During a meeting with Sir Keir Starmer at the White House, Donald Trump said that America could work towards a trade deal with Britain “where the tariffs wouldn’t be necessary”. Regarding peace talks in Ukraine, the British prime minister said he wanted to see a durable agreement “to stop [Vladimir] Putin coming back for more”. On Friday Mr Trump will meet Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
Earlier Mr Trump confirmed that he would impose 25% tariffs on all Mexican and Canadian goods from March 4th, citing their failure to curb drug trafficking. He will also add a 10% duty on Chinese imports, increasing a tariff imposed earlier this month. Separately, a judge ruled that an order to fire many newly employed federal workers was probably illegal.
OpenAIreleased ChatGPT 4.5, the much anticipated—and delayed—update to its artificial-intelligence model. The firm says its new AI is better at writing, programming and problem solving. But the model faces competition from Chinese AIs. On Thursday Tencent launched its new artificial model, Hunyuan Turbo S, which it claims is faster than DeepSeek’s R1, a market-shaking Chinese competitor launched in January.
The value of Bitcoin plunged during early trading in Asia amid a deepening cryptocurrency sell-off. Bitcoin’s price has fallen by more than 25% since touching an all-time high of $109,241 on January 20th. Traders have been disappointed by Mr Trump’s inaction on cryptocurrency. The president had vowed to implement several pro-crypto policies.
America condemned Thailand for deporting 40 Uyghurs to China. The group had been detained since being caught at the Thai border as they tried to flee China’s brutal crackdown on the mainly Muslim minority. Marco Rubio, America’s top diplomat, said they would face “persecution, forced labour and torture”. China claims the group in Thailand had been “bewitched” by criminal organisations.
Russia’s security service said it arrested two church figures accused of plotting to kill Tikhon Shevkunov, a senior Orthodox cleric and alleged confidant of Mr Putin. The FSB said that the men had been working with Ukrainian intelligence, and were reportedly planning to plant a bomb in a monastery. Russian authorities released videos of their confessions. Ukraine has not commented.
Citigroup, an American bank, mistakenly credited a client’s account with $81trn instead of $280 last April due to a manual input error, the Financial Times reported. The mistake, caught 90 minutes later, did not result in any funds leaving the bank. The incident raises concerns over the bank’s risk management practices. It has struggled to fix longstanding operational issues.
Figure of the day: $42bn, TSMC’s planned capital expenditures for 2025, a 41% increase from the previous year. Read the full story.
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