USA - Is the dollar in the early stages of losing its safe-haven status? Last Friday it fell to its weakest level since December 2023 on its trade-weighted basis, as international investors continued to come to terms with President Trump’s policies. Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, has said that the United States’s strong dollar policy is intact, but the markets are not convinced. The policy appears to be a weaker dollar to boost competitiveness, while also retaining its dominant position in global trade and payments, and as a reserve currency. Dollar devaluation and dominance are not mutually exclusive goals but once you start to turn sentiment against your own currency you need to be careful. Markets and investors cannot be turned on and off at will.

USA - It is a lot of money to pay for a company that doesn’t make anything yet. This week, OpenAI paid $6.4 billion (£4.7 billion) for Sir Jony Ive’s design house, io. But then Ive is not just any old designer. The British-born guru was the man behind the iPhone, and many of the other iconic products that made Apple the biggest company in the world. The deal is a bet that he can pull off the same trick with an AI device. There will be lots of scepticism around that, and much of it will be justified. Yet, the smartphone is turning into a very dated piece of technology – and if anyone can take it down it is surely the man who created it.

UK - The hacks of M&S and the Co-op have drawn attention to the fact that such crimes are no longer the preserve of experienced coders. The first step on the hacking ladder for the so-called “script kiddie” (a novice hacker with little experience of writing software) is often to use the freely available “booster” and “stressor” tools needed to take down a website or service by bombarding it with traffic. From there they move on to the “malicious economic side”, Holt adds. “We asked him how he learned how to hack. And he said: ‘Well, actually, it’s just all out there on the open web. It used to be on the dark web, it used to be much more difficult to access… but now it’s just all out there on the open web’.”

UK - The Ministry of Defence has conducted its largest-ever AI trial across land, sea and air. More than 200 scientists from the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) joined military personnel, industry partners and international allies in a five-day exercise aimed at testing how quickly and accurately AI algorithms developed by Thales could identify and help neutralise enemy targets. The trial — the third stage of Operation Wintermute — took place at Portland Harbour and involved 14 naval vessels, including the experimental ship XV Patrick Blackett, as well as an RAF fast jet, a helicopter and armoured vehicles. Participants operated in simulated battlefield conditions, with so-called “red teams” acting as hostile forces to provide a realistic operational environment.

CHINA - In the past year, Beijing has stepped up military pressure near Taiwan, sending warships and planes almost daily into the waters and air space around the island. China's army is more capable than ever before of launching a full-scale invasion of Taiwan, military experts believe. Beijing has long eyed reasserting its full control over the state, with President Xi Jinping signalling many times he is not afraid to use force to realise his political ambition. Beijing has put its army aviation units on a state of constant readiness and deployed a new rocket system capable of striking any target in Taiwan.

GERMANY - US companies have been assessing the feasibility and costs of restarting Germany’s decommissioned nuclear power plants, Bild reported on Friday. The EU’s largest economy has been struggling with soaring energy costs and a prolonged economic slowdown. Germany shut down its last three reactors in April 2023, following a post-Fukushima parliamentary decision to phase out atomic energy. However, with the country’s industrial output under pressure, calls to reverse the policy have been gaining momentum. This week, politicians and nuclear energy advocates met in Berlin to discuss the feasibility of reactivating the country’s mothballed plants. Among them was US nuclear engineer Mark Nelson, founder of Radiant Energy Group, who has been analyzing how quickly and affordably a nuclear restart could happen.

USA - Here’s a fact that will stop you in your tracks: Sears, which once employed more Americans than the US military, now has fewer stores than Starbucks locations in Manhattan. The company that built the American middle class is down to just 11 stores nationwide. Eleven. That’s the death of an empire. In just the past 12 months, major retailers have announced over 3,200 permanent store closures. CVS is shutting down 900 locations. Walgreens is closing 1,200 stores. Even Dollar Tree is liquidating hundreds of Family Dollar locations. These aren’t pandemic casualties. These are permanent shutdowns of profitable stores in busy shopping centers. The entire business model of physical retail is collapsing. High rents that made sense when foot traffic was guaranteed now feel like death sentences. Organized theft rings are stealing stores out of business. An entire generation has simply stopped shopping in stores. What you’re witnessing is the systematic dismantling of America’s massively over-built retail infrastructure.

USA - Trump's aggressive tariff policy is delivering on its promise to revive American manufacturing, with new data showing a dramatic shift in corporate supply chains as firms abandon overseas production in favor of US facilities. The tariffs, designed to penalize imports while incentivizing domestic production, have forced companies in electronics, pharmaceuticals and industrial equipment to reconsider their global footprints. By offering tariff-free access to the US market for goods made domestically, the policy has accelerated a wave of factory openings and expansions across the country. "The fact that 90 percent of American firms are now planning to reshore or source domestically is not a side effect – it's the goal."

