US, China Negotiators Conclude Stockholm Trade Talks Round
The talks followed previous rounds in Geneva in May and in London in June.
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Business Recorder
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Trump says he thinks US will have a ‘very fair deal' on trade with China
WASHINGTON: U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that talks were moving along with China and he expected the two sides would reach a fair deal on trade. 'We're moving along with China. We're doing fine with China,' Trump told reporters at the White House. 'I think it's going to work out very well. We're right in step. I think we're going to have a very fair deal with China.' US says Trump has 'final call' on China trade truce U.S. and Chinese officials met in Stockholm on Monday for more than five hours of talks aimed at resolving economic disputes with a goal of extending their truce on a trade war by three months. China is facing an August 12 deadline to reach a durable tariff agreement with Trump's administration, after Beijing and Washington reached preliminary deals in May and June to end escalating tit-for-tat tariffs and a cut-off of rare earth minerals. Trump's administration has agreed trade deals with the European Union, Britain and Japan. It is negotiating with multiple other countries to achieve more.
Boston Globe
24 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Trump administration told Taiwan president to avoid New York stopover
Trump's desire for steady relations with China, and potentially to secure a summit with President Xi Jinping, may have influenced his administration's position on Lai's travel plans. Trump has said he is open to visiting China to meet with Xi. Advertisement Confirmation of Lai's travels would have riled China, which held trade negotiations with Trump's team in Stockholm this week. China considers Taiwan to be part of its territory and sees the United States' support for Taiwan as meddling in a domestic issue. Beijing routinely objects to Taiwanese leaders' visits abroad, particularly to the US. Matthew Pottinger, who was the longest-serving deputy national security adviser in the first Trump administration, criticized the apparent decision by US officials to 'bend over backwards' in the face of Chinese objections to transit stops by the Taiwanese leader. He noted that such visits were common during the first Trump term — he had met with the Taiwanese president on a visit to New York — and during the Biden administration. Advertisement 'Beijing will pocket this concession and ask for more,' Pottinger said. According to two officials familiar with the planning, Lai called off the trip after Trump administration officials told him to revise his itinerary for the US, specifically to forgo the visit to New York, which was viewed as more high-profile. The news about the Trump administration's objections to Lai's travel plans was earlier reported by The Financial Times. On Monday evening, Lai's spokesperson, Karen Kuo, said the president had no plans to travel soon. Lai needed to focus on dealing with damage in southern Taiwan from a typhoon, as well as trade talks with the Trump administration, Kuo said. She said the reports of US obstructions were 'inaccurate' and 'purely speculative.' While Lai's office had never publicly confirmed the trip, three Taiwanese officials had in recent days and weeks privately described his plans to stop in New York and Dallas as part of his travels to Paraguay, Guatemala, and Belize, three of Taiwan's diplomatic partners in Latin America. David Sacks, a fellow in Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations who specializes in US-Taiwan relations, pointed out that such US stops were coordinated with Washington. 'The idea that Taiwan would plan a trip for its president to visit three of its diplomatic partners while transiting through the United States, all without approval from senior American officials, strains credulity,' he said. Advertisement The White House National Security Council did not reply to a request for comment. Tammy Bruce, a State Department spokesperson, told reporters Tuesday that because Taiwan had not announced any travel plans by Lai, any discussion about it was 'a hypothetical.' Lai's predecessor as president, Tsai Ing-wen, visited New York in 2023, during the Biden administration. Tsai also met in California with Kevin McCarthy, then the speaker of the House, the third-ranking post in the US government. That was the highest-level in-person meeting for a leader of Taiwan in the United States since Washington switched diplomatic relations from Taiwan to the People's Republic of China in 1979. The United States maintains political, economic, and security ties with Taiwan, and allows the island's president to make stops on the way to and from other countries — but Washington has sometimes set limits. In 2006, President Chen Shui-bian canceled a plan to travel through the United States after Washington denied him permission to stop in New York. Taiwanese officials had made arrangements for Lai to give a speech in New York, and he was expected to attend an exhibition of Taiwanese technology and products in Dallas, according to two researchers who had heard about the plans from diplomats. Asked about the reports that the Trump administration had blocked Lai's plans for visiting the US this time, a spokesperson for the Chinese government's Taiwan affairs office reiterated that Beijing 'adamantly opposes' any such visits at any time. This article originally appeared in
Spectator
25 minutes ago
- Spectator
The air traffic control failure looks like cock-up rather than conspiracy
The most remarkable thing about today's air traffic control failure, which has led to at least 45 flights being cancelled and many more disrupted, is how few people are bothering even to question whether this could be the work of hackers employed by a foreign power. In recent years almost every systems failure that afflicts UK infrastructure has caused speculation that the Russians or Chinese are to blame – followed by the gradual realisation that, no, we did this to ourselves through our own incompetence. The Liberal Democrats did put out a statement demanding that the government instigate an investigation, with ruling out foreign sabotage being one of its objectives. But that elicited about as much interest as every other press release from Ed Davey's office. For most of us, today's failure is one more step towards the realisation that our lives are increasingly at the mercy of computer systems which even the people who build and run them often fail fully to understand. This will almost certainly get far worse as artificial intelligence (AI) is built into these systems – as, by definition, AI is capable of itself making changes to how a system operates. Today's failure has echoes of what happened over the August bank holiday in 2023 when 700,000 passengers had their travel plans disrupted, and which ended up costing airlines £65 million. No hostile power was involved. The Civil Aviation Authority's final report into the incident, published last year, concluded that it was caused by the flight plan of a single airliner which was not even taking off or landing in Britain. Rather, it was a flight from Los Angeles to Paris which passed through UK airspace. The air traffic control system was confused because the three‑letter code for its proposed exit point from UK airspace, DVL, for Deauville in Normandy, was the same as that for an earlier waypoint which the plane had passed on its journey: Devil's Lake, North Dakota. Thus the plane seemed to be proposing to exit UK airspace several hours before it entered it. To avoid giving air traffic controllers duff information, the whole system went into maintenance mode. To compound the problems, the 'level 2' engineer who was required to fix the problem was on call but not present at the National Air Traffic Control Services' HQ in Swanwick, Hampshire, and it took him 90 minutes to get into work. Given the many millions that it cost the aviation industry, you might think it would be worth having a qualified engineer on site all the time. Yet remarkably, the CAA report concluded: 'The panel is of the view that, whilst enhancing the roster to provide for a Level 2 engineer to be available at all times may not be justified on grounds of either safety or cost, there is a case for making such an enhancement during the busier summer period, and other such times as seem appropriate.' What does it say about the priorities of the industry when the perfume shops at Heathrow seem to be more adequately staffed than air traffic control? We have yet to hear what the CAA makes of today's systems breakdown, but one thing is for sure: it is not going to enhance Britain's reputation as a modern country. Rather, it speaks once more of our ageing infrastructure. We have a Prime Minister who talks about AI solving all our problems – even filling in the potholes which blot our increasingly desiccated roads – yet the reality is that we are becoming increasingly prone to this kind of systems failure, and that there is very little we are doing about it. Hackers employed by hostile states no doubt do exist and will become an increasing threat, but at the moment they are not really getting a look‑in – cock‑ups are outrunning the conspirators.
