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Economists marked up their forecasts for growth in the US and China after the world’s two-largest economies reached a temporary agreement to reduce tariffs on each other. China’s economy is now seen expanding at least 4.6% this year from as low as 4% previously, according to new estimates from Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., ING Groep NV and Bloomberg Economics. Projections for the US still point to a slowdown, but several economists dropped their recession calls. While tariffs are widely expected to boost inflation, that hasn’t yet shown up in the data. US consumer prices rose by less than forecast, while a report on producer prices indicated businesses absorbed much of the costs from the new levies as they took effect last month

The latest CPI report highlighted two underlying dynamics in the economy. Goods categories exposed to higher tariffs, including new cars and apparel, didn’t see the kind of price increases that economists had expected by now. That suggests importers and retailers are absorbing some of the extra costs and imported products sold now had arrived before the brunt of the tariffs — namely on China were in effect. Separately, some weakness in services categories like travel and recreation suggest consumers are cutting on leisure and other discretionary spending.

For all the worry about tariffs causing pain for American consumers, shoppers have so far been mostly shielded from — or shrugged off — higher prices at the checkout aisle. Profit margins at retailers and wholesalers shrank in April by the most in almost a year. Manufacturers signaled they are paying higher prices. Yet consumer inflation remained tame, and Walmart Inc. reported solid sales as it kept prices low.

The cost of Republican lawmakers’ draft plan for sweeping tax cuts weighed in at $3.8 trillion over the next 10 years in one official estimate. The reality is likely much higher, thanks to the use of budget and political tools designed to minimize the appearance of the fiscal hit, according to independent analysts including former Republican staff members.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and other major banks boosted their forecasts for China’s 2025 economic growth, citing a better outlook for exports following the tariff truce with the US.

Australia’s wage growth was stronger than expected in the first three months of the year, highlighting the nation’s tight labor market that has been underpinned by a wave of public-sector hiring. The data did little to change market expectations for an interest-rate cut next week.

The recent conflict between India and Pakistan is prompting a reassessment of Chinese weapons, challenging long-held perceptions of their inferiority to Western arms and sparking concern in places wary of Beijing. Pakistan hailed the use of its Chinese J-10Cs to shoot down five Indian fighters, including French-made Rafale aircraft, last week in response to Indian military strikes.

US President Donald Trump’s hopes of securing as much as $1 trillion in investment commitments from Saudi Arabia might clash with another costly ambition – transforming the kingdom’s own economy. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s plans to diversify the oil-dependent country are likely to cost close to $2 trillion, according to estimates compiled by Bloomberg News.

Mexico’s central bank cut borrowing costs by half a percentage point Thursday after the economy narrowly avoided falling into recession and inflation remained within the target range.

Britain’s King Charles III saw his wealth grow by around GBP 30 million over the past year to hit GBP 640 million in the 2025 ‘Sunday Times Rich List’ released on Friday, with the 76-year-old monarch climbing 20 places to rank 238th alongside former prime minister Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty.

The annual tally of the country’s 350 wealthiest individuals and families was topped for the fourth consecutive year by the Indian-origin Hinduja family, with an estimated fortune of GBP 35.3 billion, despite taking a hit of GBP 2 billion since May 2024.

“Awarding licences to build wind farms has helped the Crown Estate double its profits, increasing the sovereign grant, which funds the royal family’s official activities,” the newspaper notes with reference to Charles’ boosted fortunes.

“We exclude the majority of royal assets from the King’s valuation because they are owned ‘in the right of the Crown’ and are not personal holdings. His Balmoral and Sandringham estates in Scotland and Norfolk, as well as an investment portfolio also inherited from his late mother [Queen Elizabeth II], account for the bulk of his wealth,” it notes.

Meanwhile, Sunak saw a dent in his family fortunes since last year with Murty’s stake in Infosys losing some of its value on the stock market, but the couple’s combined estimated fortunes of GBP 640 million means they improved their rank from last year’s 245th.

“Since leaving Downing Street, Sunak has taken a part-time role at Stanford University and signed up to the lucrative Washington Speakers Bureau,” reads ‘The Sunday Times’ analysis.

“His wife’s stake in Infosys, her father’s Bangalore-based IT firm, paid out GBP 7.5 million of dividends last year but has lost some of its value. The couple have launched a charity to tackle numeracy problems,” it adds.

