World

BEIJING — China told Washington on Wednesday to "stop threatening and blackmailing" after US President Donald Trump said it was up to Beijing to come to the negotiating table to discuss ending their trade war.

Trump has slapped new tariffs on friend and foe but has reserved his heaviest blows for China, with 145 percent on many Chinese imports even as Beijing has retaliated with levies on US goods of 125 percent.

"If the US really wants to resolve the issue through dialogue and negotiation, it should stop exerting extreme pressure, stop threatening and blackmailing, and talk to China on the basis of equality, respect and mutual benefit," foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian said.

"China's position has been very clear. There is no winner in a tariff war or a trade war," Lin said. "China does not want to fight, but it is not afraid to fight."

This year, Trump has imposed an additional 145 per cent tariff on many goods from China, stacking atop duties from previous administrations.

Trump initially imposed 20 per cent tariffs on imports from China over its alleged role in the fentanyl supply chain, then added 125 per cent over trade practices that Washington deems unfair.

His administration has, however, given temporary reprieve for certain tech products -- like smartphones and laptops -- from the latest levy.

The White House said Tuesday it was up to Beijing to make the first move towards ending the dispute, which economists warn could cause a global recession.

"The ball is in China's court. China needs to make a deal with us. We don't have to make a deal with them," said a statement from Trump read out by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

China growth 

China on Wednesday said its economy grew a forecast-beating 5.4 percent in the first quarter as exporters rushed to get goods out of factory gates ahead of the US levies.

"The escalation happening in April is going to be felt in the second-quarter figures as the tariffs will send stateside firms looking to other suppliers, impeding Chinese exports and slamming the brakes on investment," Heron Lim from Moody's Analytics told AFP.

Japan's envoy for talks slated for Wednesday in Washington said meanwhile that he was optimistic of a "win-win" outcome for both countries.

Ryosei Akazawa, who was due to meet US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, said he would "protect our national interest".

On Wednesday Honda said it will shift production of its hybrid Civic model from Japan to the United States, although this represents a very small part of its global output.

The rationale behind the decision "is not a single issue", a spokesman for the Japanese firm said. "The decision is based on the company's policy since its foundation that we produce cars where the demand is."

South Korea, another major exporter in particular of semiconductors and cars, said that finance minister Choi Sang-mok would meet Bessent next week.

"The current priority is to use negotiations... to delay the imposition of reciprocal tariffs as much as possible and to minimise uncertainty for Korean companies operating not only in the US but also in global markets," Choi said Tuesday.

Since the start of the year, Trump has imposed steep duties on imports from China, alongside a 10 percent "baseline" tariff on many US trading partners.

His administration recently widened exemptions from these tariffs, excluding certain tech products like smartphones and laptops from the global 10 per cent tariff and latest 125 per cent levy on China.

Chip stocks across Asia slumped after Nvidia said it expects a $5.5-billion hit due to a new US licensing requirement on the primary chip it can legally sell in China.

Trump also ordered a probe Tuesday that may result in tariffs on critical minerals, rare-earth metals and associated products such as smartphones.

WASHINGTON — US President Donald Trump's special envoy said Monday that Russian leader Vladimir Putin was open to a "permanent peace" deal with Ukraine, following talks seeking to end the more than three-year war.

Trump has been pressing Moscow and Kyiv to agree to a ceasefire but has failed to extract any major concessions from the Kremlin, despite repeated negotiations between Russian and US officials.

On Friday, Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff met with Putin in Saint Petersburg -- their third meeting third since the Republican leader returned to the White House in January.

Witkoff said during a Fox News interview televised Monday that he sees a peace deal "emerging," and that two key Putin advisers -- Yuri Ushakov and Kirill Dmitriev -- were in the "compelling meeting."

"Putin's request is to get to have a permanent peace here. So beyond the ceasefire, we got an answer to that," Witkoff said, acknowledging that "it took a while for us to get to this place."

"I think we might be on the verge of something that would be very, very important for the world at large."

He added that business deals between Russia and the United States were also part of the negotiations.

"I believe there's a possibility to reshape the Russian-United States relationship through some very compelling commercial opportunities, that I think give real stability to the region too," he said.

Despite a flurry of diplomacy, there has been little meaningful progress on Trump's main aim of achieving a Ukraine ceasefire.

Putin last month rejected a joint US-Ukrainian proposal for a full and unconditional pause in the conflict, while the Kremlin has made a truce in the Black Sea conditional on the West lifting certain sanctions.

