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As Winston Churchill said of parliamentary politics, Keir Starmer’s enemies don’t have the one great advantage that incumbency bestows on him. He can act, they can only talk. What, then, should he do to rebuild
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Jessie Thompson, The IndependentElizabeth Strout found the hero of her latest novel, The Things We Never Say, in an unlikely place. Well, actually, her friend did. "We've known each other forever, and he sent me
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India is all set to host the First International Big Cat Alliance (IBCA) Summit 2026 in June. Indian Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change Mr Bhupender Yadav launched the website and logo for
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Hollywood star-singer Jennifer Lopez truly did justice to her heartfelt note of gratitude for her mother, Guadalupe Rodríguez, acknowledging her for raising “three independent daughters” and for being her pillar of strength in the darkest
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Investors expect US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart to keep trade tensions on the backburner when they meet in Beijing and say they are focused on the booming AI sector and whether the US will relax chip export restrictions. This is in stark contrast with years of Chinese asset prices swinging wildly on trade and tariff headlines and is reflected most clearly in the yuan, which has been steadily rising for a year to reach a three-year peak. While thorny subjects like the US-Israeli war on Iran, Taiwan, rare earths and nuclear weapons may be discussed and major disagreements could dent market confidence, investors are presently betting on China’s technology drive. China’s benchmark Shanghai Composite is trading at an 11-year high and export growth is powering ahead on a wave of AI-driven orders. Even a widening trade surplus does not make fund managers nervous about a fresh round of US tariffs and they have swung their portfolios behind China’s artificial intelligence self-sufficiency drive. “The tables have turned. There’s little China is eager to discuss with Trump,” said Yang Tingwu, vice general manager of Tongheng Investment, adding that Trump’s unresolved war with Iran has weakened his hand. Yang has invested in China Mobile and China Telecom for exposure to their data-centre businesses. The shift in market focus, with Trump due today for his first visit to China in nearly nine years, reflects the diminished brinkmanship in the US-China relationship since Trump and President Xi Jinping pressed pause on their trade war six months ago. US courts have struck down much of Trump’s initial tariff barriers. Trade data suggests Chinese goods are reaching the US anyway via Southeast Asia. And as the fallout from the Iran war strengthens China’s push to shore up its supply chains, investors have also priced in US-China tension and bet on it spurring China’s technology development. “China has made great strides in technology, grown the new economy, expanded its global clout and increased its leverage in the global power rivalry,” said Wen Xunneng, founder and CEO of Zhu Liu Asset Management. He has been investing in AI infrastructure and expects US-China relations to be stable at least until Xi makes an expected reciprocal visit to the US. “After Xi’s visit to the US, the two countries may enter the next stage of rivalry, but now it’s a relatively peaceful time,” he said. During Trump’s first term and at the outset of his second, the yuan traded as a barometer of the bilateral relationship. Since the tariff storm was unleashed in April 2025, however, the yuan has been guided higher by booming exports and a belief in the market that authorities are comfortable with a stronger currency that is in contrast with a volatile dollar. “The summit could be a tactical catalyst for CNY strength and an important marker in stabilising trade relations,” Goldman Sachs analysts said in a note. “(But) we think the case for a stronger CNY is more fundamental and longer-lasting beyond this week’s events,” they said, as China’s external surplus drives the currency to a 12-month forecast of 6.5 to the dollar. The expected attendance of top US business leaders at the summit has also raised hopes for deals spanning finance, agriculture, energy and aeroplanes, while some investors see an opportunity for China to push for peace in the Middle East. “I’m hoping that maybe Trump can get Xi to put pressure on Iran to get the Strait of Hormuz open again and the oil flowing,” said Jack Ablin, chief investment strategist at Cresset Wealth Advisors. But with expectations for a big announcement low, the fallback for most traders is to watch what has been moving markets and that has been the global AI boom. Zeng Wanping, fund manager of Beijing Monolith Fund Management, said he is interested mainly in whether the US will allow more advanced Nvidia chips to be sold in China, which will pressure local producers. “The only thing worth monitoring is development around AI,” he said. “This is the market’s top focus, no other.”
