'My parents won't lend me £10k but helped my brother': When families play financial favourites

Outsourcing the industry to China cannot continue, but Europe knows it can no longer count on the US for a solution The alarm sounded 16 years ago. In 2010, China blocked exports of key rare earths to Japan in a row over disputed islands in the East China Sea. The critical minerals are essential to everything from advanced weaponry and iPhones to electric vehicle batteries and wind turbines, so the rest of the world took note. But it didn’t take much action. China still accounts for about 70% of rare-earth mining globally and 90% of separation and processing. Then, last year, Beijing forced Donald Trump to back away from his trade war – not with its retaliatory tariffs, but the curbing of rare-earth exports. A scramble for new supplies began in earnest. The year-long trade truce is due to expire in November. The price of erbium, an element essential to communications infrastructure, has already jumped because of fears that export controls will soon be renewed...

Meanwhile, Trump posts video of himself kicking over a Lake Ontario sign and replacing it with Lake America sign Donald Trump and Canada continued a verbal duel on Saturday over the US government’s administrative renaming of Lake Ontario, with the country erecting a giant sign saying “Lake Ontario. Now and Always” – and the American president posting a video of him tearing down an avatar of that sign, erecting a replacement saying Lake America, and dancing to YMCA. Rhetoric over the naming of Lake Ontario is the public face of an escalating trade dispute between the US and its northern neighbor involving a 50% US tariff on Canadian steel and retaliatory tariffs from Ottawa...

New company reportedly quickly fell behind with promised repayments to administrator A recruitment executive who was allowed to buy back the assets of his bust company in instalments, despite it accumulating almost £3m of debt, has placed his new business into liquidation after falling behind with promised payments to the administrator. The news is the latest event to raise questions about the practice of “phoenixism”, accounting’s controversial art of liquidating companies to allow directors to return with a new entity, free of debts...