The US trade deficit expanded more than expected in July to its widest in four months, government data showed Thursday, on a surge in imports before a fresh wave of President Donald Trump’s tariffs kicked in.The overall US trade deficit jumped 32.5 percent to $78.3 billion in July, the Department of Commerce said.This came on the back of a 5.9-percent rise in imports to $358.8 billion, while exports edged up just 0.3 percent to $280.5 billion.”While imports bounced back in July, more than half of the increase was due to gold as trade policy and safe-haven demand brought about a resurgence in trade,” said Matthew Martin, senior economist at Oxford Economics, in a statement.”Excluding gold, imports rose by a more modest 3.3 percent, while exports fell 0.1 percent,” Martin added.Analysts at Pantheon Macroeconomics expected a growing trade gap in connection with “another wave of pre-tariff stockpiling,” they said in a recent report.Trump slapped a 10-percent tariff on almost all US trading partners in April, but twice postponed a plan for these duties to rise to varying higher levels for dozens of economies.The steeper levels, hitting key partners like the European Union, Japan and India, finally took effect in early August.Even so, analysts believe businesses that boosted imports to get ahead of tariff hikes are running down on existing inventory, meaning that they will likely have to make new purchases at higher business costs.For now, the impact of Trump’s tariffs on US inflation appears limited.A Briefing.com consensus forecast had expected a smaller deficit figure of $64.2 billion. Demand for capital goods linked to artificial intelligence and data centers is boosting imports, Martin said in a note.Among sectors, imports of industrial supplies and consumer goods both jumped, the Commerce Department report said. The US goods deficit with China widened $5.3 billion to $14.7 billion in July, the report added.”Unsurprisingly, given the level of tariffs, China has been the hardest hit of all trading partners,” Martin said.Goods from the world’s second biggest economy face an additional 30-percent tariff this year, with several other Asian economies seeing lower levels.Trump’s tariffs have roiled supply chains this year, with imports already surging in March ahead of the US leader’s wide-ranging global duties in April.Apart from varied tariff rates on different economies, Trump has  slapped separate sector-specific levies on steel, aluminum and autos — while promising more to come.

First came orders to scrub references to how climate change disproportionately harms marginalized communities. Then demands to erase mentions of the “Gulf of Mexico.”By early summer, the climate.gov front page no longer existed. The federal portal once billed as a “one-stop shop” for the public to understand global warming had become another casualty of President Donald Trump’s war on science.Now, a group of former employees is working to bring it back to life.Helping coordinate the effort is Rebecca Lindsey, the site’s former managing editor, who was fired in February along with hundreds of others at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.”We all began to just brainstorm about how we could keep and protect climate.gov,” she told AFP. The team’s new website, climate.us, went online a few days ago, promising — according to its landing page — to “build an enduring, independent, and scientifically rigorous platform that the world can rely on.”The core group includes a handful of people from the former climate.gov team — which once included science writers, scientists, and data visualizers — plus “half a dozen” other volunteers supporting the effort under cover of anonymity for fear of retaliation. They have two goals.First: to republish the taxpayer-funded trove of material that was taken down — including the legally mandated National Climate Assessments, bedrock scientific studies produced every four years, but paused under Trump’s second term.The second, more ambitious goal — which hinges on securing enough funding — is to rebuild the resources and technical tools that made climate.gov, first launched in 2012 under former president Barack Obama, so indispensable, according to users.These ranged from interactive dashboards tracking sea-level rise, Arctic ice loss and global temperatures, to plain-language explainers on phenomena like the polar vortex, to a blog dedicated to the El Nino Southern Oscillation, the planet’s most influential natural climate driver. In 2024 alone, climate.gov drew some 15 million page views.”We’ve been having meetings through the summer that culminated in us writing a prospectus we hope to shop to major philanthropies and funders,” Lindsey said. A crowdfunding campaign has also begun to drum up support.As of Thursday, their donorbox.org page showed $50,000 raised toward a $500,000 goal. But for Lindsey, what matters more than the sum is the show of interest.If all goes well, she said, the project could become “an anchor for lots of groups at other federal science agencies where they have content or data that have gone silent or been taken down. We definitely hope we could be a lifeboat for them as well.”The team has already been buoyed by an outpouring of goodwill, from scientists to schoolteachers offering their time.”This is a problem we can try to solve,” Lindsey said. “Even if it’s a small thing in the big picture, just knowing that someone is doing something is encouraging to people.”

