America voted against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The UN general assembly nevertheless passed the resolution: 93 countries, including America’s European allies, voted in favour, with 18 against and 64 abstentions. The UN Security Council, where America and Russia have a veto, passed an American-backed measure calling for peace without assigning blame to Russia for starting the war.
During a press conference at the White House, Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, said that Europe had “provided real money”—not just loans, as Mr Trump asserted—to Ukraine, and clarified that Russia was the “aggressor”. Mr Trump, meanwhile, declined to call Vladimir Putin a dictator. Presidents Trump and Macron both said that European troops could potentially serve as peacekeepers in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, said he hoped the war can finish “this year” as he hosted around a dozen foreign leaders in Kyiv to mark the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s justice minister said it was close to finalising a deal with America over rights to the embattled country’s rare mineral deposits. Olha Stefanishyna said “nearly all key details” had been finalised in the agreement.
The winner of Germany’s election, Friedrich Merz, suggested he could work with mainstream parties to loosen the country’s “debt brake”, which strictly limits the federal government’s deficit, before the new parliament convenes. Mr Merz’s centre-right Christian Democrats hope to form a coalition with the centre-left Social Democrats. But hard-right and hard-left parties won sufficient seats to block efforts to loosen government-borrowing rules. The outgoing parliament runs until March 24th.
Apple said it would invest $500bn in America and hire a further 20,000 staff there over the next four years. The investment includes the opening of a plant to build servers in Texas, a training facility in Michigan and increased spending with existing suppliers. Other American tech firms have also announced big investment packages in a bid to please Mr Trump.
JPMorgan announced that it would commit an additional $50bn to its direct-lending platform, having already put some $10bn into more than 100 private-credit deals since 2021. Private credit, which mainly serves riskier mid-sized companies, has boomed since the 2008 financial crisis, and big banks such as Citigroup and Wells Fargo have also recently tried to push into the market.
Starbucks said it will cut around 1,100 jobs and simplify its menu in a bid to reduce costs and boost its flagging sales. The coffee chain’s corporate workers, a small minority of its 360,000-strong global staff, were told to stay away from the office ahead of the redundancies. The announcement did not affect café workers.
Figure of the day: £71bn, the size of Britain’s trade surplus with America, according to the Office for National Statistics. Read the full story.
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