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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday agreed to provide $571.3 million in defense support for Taiwan, the White House said, while the State Department approved the potential sale to the island of $265 million worth of military equipment. The United States is bound by law to provide Chinese-claimed Taiwan with the means to defend itself despite the lack of formal diplomatic ties between Washington and Taipei, to the constant anger of Beijing. … Read more…

KYIV (Reuters) – Ukraine’s air defences downed 52 of the 103 Russian drones launched overnight, the Ukrainian military said on Sunday. The military said on Telegram that it had lost track of 44 drones, and another had left the territory of Ukraine to Belarus. The military gave no information on the fate of the remaining drones. However, they said that in Kherson, Mykolaiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Zhytomyr and Kyiv regions, private businesses and apartment buildings have … Read more…

By Sheila Dang and Krystal Hu (Reuters) – U.S. billionaire businessman Frank McCourt is crafting a fundamental overhaul of TikTok’s business model as part of a plan to bid for the Chinese-owned short-form video app, he told Reuters. McCourt, who formerly owned the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, said he has received verbal funding commitments totaling $20 billion from a consortium of investors to rescue the app from legal purgatory as it awaits a Supreme … Read more…

By David Shepardson WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Commerce Department said on Friday it was finalizing an award of up to $4.745 billion to South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and up to $1.61 billion for Texas Instruments to expand chips production. The Samsung award is about $1.7 billion smaller than the preliminary award announced in April of up to $6.4 billion and reflects its revised smaller investment plans, the department said. A Commerce spokesperson said the department … Read more…

(Reuters) – Credit ratings agency Fitch on Friday upgraded Sri Lanka’s long-term foreign-currency default rating to ‘CCC+’ from ‘restricted default’ (RD) following approval by creditors of the country’s $12.55 billion debt overhaul earlier this week. The island nation’s bondholders overwhelmingly signed off on the government’s proposal to restructure international bonds, a much-needed step in its path to steadily recover from its worst financial crisis in decades. “Sri Lanka has normalised relations with a majority of … Read more…