New Zealand pushes aside Five Eyes to focus on China
South Pacific nation puts itself at odds with UK and others in intelligence-sharing network by pursuing closer ties to the Communist state
Nanaia Mahuta, New Zealand’s foreign minister, left, with Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister
New Zealand has broken with its “Five Eyes” intelligence partners, including the UK, as it pursues a closer alliance with China, its largest trading partner.
New Zealand’s foreign minister said she would not allow the intelligence alliance to dictate the country’s dealings with China, putting it at odds with the other members of the ‘Five Eyes’ alliance: the UK, US, Canada and Australia.
First published on Thu 8 Apr 2021 10.06 EDT
Britain’s construction sector has had its sharpest pick-up in activity since 2014 amid signs that the domestic economy is recovering more quickly than Brexit- and pandemic-affected trade flows, new figures have shown.
The latest snapshot of the construction sector, which accounts for around 6% of total UK output, pointed to an across-the-board increase in March, with house-building, commercial projects and infrastructure work all displaying strong growth.
Despite the Covid-19 lockdown the IHS Markit/CCips construction activity index registered 61.7 in March, up from 53.3 in February and well above the 50 level that marks whether the sector is expanding or contracting. The latest reading signalled the strongest rate of output growth since September 2014.
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LONDON (Reuters) - There aren’t many years you can effectively write off economic growth forecasts for a quarter and leave markets unperturbed - but welcome to 2021.
FILE PHOTO: Containers are seen on a shipping dock in the Port of Los Angeles, California, U.S., April 16, 2020. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson/File Photo
Investors are once again training their sights beyond second and third waves of the pandemic even as they busily mark down first-quarter growth and earnings assumptions and cross their collective fingers and toes that often extremely hesitant vaccine rollouts do eventually work by midyear.
“It’s darkest before dawn” is the mantra from many economists and politicians but there’s more than a few nerves about just how dark and whether the light will be quite as bright as first thought.