Britain boosts its defense spending
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LHH, a beautiful working world. Learn more at LHH.com slash beautiful. Britain is boosting its defense spending. Hello, this is the Marketplace Morning Report and we're live from the BBC World Service. I'm Leanna Byrne. Good morning.

So the UK government is preparing to ramp up its military spending, upping it to 2.5% of its economic output by 2027. It means billions more is going to be spent on nuclear weapons and 12 new attacks on marines will be built. But despite the increase, President Trump and NATO leaders would like to see more. The BBC's Jonathan Beale met NATO troops in Estonia. The war in Ukraine has shaken Europe from a peacetime slumber.

Nowhere more than in Estonia, close to the Russian border. Here, battle-hardened Ukrainians are helping train NATO forces in the skills of drone warfare. Estonian troops eager to learn, worried they could be next.

Lieutenant Colonel Madis Lus of Estonia's army. We need to fight today, tomorrow. So things that work currently in Ukraine, we need to know how to exploit all this. The UK government's defence review aims to meet the rising threats.

British troops here in Estonia are also learning the lessons from Ukraine in a command post testing new technologies to find targets faster. The head of the British army says these British troops must be ready to fight a war within two years. Do you think you'd be ready? Or do you think you're ready now?

I think we're on the right pathway to be ready. But you're not ready yet? That's a no comment from me. I would say, of course, continuous investment in defence will really help. You get enough at the moment, do you think? Does anybody really ever get enough? Regardless of how much we get, we always ask for more. We fly by German army helicopter to Lithuania, another country that shares a border with Russia.

Lithuania itself will soon be spending more than 5% of its GDP on defence. Russia's one reason, but so is Donald Trump. The UK's response so far is to increase military spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027. Lithuania's defence minister, Davila Shakaljana, tells me that simply isn't enough. 2.5%. I think that's yesterday's news.

I think that the formula proposed by Secretary General

To have 3.5% directly for defence and 1.5% for defence-related expenses is the bare minimum that we need to have. That report was by Jonathan Beale. Now, remember that deal that lowered tariffs between the US and China? Well, it's looking uncertain. Today, Beijing has hit back at Washington's claims it broke its trade agreement. The BBC's Laura Bicker has the details.

Washington and Beijing agree to temporarily lower tit-for-tat tariffs after talks in Geneva. But Mr Trump said last week that Beijing had totally violated the deal and announced plans to revoke the visas of Chinese students and restrict the sale of chip design software to China.

In a statement, the Commerce Ministry in Beijing said today that these actions seriously undermine the consensus reached in Geneva and if the US insists on its own way, China will take forceful measures to safeguard its interests, it added. That was Laura Bickert reporting in Beijing. Now let's do the numbers.

Markets slid today after Donald Trump reignited those trade tensions and announced higher steel and aluminium tariffs from Wednesday. China's mainland CSI 300 index closed down four-tenths of a percent and Europe's region-wide SOX 600 is trading down three percent.

Now, this might sound strange, but a Peruvian farmer is celebrating losing a court case. He'd sued a giant German energy firm over climate change. But even though the case was thrown out, his supporters say it sets an important precedent. Let's ask the BBC's Paul Moss to explain. Hi, Paul. Hello, Leanna. So, Paul, it's unusual to see someone celebrating a court defeat. So what is the background to this case?

If you'll excuse the cliche, Liana, this is really a David and Goliath contest. Saúl Luciano Yiuya is a farmer. He lives high up in the mountains of central Peru. Now, the mountains of Peru have had a lot of melting recently. Glaciers have been melting because of climate change and people have been warned they may need to build very robust flood defences. Now,

What Mr Yuyar argued was he thought, well, hold on a moment. Climate change was not caused by farmers like me growing wheat. It was mainly caused by industry from industrialized countries, and they should be the ones paying for our flood defenses. He sued the German energy giant RWE. Why them? Well, RWE, believe it or not, was founded back in 1898. It opened its first power station in 1900.

And experts have calculated that of all the CO2 ever emitted by industry, 0.4% of it came from this one company. So what Mr UR said was that, OK, if they produce 0.4% of the CO2, they should pay for 0.4% of our flood defences. And so it all went to court and has taken all this time to sort out. But what exactly did the court rule? Because even though he lost, the judge seemed to go out of his way to praise the...

the case, didn't he? He did, didn't he? I mean, what happened was they threw out the case for one simple reason, that they assessed his house in particular actually wasn't at particularly serious risk of flooding and therefore he didn't have a case. However, the judge praised the cogency with which the case had been argued and crucially, he

he accepted the principle that if a company has caused CO2 emissions and those CO2 emissions cause problems, well, that company should be there to defend whoever's suffering from the consequences like building flood defences. And that is why environmentalists are very happy. Indeed, they say that establishing this principle is

opens the way to all sorts of cases they could launch in the future. The BBC's Paul Moss, thank you so much for joining us on Marketplace. Thank you, Leanna. And you can read more on that story on the BBC News website. And that's it from the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service. Craig Henderson is my producer today, Naomi Redding is the editor, and I'm Leanna Byrne. Have a great day. Thanks for listening.

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