European Union and Chinese officials will meet in Brussels next week looking to smooth trade tensions, notably China's expansion of controls on rare earth exports that threaten to damage important EU manufacturing sectors such as the automotive industry. European Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic and Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao agreed in a two-hour video call on Tuesday that Brussels will host Chinese officials for talks. Learn More

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's new hardline coalition partner unshackles her security ambitions and gives U.S. President Donald Trump room to press for military spending, but her fragile government may put a brake on what she can do. An admirer of conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Takaichi was sworn in on Tuesday as head of a government that is two votes shy of a majority in the decision-making 465-seat lower house. Learn More

Defense startup Castelion said on Friday it has won contracts to integrate its Blackbeard hypersonic strike weapon with current U.S. Army systems, the first step toward allowing the military to place the powerful and nearly unstoppable weapons around the world. The U.S. and China are engaged in an arms race to develop the most lethal hypersonic weapons, which travel in the upper atmosphere at more than five times the speed of sound and are designed to evade traditional defe