x01a Research Archives

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China said Friday sales to the United States slumped last month while its total exports topped forecasts, as Beijing fought a gruelling trade war with its superpower rival.

Trade between the world’s two largest economies has nearly skidded to a halt since US President Donald Trump imposed various rounds of levies on China that began as retaliation for Beijing’s alleged role in a devastating fentanyl crisis.

Tariffs on many Chinese products now reach as high as 145 percent — with cumulative duties on some goods soaring to a staggering 245 percent.

Beijing has responded with 125 percent tariffs on imports of US goods, along with other measures targeting American firms.

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US President Donald Trump has foregone the condition originally set in negotiations with Saudi Arabia, and is prepared to discuss cooperation on a Saudi civilian nuclear project even without normalization of the country’s relations with Israel, according to a report by Reuters today.

The previous US president, Joe Biden, made expansion of the Abraham Accords to include Saudi recognition of Israel a condition for nuclear cooperation.

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The Trump administration is considering cutting the steep 145% tariff on Chinese imports by more than half, possibly as early as next week, as US and Chinese officials gear up for high-level trade talks in Switzerland,

The New York Post

reported, citing sources close to the negotiations.US officials are reportedly weighing a reduction of the levy to somewhere between 50% and 54%, a move aimed at easing tensions as trade negotiations unfold.

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Ukraine’s parliament on Thursday was set to vote on ratifying a resources deal with the United States that Kyiv hopes will pave the way to further military support.The deal, signed last week in Washington, will see Washington and Kyiv jointly develop Ukraine’s natural resources and minerals.Securing a fresh agreement was seen as a diplomatic success for Kyiv, coming after a White House clash between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy that derailed an original deal that was ready to be signed.”We hope we will successfully complete the ratification today,”

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German Chancellor Freidrich Merz has told President Trump and the United States to “stay out” of his country’s politics.

The country’s intelligence agency confirmed last week that it had classified the conservative Alternative for Germany party as a “proven right-wing extremist organization” because of their opposition to mass immigration and progressive ideology.

In a post on the X platform, Secretary of State Marco Rubio slammed German authorities for their continued crackdown against their political opposition.

He wrote:

Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That’s not democracy—it’s tyranny in disguise.

What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD—which took second in the recent election—but rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes.

Germany should reverse course.

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Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) has declared Alternative for Germany (AfD) a “right-wing extremist group” and “opposed to the basic democratic order,” allowing the country’s intelligence apparatus to intensify surveillance efforts against the nation’s second-largest political party.

Late last week BfV delivered its 1,100-page report (which is not publicly available) to the Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser, who is leaving office after her party, the Social Democratic Party, finished third in Germany’s February elections.

Allegedly the report states, “Central to our assessment is the ethnically and ancestrally defined concept of the people that shapes the AfD, which devalues entire segments of the population in Germany and violates their human dignity.”

The report claims that AfD, which campaigned on immigration reform and the assimilation of Muslim migrants, seeks to exclude Muslims from society.

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Iran has been significantly expanding its covert nuclear weapons development since 2009, it has emerged. New intelligence uncovered by Iranian opposition group NCRI reveals that the regime’s Organisation of Defensive Innovation and Research (SPND) is running a secret programme to boost nuclear warhead capability, including mounting them on ballistic missiles able to strike targets over 1,900 miles away. The revelations come as Tehran prepares for a fourth round of proposed nuclear talks with the US in Muscat next week, with experts predicting they may derail negotiations.

At the heart of this effort is the Ivanaki (Eyvanekey) facility, a sprawling 2,500-acre site in Semnan Province, northern Iran. Publicly, it is presented as a paint and chemical production site operated by Diba Energy Sina. In reality, it is used for the construction of nuclear weapon components.

Operational since around 2013, Ivanaki is one of several covert facilities established after Iran’s previous nuclear weapons programme, the Amad Plan, was exposed and halted in 2003.

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Despite warnings from European Union officials, Slovakia’s Moscow-friendly prime minister, Robert Fico, shook hands with Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin before becoming the only EU leader to attend Russia’s 9 May parade of military forces waging war on Ukraine.

The Serbian president, Aleksandar Vučić, whose country aspires to join the 27-nation bloc, also accepted the Russian president’s invitation to attend the annual Victory Day celebrations marking the defeat of Nazi Germany in the second world war.

The pair were the only European leaders to travel to Moscow after strong injunctions from EU officials not to do so. On Thursday, the bloc’s chief diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said: “All those who truly support peace cannot stand side-by-side with Putin. Those who truly support peace should be in Ukraine tomorrow, not Moscow.”

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SEOUL, South Korea — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un supervised tests of short-range ballistic missile systems that simulated nuclear counterstrikes against U.S. and South Korean forces, state media said Friday, as the North continued to blame its rivals for escalating tensions through their joint military exercises.

The report came a day after South Korea’s military detected multiple launches from North Korea’s eastern coast and assessed that the tests could also be related to the country’s weapons exports to Russia during its war in Ukraine.

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It’s a bad day to be a Donald Trump nominee.

Just 24 hours after pulling his pick for surgeon general, the president has now announced he will drop Ed Martin’s nomination to serve as U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C.—the latest collapse in an administration stacked with loyalists and controversy magnets.

“We have somebody else that we’ll be announcing over the next two days that will be great,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday.

Martin’s nomination had been on life support for days. On Tuesday, New Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis—a key GOP member of the Senate Judiciary Committee—came out against Martin, citing the nominee’s past defense of Jan. 6 insurrectionists. With Tillis out on Martin, that made a deadlocked 11-11 committee vote likely, with several other Republican senators still uncommitted.

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The Thursday three network morning shows of ABC’s Good Morning America, NBC’s Today, and CBS Mornings could not and therefore did not downplay the violence that occurred overnight at Columbia University as pro-Palestinian agitators occupied Butler Library during finals week. However, they did manage to sanitize the message used to justify that violence, as it was mostly claimed they simply want an end to the Gaza War.

Today anchor Savannah Guthrie introduced correspondent Sam Brock, “Dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters taken into custody after they stormed a library at Columbia University and refused to leave for hours. NBC’s Sam Brock on the campus there for us. Sam, what’s the latest here?”