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Oil majors are bracing for prolonged turbulence in energy markets, which should curb any temptation to ramp up spending after the Iran war. The biggest fear now is not missing the next rally, but being on the wrong side of the inevitable retreat.The Middle East conflict and the near-airtight closure of the Strait of Hormuz since February 28 have triggered an unprecedented oil and gas supply crunch, pushing crude prices above $100 a barrel and sparking a global search for alternative supplies. Even if a US-Iran peace deal is reached soon, the damage is done.The loss of more than 13% of global oil supply and roughly a fifth of LNG flows, combined with the extensive damage to energy infrastructure across the Gulf, will likely have long-lasting consequences that put a floor under prices for years. On the face of it, this should be the ideal backdrop for energy majors such as BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Shell and TotalEnergies to ramp up spending, expand production, and capture market share.All five beat first-quarter earnings expectations. Yet the industry’s response has been strikingly restrained thus far. None of the majors has raised spending plans for 2026 or beyond. “You will see capital and cost discipline no matter what,” Chevron CEO Mike Wirth told analysts on May 1. That caution reflects a structural shift in boardroom priorities.After years of aggressive expansion from the early 2000s led to about $200bn of impairments over the past decade, the industry has pivoted towards capital discipline and prioritising shareholder returns. Investors who once rewarded growth now demand high cash flow.One might argue that today’s restraint also highlights the mismatch between a short-term supply shock and the lengthy timelines of large-scale oil and gas projects. However, if companies wanted to respond quickly, bringing barrels to market faster and at lower risk, they would have options. These include tapping into US shale projects, which operate on a shorter cycle, or connecting reservoirs close to existing offshore infrastructure. Even here, however, restraint prevails. Chevron and Exxon have resisted pressure from US President Donald Trump’s administration to boost output in response to the Middle East crisis, underscoring how deeply embedded capital discipline has become.INTO THE UNKNOWNUnderlying that caution is deep uncertainty over future prices. Benchmark Brent has swung violently since the start of the war, surging more than 60% to a peak of $118 a barrel in late March before slipping back towards $100. Daily moves of 5% or more, which historically have been relatively rare, have occurred on 16 of the 50 trading days since the conflict began.Yet further along the curve, the signal is far calmer. The January 2030 Brent contract trades around $73 a barrel, only modestly above the $67 level seen on February 27. While futures contracts should not be confused with forecasts, this muted long-term price move sends a mixed signal.If supply losses are structural and geopolitical risk has permanently risen, why are long-term prices barely moving? One explanation is that investors are still pricing in a relatively swift normalisation. But that looks increasingly optimistic. Nearly one billion barrels of Middle Eastern supply have already been lost, global inventories are being rapidly drawn down, and even a full reopening of Hormuz would not quickly restore output.Rebuilding damaged infrastructure and spare capacity is likely to be a slow, uneven process. At the same time, structural uncertainty is rising on both sides of the supply/demand equation. Demand continues to grow despite expectations of an energy transition-driven plateau, while supply has become more concentrated, more exposed to geopolitical risk, and less cushioned by spare capacity.The result is a market that is not just tight, but brittle. In that environment, price volatility itself becomes the dominant risk. “We produce a commodity that, if you look at over the last six years, has had pretty extreme price volatility. So we need to make sure that the decisions we’re making on the portfolio and the business allow us to be profitable through the cycle,” BP CEO Meg O’Neill told analysts on April 28.The industry has spent years preparing for exactly this type of scenario. Costs have been cut aggressively, portfolios streamlined, and break-even levels reduced. According to RBC Capital Markets, the five largest Western majors can now sustain dividends at oil prices below $60 a barrel. That resilience removes the urgency to chase short-term price spikes.VOLATILITY AHEADOil majors’ investment decisions have long served as a bellwether for how the industry views the future. Today, that signal is unambiguous. To be sure, spending is still expected to rise between 2026 and 2030, but that was the case before the war, driven by concerns that supply growth would struggle to keep pace with demand after years of underinvestment.But recent events have done nothing to ramp up these plans. If anything, they have reinforced a more conservative mindset. Rather than betting on a prolonged price boom, companies are positioning for a world defined by sharper swings, recurring disruptions, and persistent uncertainty.The restraint on display suggests volatility, not scarcity, will define the next phase of energy markets. —Reuters• The opinions expressed here are those of Ron Bousso, a columnist for Reuters.