SUMY, Ukraine — Russia said Monday that its missiles hit a meeting of Ukrainian army commanders in Sumy, accusing Ukraine of using civilians as a "human shield" after Kyiv said the attack Sunday killed at least 34 people in one of the deadliest strikes of the entire war.

US President Donald Trump -- who is pushing for a ceasefire -- called the attack a "horrible thing" and suggested Russia had "made a mistake".

Commenting on the strike for the first time after more than 24 hours, Russia's defence ministry said its army launched two ballistic Iskander-M missiles at "the place of a meeting of command staff", claiming that it had killed 60 Ukrainian soldiers.

The Kremlin rejected that its army had targeted civilians or that there had been any kind of "mistake".

"Our army hits only military and military-related targets," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters when asked about the strike and Trump's comments.

Russia's defence ministry appeared to concede there were civilian casualties, but placed the blame on Ukraine.

"The Kyiv regime continues to use the Ukrainian population as a human shield, placing military facilities and holding events with the participation of soldiers in the centre of a densely populated city," the ministry said.

Russia has made similar accusations since it invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Ukraine's emergency services said the attack killed 34 people, including two children.

One witness told AFP she heard the two explosions.

"A lot of people were very badly injured. A lot of corpses," she said, struggling to speak.

People ran for cover amid burning cars and the dead were seen covered in silver sheets at the scene, where rescuers worked through the rubble of a building near a destroyed trolleybus.

The strike on Sumy came less than 48 hours after Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff held talks with Putin in Saint Petersburg.

The Kremlin on Monday called the meeting "extremely helpful and very effective", without elaborating on the discussions.

Ukraine's European allies meanwhile have condemned the Russian attack on Sumy.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was "appalled", and his Italian counterpart Giorgia Meloni called it a "cowardly" act by Russia.

France's foreign ministry said Monday that the attack -- along with one a week earlier that killed nine children and nine adults in Kryvyi Rig -- constituted "war crimes".

Germany's chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz on Sunday described the attack as "a serious war crime, deliberate and intended".

 'Further escalation' 

The Kremlin on Monday criticised Merz for saying he was open to supplying Ukraine with Taurus missiles.

"He is agitating on the side of toughening his position and in favour of various steps that can -- and will -- inevitably lead to a further escalation of the Ukraine situation," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

"Unfortunately, European capitals are really not inclined to look for ways of reaching peace talks, they are rather inclined to further provoke the continuation of the war," Peskov added.

Separate Russian strikes on the northeastern region of Kharkiv killed four elderly residents, local officials said Monday.

Moscow has stepped up its pressure on the regions of Sumy and Kharkiv this year, and Ukraine's army leaders have warned of a fresh offensive in the area.

Russia has pushed Ukraine out of all but 50 square kilometres of its western Kursk region, which borders Ukraine's Sumy region, according to an AFP analysis of Institute for the Study of War data.

Moscow's army has also captured several border settlements and controls around 95 square kilometres in the Sumy region -- up from virtually nothing at the start of 2025.

WASHINGTON — El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele assured Donald Trump on Monday that he would not return a man mistakenly deported from the United States, as the pair bonded over Trump's scheme to send migrants to a notorious prison in the Central American country.

Trump gave a warm welcome in the Oval Office to 43-year-old Bukele, the self-proclaimed "world's coolest dictator" who is now the US president's key ally in his controversial push to deport illegal migrants.

But the pair faced questions over the case of a father who was mistakenly deported to the Salvadoran mega-prison -- and whose return a US court has ordered the Trump administration to facilitate.

"Of course, I'm not going to do it," Bukele told reporters when asked if he would send the man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, back to the United States.

"The question is preposterous.... I don't have the power to return him to the United States."

Trump and Bukele, who wore a dark T-shirt under a suit, spent much of the meeting complimenting each other on their migration and crime policies.

Known for his stylish dress sense and social media savvy, Bukele is broadly popular at home for clamping down on once rampant drug gangs that terrorized El Salvador.

But the Salvadoran leader is accused of overseeing mass human rights violations, epitomized by a huge, brutal prison known as CECOT.

Trump's immigration policies focused on what he says is the threat of a gang-led crime wave in the United States, are meanwhile among his most popular, receiving much higher ratings than on the economy.

"You are helping us out, and we appreciate it," 78-year-old Trump told Bukele.

Trump also reiterated that he was even considering deporting some US citizens who commit violent crimes to El Salvador, saying "I'm all for it" and asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into the idea.