Besides the Hinduja family, the top 10 of the 2025 ‘Sunday Times Rich List’ sees another set of India-born brothers, David and Simon Reuben, build on their wealth to rise to second place from last year’s third, with a fortune estimated at around GBP 26.87 billion.

At No. 8 is NRI tycoon of Arcelor Mittal steelworks Lakshmi N. Mittal, who holds on to his rank with an estimated GBP 15.44 billion. Vedanta Resources’ industrialist Anil Agarwal with an estimated GBP 7.5 billion is at No. 25.

Other Indian-origin billionaires on the 2025 list include textiles entrepreneur Prakash Lohia at No. 31 with an estimated GBP 6.02 billion; retail majors Mohsin and Zuber Issa at No. 32 with GBP 6 billion; and pharma chiefs Navin and Varsha Engineer at 48 with GBP 3.45 billion. Among the top 100 richest Britons are brothers Simon, Bobby and Robin Arora at No. 69 with GBP 2.57 billion and leading NRI industrialist Lord Swraj Paul and family ranked 81st with an estimated wealth of GBP 2 billion.

On the whole, the latest edition of the rich list reveals the sharpest fall in billionaire numbers in its 37-year history – sliding to 156 this year from 165 in 2024.

“This year – the 37th edition – has been one of the toughest to compile due to [US President] Donald Trump’s tariffs and the ensuing stock market turbulence,” said Robert Watts, compiler of the annual rankings for ‘The Sunday Times’.

“It shows the third year in a row that collective wealth has fallen and the biggest drop in the number of UK billionaires in the Rich List history. It is a stark reflection of the state of UK wealth,” he said.

The valuations for this year’s list were carried out between November 2024 and April 2025.

The world’s first clinic where patients will be diagnosed using artificial intelligence (AI) has opened in Saudi Arabia. A China-based medical technology company called Synyi AI has partnered with Almoosa Health Group for the trial programme, which began last month in the eastern province of Al-Ahsa, according to a report in Leaders magazine.

The clinic aims to replace human doctors as the first point of contact for diagnosing and treating patients. However, humans are still involved in the system as “safety gatekeepers”.

“AI Clinic is an innovative medical service system where AI doctors independently complete the full-chain medical operations from inquiry to prescription, with human doctors acting as “safety gatekeepers” to review the diagnosis and treatment results,” the Shanghai-based company said in a statement.

How does the AI clinic work?

After patients arrive at the clinic, they describe their symptoms using a tablet computer to an AI “doctor” called “Dr Hua”. Akin to a real doctor, the AI variant follows up with more questions and analyses data and images taken with the help of human assistants.

Once the consultation is over, Dr Hua provides a treatment plan, which is signed off by a human doctor after a thorough review. Human doctors remain available for emergencies that AI cannot handle.

Currently, the AI doctor is limited to providing consultation about respiratory illness, covering about 30 diseases such as asthma and pharyngitis. Synyi AI is aiming to expand the doctor’s database to cover 50 respiratory, gastroenterological, and dermatological diseases.

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The pilot programme’s diagnostic data will be submitted to Saudi authorities with approval expected within 18 months. As per Synyi AI, the technology had an error rate of 0.3 per cent during a testing phase, prior to the ongoing trial.

“What AI has done in the past is to assist doctors, but now we are taking the final step of the journey to let AI diagnose and treat the patients directly,” said Synyi AI CEO Zhang Shaodian.

The company, backed by Tencent, Hongshan Capital, GGV Capital and local government, claims to use localised large language models (LLMs) for the AI models, which is customised with region-specific medical language, local languages and cultural nuances.

Bryan Johnson, the US tech entrepreneur looking to defy death, has once again gained social media’s attention after revealing his latest body experiment. In an Instagram post, Mr Johnson claimed to have had plasma removed from his body and replaced it with albumin — a protein found in a person’s blood plasma.

“I removed all the plasma from my body, and the doctor said it’s the cleanest she’s ever seen,” said Mr Johnson in the video, adding that it was the second phase of the experiment where he had previously received a blood transfusion from his son.

“You remember that blood boy thing? That’s when my son gave me plasma. Well, today, we are doing a V2 of that.”

