America voted against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The UN general assembly nevertheless passed the resolution: 93 countries voted in favour, with 18 votes against and 64 abstentions. The UN Security Council, where America and Russia have a veto, is expected to vote on the measure later on Monday. Donald Trump has pursued bilateral peace talks with Russia, to the dismay of European allies.
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.
Alibaba pledged to invest at least 380bn yuan ($53bn) in cloud-computing and artificial-intelligence infrastructure over the next three years—more than it has spent on it in the past decade. Last week Eddie Wu, the Chinese e-commerce giant’s boss, said artificial general intelligence—hypothetical programs that could match or surpass human thought—would become the group’s primary focus.
Some federal agencies, including the FBI, advised employees to ignore an email sent by Elon Musk on Saturday that gave them 48 hours to explain what they had worked on in the past week. Mr Musk warned that failure to respond would be “taken as a resignation”. The DOGE boss is aiming to make deep cuts in government spending.
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: 37%, the share of young Africans polled by the Africa Youth Survey who want to move to America. Read the full story.
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