Thailand is making a last-ditch effort to avert a punitive 36% export levy threatened by the Trump administration with offers of greater market access for US farm and industrial goods, along with increased purchases of energy and Boeing jets.

Bangkok’s latest proposal aims to boost bilateral trade volume and reduce Thailand’s $46 billion trade surplus with the US by 70% within five years, reaching balance in seven to eight years, Finance Minister Pichai Chunhavajira told Bloomberg News in an interview late Sunday. That’s quicker than the pledge to wipe the gap in a decade under an earlier proposal submitted by Thailand.

Pichai expects to submit the revised offers before July 9 — the end of the 90-day tariff pause announced by President Donald Trump. If accepted, Thailand can immediately waive import tariffs or non-tariff barriers for a majority of the products, while phasing out restrictions more gradually for a smaller set of goods, he said.

The revisions followed Pichai’s meeting Thursday with US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Deputy Secretary of Treasury Michael Faulkender in the first ministerial-level tariff talks. As many of the US products which will gain greater access into the Thai market are in short supply locally, they are unlikely to hurt local farmers or producers, Pichai said.

Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he is nominating a Maine litigator and a former clerk to a pair of conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices to serve as life-tenured judges on two federal appeals courts.

Trump in posts on his social media platform Truth Social said he is nominating Joshua Dunlap to join the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Eric Tung to serve on the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The two picks to serve as life-tenured judges brought to 14 the number of judicial nominees announced by Trump in his second term. Trump has now nominated four appeals court judges, as he looks to add to the 234 judicial appointments in his first term in office.

Dunlap, a Maine-based lawyer at the law firm Pierce Atwood, has been nominated to fill the lone vacancy on the Boston-based 1st Circuit, which currently is the only one of the 13 appeals courts with no active judges appointed by Republican presidents.

Former President Joe Biden had sought to fill the vacancy and solidify a six-judge court with only Democratic-appointed judges, but did not secure confirmation of his nominee, Julia Lipez, before he left office.

You may have noticed yesterday that there was a bunch of chatter prior to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest report that the number of new jobs created might be lower than the 110,000 consensus estimate. Analysts at Goldman Sachs, UBS, and Pantheon Macroeconomics all said they thought the number might be weaker than predicted. The ADP private payroll report, published before the official government number, showed a 33,000 decline in jobs.

In the event, the number of nonfarm payroll jobs increased by 147,000 in June, the bureau said—way above expectations.

So why did so many people get this wrong?

The fact that President Trump was tweeting angrily about U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell the night before distracted many, who read into those social media posts that perhaps he had seen a preview of the jobs report, didn’t like it, and was—as usual—trying to set up Powell as the fall guy.

That turned out to be a false signal.

Solar panels and wind turbines at the Huaneng Binzhou new energy power generation project in Binzhou, China, on June 11. (AFP/Getty Images)


Republicans in Congress produced a surprise winner this week when they axed hundreds of billions of dollars in federal clean-energy subsidies: China’s artificial intelligence industry.

China is pouring money into energy production to support its bid to dominate AI. America’s tech industry, meanwhile, has been scrounging for more energy to run power-hungry AI data centers and strongly urged Congress not to wipe out solar and wind tax credits.

Solar panels and windmills are the fastest-growing sources of power in the United States, accounting for 80 percent of new energy being added to the grid. Yet Republican lawmakers and Trump administration officials remain intent on stifling clean energy progress in America, calling it Biden-era folly.

Now the consequences of the massive cuts in the GOP tax and budget bill are coming into focus. Modeling of the package by energy economists shows they will substantially reduce the amount of electricity added to the U.S. power grid in the coming years, even as China races ahead.

Wind and solar power “is critical in the near term,” said Ben King, director of the U.S. energy program at the Rhodium Group, a research firm that has developed projections of the bill’s impact. “This creates a risk that energy projects just won’t get built. At the same time, China is adding staggering electricity capacity.”

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the European Union’s top diplomat that Beijing can’t accept Russia losing its war against Ukraine as this could allow the United States to turn its full attention to China, an official briefed on the talks said, contradicting Beijing’s public position of neutrality in the conflict.

The admission came during what the official said was a four-hour meeting with EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas on Wednesday in Brussels that “featured tough but respectful exchanges, covering a broad range of issues from cyber security, rare earths to trade imbalances, Taiwan and Middle East.”

The official said Wang’s private remarks suggested Beijing might prefer a protracted war in Ukraine that keeps the United States from focusing on its rivalry with China. They echo concerns of critics of China’s policy that Beijing has geopolitically much more at stake in the Ukrainian conflict than its admitted position of neutrality.

On Friday, at a regular Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs briefing, spokeswoman Mao Ning was asked about the exchange, which was first reported in the South China Morning Post, and re-affirmed Beijing’s long-standing position on the three-year war.

Shorter enrollment periods. More paperwork. Higher premiums. The sweeping tax and spending bill pushed by President Donald Trump includes provisions that would not only reshape people’s experience with the Affordable Care Act but, according to some policy analysts, also sharply undermine the gains in health insurance coverage associated with it.

The moves affect consumers and have particular resonance for the 19 states (plus Washington, D.C.) that run their own ACA exchanges.

Many of those states fear that the additional red tape — especially requirements that would end automatic reenrollment — would have an outsize impact on their policyholders. That’s because a greater percentage of people in those states use those rollovers versus shopping around each year, which is more commonly done by people in states that use the federal healthcare.gov marketplace.

“The federal marketplace always had a message of, ‘Come back in and shop,’ while the state-based markets, on average, have a message of, ‘Hey, here’s what you’re going to have next year, here’s what it will cost; if you like it, you don’t have to do anything,’” said Ellen Montz, who oversaw the federal ACA marketplace under the Biden administration as deputy administrator and director at the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. She is now a managing director with the Manatt Health consulting group.

Millions — perhaps up to half of enrollees in some states — may lose or drop coverage as a result of that and other changes in the legislation combined with a new rule from the Trump administration and the likely expiration at year’s end of enhanced premium subsidies put in place during the covid-19 pandemic. Without an extension of those subsidies, which have been an important driver of Obamacare enrollment in recent years, premiums are expected to rise 75% on average next year. That’s starting to happen already, based on some early state rate requests for next year, which are hitting double digits.

No other state is likely to have more residents' healthcare affected by the passage of the "One Big Beautiful Bill" on July 3 quite like Florida because of how the bill lets Affordable Care Act federal subsidies expire.

Florida has the highest proportion of residents enrolled in the government-sponsored healthcare initiative that was the signature effort of former President Barack Obama's administration. The healthcare law, also known as "Obamacare," was enhanced in former President Joe Biden's term with subsidies. Now, though, the first major legislation of President Donald Trump's term, a megabudget bill that advances a wide range of his policies, lets those subsidies expire at the end of the year.

Legislation could be introduced to save the subsidies, but that appears unlikely.

With the passage of the bill through Congress — and Trump's expected signature — the Congressional Budget Office expects that nearly 2 million Floridians will be without healthcare by 2034.

Some of them will lose it due to new Medicaid rules, but the vast majority of those unable to afford healthcare as a result of the bill is expected to be those receiving Obamacare subsidies. Those expected to find healthcare unaffordable because of the law's passage are mostly concentrated on households earning between 100% and 138% of the Federal Poverty Level. That's a yearly income between $32,150 and $44,367 for a family of four.