A court in the Russian city of St. Petersburg has ordered the seizing of assets of Germany's Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank in the country, the Russia state news agency Tass says. The order is in response to a lawsuit over the planned construction of a liquefied natural gas terminal in the Baltic Sea.

The banks were among the guarantors in the contract for building a gas processing plant by a multinational construction firm, Renaissance Heavy Industries, and German company Linde. But the project was cancelled after Western sanctions, with the banks withdrawing their guarantees.

China's Ministry of Commerce announced sanctions against Boeing and two other defense companies Monday for arms sales to Taiwan, on the day of Taiwan's presidential inauguration.

The move is the latest in a series of sanctions Beijing has announced in recent years against defense companies for weapons sales to Taiwan, a self-ruled island that China considers as part of its own territory.

It was a time of fear and chaos four years ago.

The death count was mounting as COVID-19 spread. Financial markets were panicked. Oil prices briefly went negative. The Federal Reserve slashed its benchmark interest rates to combat the sudden recession. And the U.S. government went on a historic borrowing spree — adding trillions to the national debt — to keep families and businesses afloat.

China announced a slate of fresh measures Friday to reinvigorate its ailing property industry after the latest data showed housing prices have slumped nearly 10% since the start of the year.

Among other things, the central bank said it would reduce the minimum down payment for mortgages and remove the floor on interest rates for first and second homes.

Whether it's tapioca balls or computer chips, Taiwan is stretching toward the United States and away from China — the world's No. 2 economy that threatens to take the democratically ruled island by force if necessary.

That has translated to the world's biggest maker of computer chips — which power everything from medical equipment to cellphones — announcing bigger investments in the U.S. last month after a boost from the Biden administration. Soon afterward, a Taiwanese semiconductor company said it was ending its two-decade-long run in mainland China amid a global race to gain the edge in the high-tech industry.

Russian President Vladimir Putin focused on trade and cultural exchanges Friday during his state visit to China that started with bonhomie in Beijing and a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping that deepened their " no limits " partnership as both countries face rising tensions with the West.

Putin praised China at a China-Russia Expo in the northeastern city of Harbin, hailing the growth in bilateral trade. He will also meet with students at Harbin Institute of Technology later Friday. Harbin, capital of China's Heilongjiang province, was once home to many Russian expatriates and retains some of those historical ties in its architecture, such as the central Saint Sophia Cathedral, a former Russian Orthodox church.

The Japanese economy shrank at an annual rate of 2% in the first quarter of this year, as consumption and exports declined, the government said Thursday.

Although unemployment has stayed relatively low in the world's fourth largest economy at about 2.6%, wage growth has been slow and prices have risen partly due to weakness of the yen against the U.S. dollar.

Fewer Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week as layoffs remain at historically low levels even as other signs that the labor market is cooling have surfaced.

Jobless claims for the week ending May 11 fell by 10,000 to 222,000, down from 232,000 the week before, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Last week's applications were the most since the final week of August 2023, though it's still a relatively low number of layoffs.

Profit at Sony surged 34% in the last quarter on strong sales of its video games, music and movies, the Japanese electronics and entertainment company said Tuesday.

Tokyo-based Sony Corp.'s quarterly profit totaled 189 billion yen ($1.2 billion), up from 141 billion yen the year before. Quarterly sales for the maker of the PlayStation game machines rose 14% to 3.48 trillion yen ($22 billion).

Protesters in the Pakistan-held part of Kashmir called off rallies over price hikes that have left four people dead after authorities agreed to lower prices of electricity and wheat.

The local civil rights alliance, the Awami Action Committee, said it had called off a planned march in the city of Muzaffarabad, the capital of the Pakistan-held part of the disputed Himalayan region, after the government accepted all of its demands.