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Good morning. Donald Trump cruised to victory in nearly all of the states holding Republican primaries on Super Tuesday, on a night that took him to the brink of securing his party’s presidential nomination to face Joe Biden in November.
By 11.30pm Eastern time, Trump had won 12 of the 15 states voting on Super Tuesday, a pivotal date on the primary calendar. The former president’s dominance — which included wins in California and Texas, the biggest prizes of the night — will heap more pressure on his main rival, Nikki Haley, to abandon her bid.
Trump is expected to approach the 1,215 delegates to the Republican National Convention that he needs to seal the party’s nomination in July — but not cross that threshold until later this month.
Meanwhile, Biden has been dominating the Democratic primary contests across all states that have held votes so far, overcoming challenges from Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson. Read our Super Tuesday coverage.
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Instant Insight: If there’s anything we’ve learned about US politics in the age of Trump it is that pollsters almost always get it wrong, writes Peter Spiegel. This time was no different.
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Live results: Follow our state-by-state guide to the primaries.
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Swing states: The November election is almost certain to be a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump and will probably be decided in just six key states.
In a landmark year for democracy, join Financial Times Washington reporter Steff Chávez for your essential guide to the twists and turns of the most significant election in decades. Sign up for the US Election Countdown newsletter here.
And here’s what else I’m keeping tabs on today:
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EU: The European People’s party, the centre-right grouping ahead in polls for June’s EU elections, begins its congress in Bucharest, with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen due to be named as its candidate.
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Economic data: S&P Global releases its UK construction purchasing managers’ index for February, and Germany has January trade balance data. The Bank of Canada announces its interest rate decision.
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Results: AIB Group, Breedon, Capita, CLS Holdings, ConvaTec, Ibstock, Legal & General, Nichols, Quilter, Rathbones, Spirent Communications and Tullow Oil report full-year results. Galliford Try and Ricardo present half-year earnings, and DS Smith issues a trading update.
Five more top stories
1. UK chancellor Jeremy Hunt will on Wednesday put a £10bn personal tax cut at the heart of his Budget, which will also see him scrap the colonial-era “non-dom” regime and provide a tax boost to investors in UK companies. Conservative MPs are looking to Hunt to convince voters that he has a plan to drag Britain out of recession, raise growth rates and cut taxes ahead of an election expected later this year.
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Higher earners: The top third of households are on track for a drop of more than 6 per cent in disposable incomes in the current parliament, according to a think-tank.
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Business obstacles: Directors of smaller companies have expressed concern over rising interest rates, a labour shortage and difficulty accessing tax breaks.
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Budget Q&A: Consumer editor Claer Barrett, economics commentator Chris Giles and Nimesh Shah of Blick Rothenberg answer your queries live.
2. Russia has aggressively relaunched its spy war with the west, with Moscow’s publication of a phone call in which senior German air force officers discussed sending cruise missiles to Ukraine being only the latest chilling example. Almost every week, it seems, another covert operation comes to light, showing how far Russia’s intelligence agencies have penetrated Europe.
3. Exclusive: EG Group is in talks to offload some UK assets to billionaire co-founder Zuber Issa, in what the company told investors was an attempt to reduce the debt pile of its petrol-station empire. The group — co-owned by brothers Mohsin and Zuber Issa and private equity firm TDR Capital — told investors that it “continued to have active discussions” with Zuber about divesting some assets in the UK and Ireland, with plans to strike a deal “in the near term”.
4. Exclusive: PwC stripped three senior partners of their management roles and disqualified one of them from the race to run its US business after finding they breached leadership election rules. The Big Four firm found that Neil Dhar, who was a frontrunner, and his allies had committed “significant violations” of electioneering rules and firm policies, according to people familiar with the matter.
5. China has revealed little about how much the country will really be spending on the People’s Liberation Army. While its official budget will increase by 7.2 per cent this year, experts believe that the figure masks a much bigger boost for military capabilities, as leader Xi Jinping seeks to transform the PLA into a more potent force while lowering the cost of weapons acquisition.
News in-depth
PDD, the Chinese owner of ecommerce site Temu, wants nothing less than to change the way the world shops: a faster, leaner and cheaper version of Amazon that has spread from China to 49 countries in less than two years. But why do US investors have so much confidence in an opaque operation whose financial statements seem to lack much pattern or explanation, and whose operations, management, auditors and regulators sit in a distant, untouchable jurisdiction?
We’re also reading and listening to . . .
Chart of the day
Despite bitcoin’s latest surge, liquidity is yet to return for the crypto industry’s most well-known token. According to numbers shared by data provider CCData, liquidity on the top 21 centralised exchanges still lags well behind levels registered this time last year.
Take a break from the news
Refik Anadol watched Ridley Scott’s 1982 neo-noir classic Blade Runner at a tender age. A key scene between the film’s android leads imprinted what would become the Turkish artist’s life’s work: exploring the apparently infinite terrain of what a machine imbued with “deep learning” can do with the artefacts of both personal and collective memory.
Additional contributions from Benjamin Wilhelm and Gordon Smith
Read the full article here