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In the latest proposal, Iran said it had demanded the release of its frozen assets and the end of a US blockade of its ports, however, President Donald Trump angrily rejected Tehran’s terms for ending the Middle East war. The sharp exchange of messages raised the spectre of a return to open conflict in the Gulf, dashed hopes of a quick negotiated deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping and sent oil prices higher.Trump reacted with fury after Iran responded to the latest US proposed outline for peace talks with a counteroffer he deemed, in a brief social media post, “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE”.The impasse unnerved global energy markets, with international benchmark Brent crude prices rising 4.65% to $99.95 a barrel during early Monday trade in Asia. The US leader did not say what had offended him in Iran’s response, but Tehran’s foreign ministry said it had called for an end to the US naval blockade and to the war “across the region” implying a halt to Israel’s strikes targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon.Crucially, ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei told reporters, Iran demanded the “release of assets belonging to the Iranian people, which have for years been unjustly trapped in foreign banks”.This would suggest not just a return to the status quo before the United States and Israel launched the war on February 28, but a victory for the Islamic government’s long-standing campaign against economic isolation. “We did not demand any concessions. The only thing we demanded was Iran’s legitimate rights,” Baqaei said.An end to international sanctions would also diminish Washington’s leverage over Tehran as it tries to secure a lasting end to Iran’s nuclear enrichment.The US, Israel and their allies have long accused Iran of seeking an atomic bomb, an accusation Tehran has repeatedly denied.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted the conflict would not end until Iran’s nuclear facilities are destroyed. “It’s not over, because there’s still nuclear material enriched uranium that has to be taken out of Iran,” he told US broadcaster CBS’s ‘60 Minutes’. “There’s still enrichment sites that have to be dismantled,” he said.The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, said Iran’s counter-proposal had included the possibility of diluting some of its highly enriched uranium, with the rest transferred to a third country. Iran had sought guarantees that the transferred uranium would be returned if negotiations failed or Washington abandoned the agreement, sources told the ‘Journal’.Trump is expected to press China’s President Xi Jinping a major buyer of Iranian oil on the Iran issue when he visits Beijing on Thursday, according to a senior US official. The lack of a path to a resolution has focused concern on the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran is restricting maritime traffic and setting up a payment mechanism to charge tolls for crossing ships.US officials have stressed it would be “unacceptable” for Tehran to control the international waterway the export route for a fifth of the world’s oil. The US Navy is also blockading Iran’s ports, at times disabling or diverting ships heading to and from them.As diplomatic momentum appeared to dwindle, fresh drone attacks in the Gulf on Sunday rattled the ceasefire. The United Arab Emirates said its air defences intercepted a drone attack launched from Iran, while Kuwait reported “hostile drones” in its airspace.Qatar’s defence ministry also said a freighter arriving in its waters from Abu Dhabi was hit by a drone. In a social media post on Sunday, the spokesman for the Iranian parliament’s national security commission warned Washington: “Our restraint is over as of today.”“Any attack on our vessels will trigger a strong and decisive Iranian response against American ships and bases,” Ebrahim Rezaei said. —AFP
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A year ago, US President Donald Trump predicted that towering trade tariffs would bring America’s main economic rival to heel. He is headed to China this week with that ambition blunted by court rulings, narrowing his goals to a few deals on beans, beef and Boeing jets, and enlisting China’s help to resolve his unpopular Iran war, political analysts say. The modest expectations for Trump’s May 14-15 meetings with Xi Jinping — the first since they paused a bruising trade war in October — underscore how Trump’s bombastic approach has failed to deliver an advantage ahead of the talks, according to analysts. Trump “kind of needs China more than China needs him,” said Alejandro Reyes, a professor specialising in Chinese foreign policy at the University of Hong Kong. “He needs a kind of foreign policy victory: