BMW reported a clear drop in profit, and several other German carmakers released similarly bad results in the same week, according to Tagesschau.
Four separate studies published this month found China pulling ahead of the United States in several areas at once: global opinion polls now favor China over the US in most countries, China's trade surplus keeps growing, its biotech industry is running drug trials faster and cheaper, and its military has added disinformation and fake videos to its war plans for Taiwan (a self-governing island China claims).
A single phrase in Brussels' new China paper — that Beijing seeks to "reshape the global order" — reclassifies every EU-China decision from trade dispute to strategic contest.
Beijing hit 14 EU entities with export controls and called it payback for Europe's newest Russia sanctions — opening a second, major-power front in the sanctions war, though the details that decide whether it bites remain undisclosed.
Whoever controls a supply chain's narrowest point now sets the price of everyone else's security. This week the pattern showed up in four regions at once.
A strait America cannot keep open, a navy built to close another, a nuclear taboo cracking in Tokyo, factories rising in Romania and Ukraine — read together, the week tells a single story about who pays for security and who collects.
For years the United States led China on global favorability. A new Pew Research Center survey shows that lead has reversed across most of 36 countries and territories, including two of Washington's closest neighbors — the first hard data pointing to a measurable shift in soft power.
Typhoon Bavi made full landfall in China's Zhejiang province late Saturday after brushing Taiwan and southern Japan, with more than 1.7 million people evacuated. In Taipei, commentary has sharpened on Beijing's parallel use of legal and political pressure against pro-Taiwan speech during the disruption.
As Typhoon Bavi forced thousands into shelters across Taiwan and Japan's southern islands, Taipei detected a Chinese naval vessel and official ship near its territory — coinciding with a new Chinese law that criminalizes pro-Taiwan speech among ethnic minorities.
Typhoon Bavi is disrupting Taiwan and tracking toward the Chinese coast just as floods in southern China kill at least 39 people — a rare case of simultaneous disaster pressure on both sides of the strait.
Beijing is normalising coast-guard patrols off Taiwan's east coast even as it fires missiles into the Pacific. Taipei's response is not a threat of retaliation but a warning to everyone else: without collective pushback, the pressure only ratchets.
A U.S. Air Force think-tank report says China has built two new multiple missile launch systems that appear able to fire large numbers of ballistic and cruise missiles at Taiwan or at U.S. and allied forces in the region. The detail worth dwelling on is the design intent: volume.