Deadline set by US president was supposed to be Saturday, with Trump now considering decreasing tariffs to get deal

Donald Trump on Friday afternoon extended by 75 days a deadline for the Chinese technology company ByteDance to sell US assets of the popular short-video app TikTok to a non-Chinese buyer or face a ban that was supposed to take effect in January under a 2024 law.

“The deal requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed,” the US president said, explaining why he was extending the deadline he set in January that was supposed to expire on Saturday. “We hope to continue working in good faith with China, who I understand is not very happy about our reciprocal tariffs.”

Released court statement says alleged Chinese spy helped draft private letters to Chinese president

The Duke of York sent letters directly to China’s president, Xi Jinping, the prince’s former senior adviser told a special immigration tribunal, with an alleged Chinese spy advising him on how to write them.

Dominic Hampshire, who worked for Andrew from 2019-22, said Andrew had “always had a communication channel” with Xi which was “accepted” and may even have been encouraged by Buckingham Palace and the late Queen.

Board game designer and entrepreneur Jamey Stegmaier has published hit games like Scythe and Wingspan —the latter a personal favorite of mine, with a delightfully gentle theme about birds—but this week found him in a gloomy mood.

"Last night I tried to work on a new game I'm brainstorming," he wrote in a blog post yesterday , "but it’s really hard to create something for the future when that future looks so grim. I mostly just found myself staring blankly at the enormity of the newly announced 54 percent tariff on goods manufactured in China and imported to the US."

Most US board games are made in China, though Germany (the home of modern hobby board gaming) also has manufacturing facilities. While printed content, such as card games, can be manufactured in the US, it's far harder to find anyone who can make intricate board pieces like bespoke wooden bits and custom dice. And if you can, the price is often astronomical. "I recall getting quoted a cost of $10 for just a standard empty box from a company in the US that specializes in making boxes," Stegmaier noted—though a complete game can be produced and boxed in China for that same amount.

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Beijing imposes punitive 34% extra tariffs on all goods imported from US, exacerbating stock market sell-off

• US politics live – latest updates

China has hit back hard against Donald Trump’s “bullying” tariffs, raising fears that the escalating trade war could trigger a global recession and prompting fresh turmoil in financial markets.

Beijing retaliated on Friday with punitive 34% additional tariffs on all goods imported from the US – mirroring the US decision and exacerbating a sell-off on global stock markets.

Meta’s attempt to silence ex-employee Sarah Wynn-Williams has drawn attention to its work on stifling freedom of expression in China

There’s nothing more satisfying than watching a corporate giant make a stupid mistake. The behemoth in question is Meta, and when Careless People, a whistleblowing book by a former senior employee, Sarah Wynn-Williams, came out last week, its panic-stricken lawyers immediately tried to have it suppressed by the Emergency International Arbitral Tribunal. This strange institution obligingly (and sternly) enjoined Wynn-Williams “from making orally, in writing, or otherwise any ‘disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments to any person or entity concerning [Meta], its officers, directors, or employees’ ”. To which her publisher, Macmillan, issued a statement that could succinctly be summarised thus: “Get stuffed.”

Clearly, nobody in Meta has heard of the Streisand effect , “an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove or censor information, where the effort instead increases public awareness of the information”. The company has now ensured that Wynn-Williams’s devastating critique of it [see our review inthe New Review] will become a world bestseller.

Commentary urged CK Hutchison to ‘think twice’ about ‘what position and side they are on’ in sale to US investors

China has criticised the sale of the business that controls ports in Panama to US investors, saying the Hong Kong-based parent company should “think twice” and that the $22.8bn deal is “power politics” that is not in the country’s national interests.

Shares in Hong Kong-based conglomerate CK Hutchison fell more than 6% on Friday after a critical commentary appeared in the Beijing-backed newspaper Ta Kung Pao in Hong Kong.

Welcome to Edition 7.35 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX's steamroller is still rolling, but for the first time in many years, it doesn't seem like it's rolling downhill. After a three-year run of perfect performance—with no launch failures or any other serious malfunctions—SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket has suffered a handful of issues in recent months. Meanwhile, SpaceX's next-generation Starship rocket is having problems, too. Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX's vice president of launch, addressed some (but not all) of these concerns in a post on X this week. Despite the issues with the Falcon 9, SpaceX has maintained a remarkable launch cadence. As of Thursday, SpaceX has launched 28 Falcon 9 flights since January 1, ahead of last year's pace.

As always, we welcome reader submissions . If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Alpha rocket preps for weekend launch. While Firefly Aerospace is making headlines for landing on the Moon, its Alpha rocket is set to launch again as soon as Saturday morning from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The two-stage, kerosene-fueled rocket will launch a self-funded technology demonstration satellite for Lockheed Martin. It's the first of up to 25 launches Lockheed Martin has booked with Firefly over the next five years. This launch will be the sixth flight of an Alpha rocket, which has become a leader in the US commercial launch industry for dedicated missions with one-ton-class satellites.

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Ed Miliband travels to Beijing saying co-operation with China vital to protect future generations, as US and Russia push for expansion of fossil fuels

• Ed Miliband: ‘The global battle against the climate crisis needs China’

The UK is hoping to shape a new global axis in favour of climate action along with China and a host of developing countries, to offset the impact of Donald Trump’s abandonment of green policies and his sharp veer towards climate-hostile countries such as Russia and Saudi Arabia .

Ed Miliband, the UK’s energy and net zero secretary, arrived in Beijing on Friday for three days of talks with top Chinese officials, including discussions on green technology supply chains, coal and the critical minerals needed for clean energy. The UK’s green economy is growing three times faster than the rest of the economy , but access to components and materials will be crucial for that to continue.

I will be the first UK energy secretary since 2017 to visit. It is negligence towards today’s and future generations not to engage China on this critical topic

The climate crisis is an existential threat to our way of life in Britain. Extreme weather is already changing the lives of people and communities across the country, from thousands of acres of farmland being submerged due to storms such as Bert and Darragh to record numbers of heat-related deaths in recent summers.

The only way to respond to this challenge is with decisive action at home and abroad. Domestically, this government’s clean-energy superpower mission is about investing in homegrown clean energy so we can free the UK from dependence on fossil fuel markets while seizing the immense opportunities for jobs and growth.