The US Trade Deficit Increases

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The US trade gap with the rest of the world jumped to a 10-year high of $621bn last year. Our regular economic commentator, Susan Schmidt, Head of US Equities at Aviva Investors, assesses how big a blow the widening trade gap is for President Trump. The extradition case of Meng Wanzhou - Chief Financial Officer of the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, and daughter of the company founder - continues to be a stop-start affair. We get the latest from North America Tech Reporter, Dave Lee and we cross to Singapore and the BBC's Karishma Vaswani because it's not just the Americans who have security anxieties about Huawei. Plus, Charles Scharf, CEO of the US financial giant BNY Mellon, has banned from June the kind of flexible arrangements that allow staff to work from home. That's prompted a landmark legal challenge from disgruntled employees. Lucy Tobin broke the story in the Evening Standard in London. Also in the programme, we have a report from New Zealand, asking what Brexit Britain can learn from the country's experience when the UK joined the forerunner to the European Union in the 1970s. The global car industry is facing a number of challenges but at an annual car show in Switzerland, carmakers are doing their best to drum up excitement around their latest models; we hear from the BBC's Theo Leggett. Plus, investment bank Goldman Sachs has said its staff can now dress casually if they want to. Texas etiquette expert Diane Gottsman gives us her reaction. (Picture: A Chinese container terminal. Picture credit: Reuters.)