Japan, South Korea face 25% tariffs as Trump ramps up trade war
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Euronews
an hour ago
- Euronews
Chinese economy grows at a 5.2% annual pace despite trade war
China's economy slowed in the last quarter as President Donald Trump's trade war escalated, but it still expanded at a robust 5.2% pace, the government said Tuesday. That compares with 5.4% annual growth in January to March. The government said Tuesday that in quarterly terms, the world's second largest economy expanded by 1.1%. In the first half of the year, the Chinese economy grew at a 5.3% annual pace, the official data shows. However, some analysts said actual growth may have been significantly slower. Zichun Huang of Capital Economics noted that investments in fixed assets such as factory equipment rose only 2.8% in the first half of the year, implying 2.9% annual growth in May and a mere 0.5% increase in June. Capital Economics' activity proxy shows growth in China's gross domestic product, or GDP, at less than 4% year-on-year in April and May, she said, forecasting annual growth of 3.5% for full-year 2025. 'The economic outlook for the rest of the year remains challenging,' Huang wrote in a report. She added though that 'political pressure to meet annual growth targets, even if only on paper, means that published GDP growth will be much higher.' A key factor was strong exports. On Monday, China reported that its exports accelerated in June, rising 5.8% from a year earlier, up from a 4.8% increase in May. A reprieve on painfully high tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States prompted a rush of orders by companies and consumers as the two sides resumed trade talks. Chinese companies also have expanded exports to and offshore manufacturing in other countries, helping to offset the impact of higher tariffs imposed by the Trump administration. 'Generally speaking, with the more proactive and effective macro policies taking effect ... the national economy maintained steady growth with good momentum, showcasing strong resilience and vitality,' the report by the National Bureau of Statistics said. However, a 0.1% decline in consumer prices in the first half of 2025 showed continuing weakness in domestic demand, a long-term challenge for the ruling communist party as the Chinese population declines and ages. Those troubles deepened during and after the COVID-19 pandemic and are also linked to a prolonged real estate crisis. Chinese leaders have set a growth target of 5% for this year, in line with last year's growth. A resumption of US tariffs of up to 245% could derail the recovery in exports, a major driver of growth and employment. Such duties could become a reality if Washington and Beijing fail to meet an 12 August deadline for a new trade deal.
LeMonde
4 hours ago
- LeMonde
US Supreme Court allows Trump to lay off nearly 1,400 Education Department employees
The Supreme Court is allowing President Donald Trump to put his plan to dismantle the Education Department back on track − and to go through with laying off nearly 1,400 employees. With the three liberal justices in dissent, the court on Monday, July 14, paused an order from US District Judge Myong Joun in Boston, who issued a preliminary injunction reversing the layoffs and calling into question the broader plan. The layoffs "will likely cripple the department," Joun wrote. A federal appeals court refused to put the order on hold while the administration appealed. The high court action enables the administration to resume work on winding down the department, one of Trump's biggest campaign promises. In a post Monday night on his social media platform, Trump said the high court "has handed a Major Victory to Parents and Students across the Country." He said the decision will allow his administration to begin the "very important process" of returning many of the department's functions "BACK TO THE STATES." The court did not explain its decision in favor of Trump, as is customary in emergency appeals. But in dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor complained that her colleagues were enabling legally questionable action on the part of the administration. "When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary's duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it," Sotomayor wrote for herself and Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan. The secretary of education lauds the decision Education Secretary Linda McMahon said it's a "shame" it took the Supreme Court's intervention to let Trump's plan move ahead. "Today, the Supreme Court again confirmed the obvious: the President of the United States, as the head of the Executive Branch, has the ultimate authority to make decisions about staffing levels, administrative organization, and day-to-day operations of federal agencies," McMahon said in a statement. Help us improve Le Monde in English Dear reader, We'd love to hear your thoughts on Le Monde in English! Take this quick survey to help us improve it for you. Take the survey A lawyer for the Massachusetts cities and education groups that sued over the plan said the lawsuit will continue, adding no court has yet ruled that what the administration wants to do is legal. "Without explaining to the American people its reasoning, a majority of justices on the US Supreme Court have dealt a devastating blow to this nation's promise of public education for all children. On its shadow docket, the Court has yet again ruled to overturn the decision of two lower courts without argument," Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement. The Supreme Court has handed Trump one victory after another in his effort to remake the federal government, after lower courts have found the administration's actions probably violate federal law. Last week, the justices cleared the way for Trump's plan to significantly reduce the size of the federal workforce. On the education front, the high court has previously allowed cuts in teacher-training grants to go forward. Separately on Monday, more than 20 states sued the administration over billions of dollars in frozen education funding for after-school care, summer programs and more.
France 24
5 hours ago
- France 24
Tech giants scramble to meet AI's looming energy crisis
AI depends entirely on data centers, which could consume three percent of the world's electricity by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. That's double what they use today. Experts at McKinsey, a US consulting firm, describe a race to build enough data centers to keep up with AI's rapid growth, while warning that the world is heading toward an electricity shortage. "There are several ways of solving the problem," explained Mosharaf Chowdhury, a University of Michigan professor of computer science. Companies can either build more energy supply -- which takes time and the AI giants are already scouring the globe to do -- or figure out how to consume less energy for the same computing power. Chowdhury believes the challenge can be met with "clever" solutions at every level, from the physical hardware to the AI software itself. For example, his lab has developed algorithms that calculate exactly how much electricity each AI chip needs, reducing energy use by 20-30 percent. 'Clever' solutions Twenty years ago, operating a data center -- encompassing cooling systems and other infrastructure -- required as much energy as running the servers themselves. Today, operations use just 10 percent of what the servers consume, says Gareth Williams from consulting firm Arup. This is largely through this focus on energy efficiency. Many data centers now use AI-powered sensors to control temperature in specific zones rather than cooling entire buildings uniformly. This allows them to optimize water and electricity use in real-time, according to McKinsey's Pankaj Sachdeva. For many, the game-changer will be liquid cooling, which replaces the roar of energy-hungry air conditioners with a coolant that circulates directly through the servers. "All the big players are looking at it," Williams said. This matters because modern AI chips from companies like Nvidia consume 100 times more power than servers did two decades ago. Amazon's world-leading cloud computing business, AWS, last week said it had developed its own liquid method to cool down Nvidia GPUs in its servers - - avoiding have to rebuild existing data centers. "There simply wouldn't be enough liquid-cooling capacity to support our scale," Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at AWS, said in a YouTube video. US vs China For McKinsey's Sachdeva, a reassuring factor is that each new generation of computer chips is more energy-efficient than the last. Research by Purdue University's Yi Ding has shown that AI chips can last longer without losing performance. "But it's hard to convince semiconductor companies to make less money" by encouraging customers to keep using the same equipment longer, Ding added. Yet even if more efficiency in chips and energy consumption is likely to make AI cheaper, it won't reduce total energy consumption. "Energy consumption will keep rising," Ding predicted, despite all efforts to limit it. "But maybe not as quickly." In the United States, energy is now seen as key to keeping the country's competitive edge over China in AI. In January, Chinese startup DeepSeek unveiled an AI model that performed as well as top US systems despite using less powerful chips -- and by extension, less energy. DeepSeek's engineers achieved this by programming their GPUs more precisely and skipping an energy-intensive training step that was previously considered essential. China is also feared to be leagues ahead of the US in available energy sources, including from renewables and nuclear.