a victory that shows that he is looking to ensure stability in the world and that he’s not just disrupting global politics,” Reyes added. Since their last brief meeting at an airbase in South Korea where Trump suspended triple-digit tariffs on Chinese goods and Xi backed away from choking global supplies of rare earths, China has quietly sharpened its economic pressure toolkit aimed at Washington. Trump, meanwhile, has been preoccupied fighting US court rulings against his tariffs and a war with Iran that has sapped his approval ratings ahead of November’s midterm elections. This week’s meeting in the Chinese capital will be a grander occasion, with the leaders set to hold a summit at the Great Hall of the People, tour Unesco-heritage site Temple of Heaven, dine at a state banquet and take tea and lunch together. But the anticipated economic deliverables amount to a handful of deals and mechanisms to manage future trade, while it remains unclear whether the leaders will even agree to extend their trade truce, officials involved in the planning said. Trump will be joined by CEOs including Tesla’s Elon Musk and Apple’s Tim Cook, though the business delegation is smaller than when he last visited Beijing in 2017. Aside from trade, Trump said on Monday he will discuss arms sales to Taiwan and the case of jailed media tycoon Jimmy Lai with Xi. Families of two Americans imprisoned in China for more than a decade are also urging Trump to seek their release. “We used to be taken advantage of for years with our previous presidents, and now we’re doing great with China,” Trump said. “I respect him (Xi) a lot, and hopefully he respects me.” ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHERThe mood music has changed dramatically since Trump declared in a Truth Social post in April 2025 that his tariffs would make China realise that the “days of ripping off” the United States were over. Those levies prompted Beijing to restrict exports of rare earths, brutally exposing the West’s dependency on elements vital to the manufacturing of everything from electric cars to weapons, and eventually led to Trump and Xi’s fragile truce. Since then, Trump has faced countless other battles: capturing Venezuela’s leader, threatening to annex fellow Nato member Greenland and waging a war on Iran that has plunged the Middle East into chaos and stoked a global energy crisis. More than 60% of Americans disapprove of his Iran war, according to a Reuters/Ipsos survey last month. Now, Trump wants China to convince Tehran to make a deal with Washington to end the conflict. China maintains ties with Iran and remains a major consumer of its oil exports. Matt Pottinger, who served as deputy national security advisor during Trump’s first term, told a forum in Taipei last week that while China would like to see an outcome that weakens American power it is not immune to the economic cost of a protracted conflict. But Beijing will want something in return, and top of Xi’s agenda is Taiwan, the democratically governed island claimed by China. While some fear a bargain that could embolden China to take Taiwan by force, even a nuanced change in Washington’s wording would raise anxiety about the commitment of Taipei’s most important backer that would reverberate across other US allies in Asia. Wu Xinbo, a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai who serves on the policy advisory board of China’s foreign ministry, said Trump should make clear that he “won’t support independence or take actions that encourage a separatist political agenda”. ‘SUPERFICIAL CEASEFIRE’China also wants the Trump administration to commit to not taking future retaliatory trade action such as technology export controls, and to roll back existing controls on chipmaking equipment and advanced memory chips, people briefed on the talks said. And since last October, Beijing has been expanding its own economic leverage, such as enacting laws to punish foreign entities that shift supply chains away from China and tightening its rare earth licensing regime. A majority of Americans (53%) now say the United States should undertake friendly co-operation and engagement with China, up from 40% in 2024, according to a survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs published in October. So just keeping relations on an even keel and extending the trade war truce could be enough for Trump to claim a win. That leaves the main outcome likely to be “a superficial ceasefire that is largely to China’s advantage,” said Scott Kennedy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington.
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Catherine West, the former minister who is launching a stalking-horse campaign to try to force Sir Keir Starmer out of office, does not know who she wants as prime minister. She just wants a change,
