Day: August 7, 2025

As China defuses its time bomb of debt, US hears the ticking intensify

Media Library

Concerns over China’s local-level debt have long loomed large in international discourse, with a mountain of “hidden” debt viewed as a “ticking time bomb” that threatens to trigger a cascade of defaults while posing a risk to financial stability. Advertisement But some experts now contend that, after a sweeping debt-restructuring campaign, the outlook for China is shifting. And they say that, by comparison, the debt challenges facing the United States are causing considerable alarm. “After years of effort, the overall debt risks of local governments in China have been brought…

Samsung to produce image sensors for Apple’s iPhone in Texas

Media Library

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Samsung Electronics will produce digital image sensors for Apple in the latest sign that South Korean technology companies are starting to reap the benefits of a series of US investments and President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariff policies. The iPhone maker on Wednesday said it would work with Samsung’s semiconductor facility in Austin, Texas, “to launch an innovative new technology for making chips, which has never been used before anywhere in the…

China’s exports surge ahead of US tariff truce deadline

Media Library

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world China’s exports rose faster than expected last month, official data showed, ahead of the expiry next week of a tariff truce with the US that threatens to reignite trade tensions between the world’s economic superpowers. Exports added 7.2 per cent in July on a year earlier in US dollar terms, the fastest rate of growth since April and exceeding forecasts of 5.4 per cent in a Reuters poll.…

Unique genes that make us smart may also fuel cancer: China study

Media Library

A genetic study in China that could have major implications for human evolution – and cancer research – has shown that a special type of recently evolved gene can be sequestered by cancerous tumours to fuel their growth. Advertisement The team of researchers from Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) examined a group of young genes that emerged de novo, meaning they recently evolved from regions of the genome that do not code for proteins rather than from coding genes through typical gene evolution. Unlike most genes,…

Maglev train researchers may have solved ‘tunnel boom’ shock waves

Media Library

Researchers hope they may have solved the “tunnel boom” problem as they prepare to roll out China’s latest prototype magnetic levitation train. The newest version of the maglev train is capable of travelling at 600km/h (about 370mph). However, the train’s engineers have wrestled with the problem of the shock waves which occur as the train exits the mouth of a tunnel. When a high-speed train enters an enclosed space such as a tunnel, air in front is compressed, like in a piston. The resulting fluctuations in air pressure coalesce at…