European leaders on Thursday spoke to US President Donald Trump after holding a summit with President Volodymyr Zelensky on security guarantees for Kyiv in the event of a peace accord to end Russia’s three-and-a-half war against Ukraine.The guarantees by the so-called coalition of the willing, which remain under wraps but are expected to include ramped-up training for the Ukrainian army and deployment of troops by some European states, have angered Russia.They form part of a push led by French President Emmanuel Macron to show that Europe can act independently of Washington after Trump upended US foreign policy and launched direct talks with Russian leader Vladimir Putin after returning to the White House.The summit, co-chaired by Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, aimed to firm up plans on security guarantees for Ukraine if or when there is a ceasefire, and get a clearer picture of US involvement. The United States was represented at the talks by Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, who also met with Zelensky separately.Some of the leaders, such as Zelensky, attended in person while others, including Starmer, remotely. The call with Trump took place by videoconference.During the summit Starmer said it was necessary “to go even further to apply pressure on Putin to secure a cessation of hostilities”, a Downing Street spokeswoman said.”The prime minister said Putin could not be trusted as he continued to delay peace talks and simultaneously carry out egregious attacks on Ukraine,” she added.Russia has heaped scorn on European security guarantee plans, with Putin saying Moscow is willing to “resolve all our tasks militarily” in the absence of a peace deal acceptable to the Kremlin. He has indicated he does not want to see European troops in post-war Ukraine.The coalition of the willing includes around 30 nations backing Ukraine, mainly European but also Canada, Australia and Japan.- ‘Not up to them’ – “Europe is ready, for the first time with this level of commitment and intensity,” Macron said Wednesday as he welcomed Zelensky, adding that preparatory work on the guarantees was complete.But there appears to be no agreement on a course of action, with the nature of the guarantees sketchy and some countries reluctant to commit to sending troops.German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has said it is premature to discuss the possible deployment of German peacekeeping troops to Ukraine, while not entirely ruling out the prospect.Germany wants to help strengthen Ukraine’s air defences, offer other weaponry and military training, a government source told AFP.Frustration has been building in the West over what leaders say is Putin’s unwillingness to strike a deal to end the conflict.Zelensky says he has not seen “any signs from Russia that they want to end the war”. Before the Paris talks, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Moscow would not consider the deployment of foreign troops in Ukraine “in any format”.”It’s not for them to decide,” NATO chief Mark Rutte shot back Thursday.”I think we really have to stop making Putin too powerful.”- ‘War criminal’ – The gathering took place after Putin’s high-profile trips to China and the United States.Speaking Wednesday in Beijing, where he attended a massive military parade alongside Chinese President Xi Jinping, Putin hailed his forces’ progress in Ukraine, adding that Russian troops were advancing on “all fronts”.In unprecedented scenes, Putin was pictured shaking hands and chatting with Xi and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as they walked down a red carpet by Tiananmen Square.Last month Trump rolled out a red carpet for Putin in Alaska but those talks yielded no breakthrough.Trump has indicated the United States could back up any European peacekeeping plan, but would not deploy US soldiers to Ukraine. European leaders have been growing exasperated with Putin, sharpening their criticism and warning that the Ukraine war could last for many more months. “Putin is a war criminal,” Merz said on X on Tuesday. “He is perhaps the most severe war criminal of our time that we see on a large scale.”Macron last month called Putin “an ogre at our gates”, while his Defence Minister Sebastien Lecornu said Russia might continue to wage its war against Ukraine “for as long as it can”.