In another video, he explained that the human body has “the natural ability to remove waste products” but sometimes “it can’t deal with the load of our modern world or certain kinds of toxins”, which prompted him to undergo the procedure.

“So, what happens when you remove all the plasma from your body? Nothing, really. I did the entire thing I felt the same, went to bed, slept the same,” he informed.

“So for me it was pretty inconsequential. For those suffering from health challenges, they can feel a significant boost of energy and alertness. So how might this affect my logevity? Well, like all things blueprint we are measuring dozens of biomarkers and we will see a before and after and then make an assessment of what it’s doing for me.”

Mr Johnson spends $2 million a year on medical diagnostics and treatments combined with a meticulously crafted regimen of eating, sleeping, and exercising to see if he can slow, and perhaps even reverse, the ageing process.

He is committed full-time to stopping the ageing process, having made a massive fortune in his 30s when he sold his payment processing company to eBay.

A day before trade minister Piyush Goyal and a delegation of top negotiators are to arrive in Washington for talks on the proposed India-US trade deal, Donald Trump has let the cat out of the bag by making a huge claim – that India has offered a trade deal with “no tariffs”.

Donald Trump, who is on a whirlwind 3-nation visit to the Middle East, made this claim during a meeting with top executives in Doha.

Speaking about tariffs and trade, President Trump said, “It is very hard to sell in India, and they are offering us a deal where basically they are willing to literally charge us no tariffs.” He also expressed his dissatisfaction with Apple’s plans to invest and manufacture in India.

In a quick and sharp response, India, without directly naming the US or President Trump, called the remarks “premature”.

“Any trade deal has to be mutually beneficial. It has to work for both countries. That would be our expectation from any trade deal. Until that is done, any judgement will be premature,” Dr Jaishankar said.

The foreign minister said that such negotiations are “complicated”, and take time. “Nothing is decided till everything is,” he added.In Doha, President Trump also recalled how he had “confronted” Apple CEO Tim Cook when he found out about Apple shifting production from China to India. “I told him, Tim, we treated you very good, we put up with all the plants you built in China for years. We are not interested in you building in India. India can take care of themselves, they are doing very well, we want you to build here (in the US),” the US President said.

APPLE’S PLANS FOR INDIA

Apple, which had already aimed to manufacture most of its iPhones meant to be sold in the United States at factories across India by the end of 2026, has been speeding up those plans to navigate potentially higher tariffs imposed by Trump on China.

In March, hours before Donald Trump announced his “reciprocal tariffs” for friends and does alike, Apple’s main India suppliers – Foxconn and Tata – shipped nearly $2 billion worth of iPhones to the US – an all-time high, to bypass those tariffs, which, at the time, President Trump had said, would come into effect within two days of the announcement.

MARKETS UPBEAT

Meanwhile, equity markets in India surged to a seven-month high almost immediately after reports about Trump’s claim of India allegedly offering a trade deal with zero tariffs surfaced. As the delegation led by trade minister Piyush Goyal heads to Washington, New Delhi seeks to clinch the deal within the “Autumn” time frame announced by the government earlier this year.

Donald Trump’s 90-day pause on punitive “reciprocal tariffs” also ticks along, but that has not deterred New Delhi. Minister Piyush Goyal had said last month that “We never negotiate at gunpoint. Favourable time constraints motivate us for quicker talks, but till the time we are not able to secure the interest of our country and our people, we do not hurry (into any deal).”

INDIA FIRST, ASSURES TRADE MINISTER

Adding to this, Mr Goyal had said, “All our trade talks are progressing well, in the spirit of India First, and to ensure our pathway to Viksit Bharat by 2047 in the Amrit Kaal.”

According to news agency Reuters, India has reportedly offered to reduce duties to zero on 60 per cent of tariff lines in a first phase of the deal under negotiation with Washington, while offering preferential access to nearly 90 per cent of the merchandise India imports from the United States.

WHAT INDIA-US TRADE STATS REVEAL

The US is India’s largest trading partner globally. Bilateral trade between the largest and the oldest democracies in the world currently totals $129 billion, 2024 data reveals. At a surplus of $45.7 billion, the balance is in India’s favour.

With negotiations under way, both countries are aiming for a massive boost in bilateral trade – totaling $500 billion by 2030.

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