wednesday, he will step out into the arms – perhaps a hug , if Donald Trump’s wishes come true – of a US president who has shown China more bonhomie than any of his recent predecessors. The meeting between Xi and Trump this week will be the second time that the leaders of the world’s two biggest economies have talked face to face this year. At the previous summit, held in Beijing in May, there was much talk of building a “strategic stability” between the two powers. But there was little by way of concrete outcomes : the countries remain at loggerheads over trade, export controls and geopolitics. Continue reading...

Heightened U.S.-China tensions over Taiwan could reshape diplomatic and military strategies, influencing global stability and market dynamics.

Xi Jinping arrives in Washington September 24, prepared to discuss reviving a $6 billion-a-year trade in US liquefied natural gas, contingent on lifting a 15% Chinese tariff that has blocked American gas since Q1 2025. Iranian missiles destroyed 17% of Qatar's LNG export capacity in March, and China absorbed that shock by buying more from everyone except the United States: Australia took 36% of its LNG imports from January through July, Southeast Asia 20%, Russia 12%, and Canada, a new entrant, 4%, according to Banchero Costa data. American cargoes…

President says US is ‘leading over China by a lot and everyone else, and we’re going to keep it that way’

This report examines how health and biopharmaceutical companies interact with the data components of the AI supply chain, and how a fractured global regulatory landscape shapes their ability to innovate responsibly. It maps seven data components, from training data to model weights, APIs, and SDKs, against real-world use cases spanning drug discovery, cancer diagnostics, and cross-border genomic research, explores fourteen exemplative regulatory regimes across the United States, the European Union, China, and India, and assesses the tensions, open questions, and policy recommendations that will shape the future of health data governance for corporations, researchers, and policymakers alike.
Lian Yunzhi, from China, learnt more than 1300 cube algorithms, spending between two and three hours practising on the cube per day in the past year.

DeepSeek will address the UN Security Council on AI risks this week, sharing a stage with Dario Amodei—who has spent a year calling China's government the industry's biggest threat.

Potato farmers rub shoulders with rows of gleaming new data centres as Trump and Xi meet to discuss AI safety.

The BBC is in Inner Mongolia where dozen of Chinese data centres are being constructed, as the country aims to lead the world in artificial intelligence.

The current focus of the world’s governments, business and media when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) is on the dangers it poses to jobs, democracy and even the future of humanity itself. For many of a certain generation, these fears crystallise in the cold but relentlessly courteous voice of HAL, the on?board AI in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. After a crew member questions HAL’s diagnosis of a faulty antenna, the system secretly lip?reads the astronauts, discovers their plan to disconnect it, and kills them…

China's enhanced energy leverage could shift global energy dynamics, emphasizing clean energy's role amid geopolitical and market tensions.

The Iran war has boosted China’s clean energy exports and strengthened its leverage in global energy markets, giving China little incentive to yield to President Donald Trump’s demands.

Trump still doesn’t have an answer to China’s leverage.

Jacob Rothman built a manufacturing business in China supplying major retailers

French President Emmanuel Macron used his last address before the UN General Assembly as France's leader to urge the world's nations to stand alongside the United Nations in the face of a resurgent "law of the jungle". Macron also called for a moratorium on strikes on civilian and energy infrastructure in the Russia-Ukraine war and an "open-source" model for frontier AI independent of China and the US.

China is competing with the United States and other nations to develop AI.