'Administrative error' 

Trump and Bukele also share a taste for conservative, strongman-style politics. They spent several minutes criticizing the media and then talking about the issue of transgender athletes in women's sprts.

Shortly after Trump's inauguration for a second term, Bukele made the extraordinary offer to take in prisoners from the United States, in exchange for a fee of $6 million.

Trump took the Salvadoran leader up on his proposal, sending more than 250 migrants there -- a majority of them under a rarely used wartime law dating to 1798, which stripped the deportees of due process.

Slickly produced footage of their arrival -- including chained and tattooed men having their heads shaved and being frog-marched by masked guards -- was widely promoted by both the Salvadoran and US governments.

The Trump administration contends that the migrants are members of criminal gangs designated by the United States as terrorist organizations, including El Salvador's MS-13 and Venezuela's Tren de Aragua.

However, relatives of several of the men contend they have no connection to organized crime and in some cases had been swept up simply because they had tattoos unrelated to any gang activity.

The expulsion to El Salvador of Abrego Garcia has set off a major legal crisis, after the Trump administration admitted he had been deported in an "administrative error."

A federal judge ordered the government to "facilitate" Abrego Garcia's return to the United States, but Trump officials contend he is now solely in Salvadoran custody, leaving the man in legal limbo.

Despite the partnership, El Salvador was among the dozens of US trade partners that the Trump administration slapped with 10 percent tariffs earlier this month.

The United States is the main destination for Salvadoran exports. Of the nearly $6.5 billion in goods exported from El Salvador in 2024, $2.1 billion went to the United States, including clothing, sugar and coffee, according to the central bank.

But Trump and Bukele also share a fondness for cryptocurrency, with El Salvador becoming the world's first country to establish bitcoin as legal tender in 2021.

BERLIN — German lawmakers will gather in early May to elect Friedrich Merz as chancellor after his conservative bloc sealed a coalition agreement with the main centre-left party, the Bundestag said Monday.

The president of the assembly, Julia Kloeckner was "preparing to convene the German Bundestag for the election of the federal chancellor... on Tuesday, May 6", the parliament said in a statement.

The date was "subject to the parties' approval of the coalition agreement" and Merz's nomination by the German federal president, the parliament said.

Both steps were expected to be a formality after Merz'sconservative bloc, the CDU/CSU, and his future governing partners, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), settled on a coalition agreement last week.

Merz's confirmation as chancellor will mark the realisation of a long-held dream for the conservative leader, who suffered multiple setbacks on his way to the top of German politics.

The future chancellor quit politics in the early 2000s after losing a power struggle to former chancellor Angela Merkel, embarking on a lucrative career in the business world.

But with the sun slowly setting on Merkel's time in office, Merzlaunched his comeback in 2018. He lost an initial tilt at the CDU party chairmanship and was passed over as the CDU/CSU's candidate for chancellor in 2021 before getting his chance this year.

The conservatives topped the polls in national elections at the end of February with 28.5 percent of the vote -- a result that was nonetheless below expectations.

The modest score and the historically high share of the vote for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) left Merz with the Social Democrats (SPD) of outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz as the only path to securing a majority.

The two parties needed just over six weeks to seal a deal that will mark a right-ward shift from the coalition led by Scholz, who will step back from frontline politics with Merz's election as chancellor.

The formation of a new government comes at a difficult moment for Germany, with the economy sputtering and its relationship with its key US ally rattled by President Donald Trump's return to office.

Trump's turbulent tariff policy and overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine have thrown into doubt Germany's export-focused economic model and its historic reliance on US security guarantees.

Merz has wasted no time in addressing those issues. After the election but before the coalition was agreed, Merz forced through changes to Germany's strict debt brake to make way for a defence and infrastructure spending boost worth hundreds of billions of euros.

LIMA — Peruvian writer and Nobel literature laureate Mario Vargas Llosa died on Sunday at the age of 89, his family announced, ending the era of Latin America's literary golden generation.

"It is with deep sorrow that we announce that our father, Mario Vargas Llosa, passed away peacefully in Lima today, surrounded by his family," his eldest son Alvaro wrote in a message on X also signed by his siblings Gonzalo and Morgana Vargas Llosa.

Born into a middle-class Peruvian family, Vargas Llosa was one of the greats of the Latin American literary "boom" of the 1960s and 1970s, along with Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Argentina's Julio Cortazar.

Rumors of the writer's deteriorating health had spread in recent months, during which he had been living out of the public eye.