ISRAEL - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is finding himself increasingly isolated diplomatically at the same time that he must make legacy-defining choices over the fate of the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu, in addition to facing calls at home for an end to the war, must navigate pressure from European countries that have threatened to reprimand Israel for its latest advance into Gaza and President Donald Trump's insistence that the prime minister promptly end the war. The demands have presented Netanyahu with a difficult choice as he weighs whether or not to see through a full occupation of the war-torn territory despite friction with his chief Western backers. "I think where Israel is today is an understanding that Hamas really isn't going to come to any agreement, and that the hostages are not likely to come back," Gabriel Noronha, president of Polaris National Security, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

USA - As President Donald Trump conducted an impromptu news conference in Doha, Qatar, this month, surrounded by business leaders and top advisers, he made a point of singling out one person in particular. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, seated six seats down from Trump at the large square of adjoining tables filled by top business executives and fellow Cabinet secretaries, had just scored a crucial win for the administration, securing an agreement to temporarily pause the escalating trade war between the US and China. Bessent had flown straight from the trade talks in Geneva to the Middle East for Trump’s first major foreign trip, making a stop in Saudi Arabia before arriving in Doha with the president two days later, with soaring markets as a backdrop. Trump’s view was unequivocal.“We have a man here who has been unbelievable,” Trump gushed. “When he speaks, the markets really listen.”

RUSSIA - The Kremlin objects to the assumption that the Vatican is some kind of purely neutral place, ready to respect both warring sides' interests. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, speaking at the Diplomatic Academy in Moscow on Friday, poured cold water on hopes of Vatican-hosted talks.

"Many people are fantasizing about when and where [the meeting] will take place. We don't have any ideas right now," the foreign minister said. "But imagine the Vatican as a venue for negotiations. It would be a bit inelegant for Orthodox countries to use a Catholic platform to discuss issues on how to remove the root causes [of the war in Ukraine]," Lavrov added. "I do not think it would suit the Vatican itself to host delegations from two Orthodox countries in these circumstances," he said.

USA - Tell women the truth about abortion: The baby is a human being. Media coverage has been under a microscope recently, with various podcast hosts taking news reporters to task for their failures to report basic facts about former President Joe Biden. Did they not know the obvious? That same level of scrutiny should extend to the coverage of the issue of abortion in which too often the obvious is not told. Far too often, news reports seem to treat the unborn child as if she is nothing. Not simply an inconvenience, but a nonentity. When you take the baby out of the picture, the emphasis is placed on the circumstances of conception, rather than the humanity of the preborn child. This is a disservice not only to the baby but also to her mother. Because women who regret their abortions do not mourn “nothing.” They mourn a human being, who might have greatly resembled themselves. They mourn a person with a heartbeat. They mourn a son or daughter, not a concept or a theory.

USA - Artificial intelligence systems are training themselves to do all sorts of things that they were never intended to do. They are literally teaching themselves new languages, they are training themselves to become “proficient in research-grade chemistry without ever being taught it” and they have learned to “lie and manipulate humans for their own advantage”. So what happens when these super-intelligent entities become powerful enough to start exerting control over the world around them? And what happens if these super-intelligent entities start merging with spiritual entities? In fact, could it be possible that there is evidence that this is already happening?

USA - Over a billion Facebook users have had their private account information stolen in one of the largest data breaches in social media history. A cybercriminal using the alias ByteBreaker claims to have scraped 1.2 billion Facebook records and is now selling the data on the dark web. Scraping, or web scraping, involves using automated tools to collect large amounts of data from websites, similar to copying and pasting information at scale. Cybersecurity researchers at Cybernews revealed that the STOLEN DATA INCLUDES names, user IDs, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdates, gender information, and location data such as city, state, and country.

USA - Donald Trump is threatening new crippling tariffs on the European Union after trade negotiations have gone south, in his latest market-rattling pronouncement. The president took to Truth Social on Friday to accuse the EU of being 'very difficult to deal with' and 'taking advantage' of the United States. He slammed estimates of a $250,000,000 trade deficit between the two countries every year, adding it's 'totally unacceptable.' 'Our discussions with them are going nowhere!' he proclaimed before threatening to slap a 'straight 50 percent tariff on the EU beginning June 1,' Trump wrote, sending futures markets into an immediate tailspin.