President Donald Trump claims America is profiting from trade with China despite tensions over rare earth minerals, tariffs and emerging technologies like AI.

Trump departs Tuesday for a summit in Beijing with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. It will aim to keep the economic relationship stable, with only modest policy announcements expected. The trade truce reached last October will likely be extended, and China may announce plans to buy American soybeans, beef and Boeing airplanes. The U.S. also wants a new Board of Trade to guide trade with China. Despite Trump’s claims about making money, China bought nearly $50 billion less in American products last year than in 2022.

Asia braces for a second wave of energy shocks

Asia’s initial buffers against the Iran war’s energy shock are fraying as a second wave of impacts hits.

Governments that had hoped the war would end soon leaned on stopgap fixes, like burning through their energy reserves, bidding on the spot market for oil and gas and ordering policies to save power. But as ceasefire talks remain stalled, those short-term solutions are fast eroding. What began as a fuel crisis is now spreading across economies — driving up fertilizer costs, shipping rates and risking national growth. Millions of lower -income people are being squeezed ever harder by rising costs and shrinking profit margins.

Businesses facing rising costs during the war

Costs are piling up for businesses during the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran — and many economists see a bleak outlook, with some bracing for a downturn in hiring and investment in the coming months.

Nearly half of business economists who responded to a survey by the National Association for Business Economics say that the conflict has negatively impacted their operations, according to a report released Monday, and most (54%) say they’ve been affected by rising energy prices. More than two-thirds reported steeper material expenses over the last three months. The war, which began Feb. 28, has plunged the world into an energy and supply chain crisis.

US home sales flat in April in lackluster spring

Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes were essentially flat in April, another lackluster showing for the housing market during what’s traditionally its busiest time of the year.

The National Association of Realtors said Monday that existing home sales edged up 0.2% last month from March to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.02 million units. Sales were unchanged compared to April last year. The latest sales figure fell short of the roughly 4.12 million pace economists were expecting, according to FactSet. The national median sales price increased 0.9% in April from a year earlier to $417,700.

Startup captures workers’ techniques for AI brains

Workers at a five-star hotel fold napkins and wipe silverware with body cameras recording their every move. Their motions are then fed into a database that will one day teach a robot to do the same.

Just as chatbots trained on vast troves of internet text, AI robots require extensive data on human movement to handle advanced physical tasks. A South Korean artificial-intelligence company is working to build an extensive library of human expertise to develop AI brains for robots possibly coming to industrial sites and homes. While it is unclear whether these machines will fully meet expectations, they are central to South Korea’s ambitions to leverage its semiconductor and manufacturing strengths to become an AI powerhouse.