In October, his son Alvaro said he was "on the verge of turning 90, an age when you have to reduce the intensity of your activities a little."

The writer's "passing will sadden his relatives, his friends and his readers around the world," the family statement read.

"But we hope that they will find comfort, as we do, in the fact that he enjoyed a long, adventurous and fruitful life, and leaves behind him a body of work that will outlive him."

Peru declared a day of mourning for the author on Monday, with flags flying at half-mast on government premises.

'Enduring legacy' 

The family said that "no public ceremony will take place," in accordance with instructions left by Vargas Llosa himself.

"Our mother, our children and ourselves trust that we will have the space and privacy to bid him farewell in the company of family members and close friends," the siblings added.

Vargas Llosa's body will be cremated, in accordance with his wishes, they said.

Gustavo Ruiz, a reader of Vargas Llosa's works, was among a small group of young people gathered around the writer's home to pay tribute.

"I didn't believe it and I wanted to come close to his house since they are not going to give him a wake," Ruiz told national radio station RPP.

David Marreros, a 30-year-old visual artist, told AFP that Vargas Llosa proved "one can live doing what one is most passionate about."

The writer's "intellectual genius and enormous body of work will remain an enduring legacy for future generations," Peru's President Dina Boluarte posted on X.

"We express our sincerest condolences to the family, to his friends and to the whole world. Rest in peace, illustrious Peruvian for the ages."

Former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe called Vargas Llosa a "Master of Masters."

"He leaves us a path for the future," Uribe said on X.

Fellow Peruvian writer Alfredo Bryce Echenique hailed Vargas Llosa's "enormity," telling RPP his friend's death was "a sorrow for Peru."

US Deputy State Secretary State Christopher Landau said that "to label him as just Peruvian would be a disservice because his themes and interests were timeless and universal."

"He will live on in my bookshelves and many others in Latin America and around the world," Landau wrote on X.

Mario Vargas Llosa moved to Lima last year and celebrated his 89th birthday on March 28.

A few days before, his son Alvaro posted on X three photos of him showing the writer in spots around Lima where he wrote his last two novels, "Cinco Esquinas" ("Five Corners", 2016) and "Le Dedico Mi Silencio" ("I Dedicate My Silence To You," 2023).

Vargas Llosa was hailed for his close description of social reality in works like "La ciudad y los perros" ("The City and the Dogs", 1963) and "Conversacion en la catedral" ("Conversation in the Cathedral", 1969).

But he was criticized by some South American intellectuals for his conservative stances.

Vargas Llosa's works were translated into around 30 languages.

A Francophile, he lived in Paris for several years, becoming in 2016 the first foreign author added to the prestigious Pleiadeliterary collection during his lifetime.

He was named to France's Academy of prominent intellectuals in 2021.

SUMY, Ukraine — A Russian strike on Ukraine's northeastern city of Sumy killed at least 31 people and wounded dozens on Sunday, Kyiv said, in the deadliest attack in months.

Ukraine said Russia launched ballistic missiles on Sumy's city centre on Palm Sunday.

The attack came two days after US envoy Steve Witkofftravelled to Russia to meet its leader Vladimir Putin and despite US President Donald Trump urging Moscow to end the war.

Sumy lies close to the Russian border and has come under increasing attack for weeks.

Rescuers said the strike hit the city centre "right when there were many people on the street."

Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky said Moscow launched a ballistic missile on Sumy and called on the world to put pressure on Russia to end the three-year war and called for a "strong response" from Europe and the US.

Palm Sunday 

Local authorities in Sumy published footage of bodies strewn on the street and people running for safety, with cars on fire and wounded civilians on the floor.

An AFP reporter saw bodies strewn near a trolleybus and on the street.

Russia has relentlessly attacked Ukraine in recent weeks, even as Trump calls on it to "get moving" on ending the more than three-year-long war..

Russia had refused a US-proposed unconditional ceasefire and has been accused by Ukraine and its European allies of dragging out the war and seeking to stall efforts for peace negotiations.

Sumy has been under increasing pressure since Moscow pushed back much of Ukraine's troops from its Kursk region across the border.

The eastern city so far has been spared from the kind of fighting seen further south in the Donetsk region but Kyiv for weeks has warned that Moscow could mount an offensive on Sumy.

Russia in recent weeks has claimed the capture of a village in the Sumy region for the first time since the early days of its 2022 invasion.

Russia launched its invasion partially through the Sumy region and briefly occupied parts of it before being pushed back by Ukrainian forces.

Moscow has not yet commented on the strike.