As tensions rise at sea over Venezuelan oil, what's at stake for China?
It's World Business Express from the BBC World Service.
I'm Leanna Byrne.
Warner Brothers Discovery bats off Paramount's offer again and we get a look at a quantum computer at the centre of a battle between the world's biggest tech companies.
Four days since Venezuela's president, Nicolas Maduro, was seized and there's another potential crisis brewing.
The United States says it has seized two tankers, accusing them of violating sanctions against Venezuela.
Then China again criticised the use of force to remove Venezuela's president over the weekend.
US President Donald Trump says the interim authorities in Venezuela will be turning over up to 50 million barrels of what he calls sanctioned oil.
Joe Leahy is the Beijing Bureau Chief for the Financial Times.
President Trump's sort of seizure of Venezuela's oil industry for China is more of a geopolitical blow than an economic one, because Venezuelan oil exports to China are actually only about 4 of China's total oil imports.
But the principle of the US taking control and intervening in a market like this is bad for China.
And the sort of big thing that's on the horizon is is really whether the US would intervene in other markets that are selling sanctioned oil.
So, for instance, Iran is a much bigger exporter of oil to China and a lot of that oil is also sanctioned.
So if Trump then followed through and intervened in that market as well, then that starts to become a big problem for China's oil sector.
China.
It's a huge partner with Latin American countries and it's lent Venezuela more than 100 billion over the years, much of it repaid in oil.
So if a pro-US government takes over, how realistic that Beijing ever sees the rest of that money again.
That's one of the big questions coming out of this.
No one really knows how much Venezuela still owes China, but estimates are about $10 to $12 billion.
And this is all, as you mentioned, loans for oil.
This is all covered by those schemes.
So Venezuela needs to pay China back with oil.
But if the US is controlling that, we really don't know how that's going to work out.
Now, there are some sort of gaps or flexibility in the statements coming out of the US.
It's not clear that Trump won't allow Venezuela to sell any oil to China.
So we really need to see how this plays out.
But this development today, where Trump is essentially taking 50 million barrels away from Venezuela immediately to sell in the US, is probably not a good sign for China in terms of seeing these loans getting paid back in the near future.
Joe Leahy there, Beijing Bureau Chief for the FT.
Meanwhile, the US Department of Health has frozen childcare and family assistance in five Democrat-governed states alleging, without providing evidence, concerns over fraud and misuse of public bonds in state-run programmes.
The BBC's Yusuf Taha has more details.
The states affected are California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York.
The total value of the program cuts is just over $10.6 billion.
The Deputy Health Secretary, Jim O'Neill, said his department was committed to the integrity of assistance programs, as well as fiscal responsibility and complying with federal requirements.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul said that the cuts were an attack on children and vowed to fight them head-on.
A spokesperson for the Colorado governor's office said that, if true, it would be awful to see the federal government targeting the most needy families and children this way.
That was Yusuf Taha reporting.
Back over this side of the Atlantic.
Flights across parts of northwestern Europe are continuing to face major disruptions due to wintry conditions.
One of the worst affected airports is Schiphol in the Netherlands, a major hub for travellers and for shipping cargo.
More than 700 of its flights have been cancelled as it enters its sixth day of its battle with snow.
Itterker de Jong is an aviation reporter for De Telegraaf newspaper.
Today, 90% of the flights is cancelled.
The last five days there have been hundreds of thousands of people stranded here in the Netherlands.
And there's also a problem with de-icing.
After five days, they ran out of the liquid that is used.
So yesterday night, they drove to Germany to get the stuff.
They should be back today.
That was Ittiker de Jong from the Telegraph newspaper.
Now Warner Brothers Discovery, as expected, has batted off Paramount Skydance's latest takeover bid.
Ross Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, is with me now.
Ross, what were some of the issues with this bid?
Hello, Leanna.
The main one is financing.
Warner Brothers Discovery continue to suggest that there will be too much debt in the newly merged company, even allowing for the increased backing from Larry Ellison and Oracle, the dad of David Ellison, who's running Paramount Scallions.
That's the big one, that there is a strategic, because Paramount wants to keep the cable business, which they think will be too complicated and that will also make the regulatory clearance more difficult to achieve.
They didn't pull any punches.
They were especially over the debt, as you mentioned, involved in the offer.
They were pretty sharp in its criticism.
They were.
I mean debt is still fairly cheap, but it's still.
The interest payments mean it's more difficult to invest in your business if you're paying all that interest.
I can understand that concern.
One more for you.
Businesses and the Trump administration.
They're bracing for a Supreme Court ruling on tariffs, expected on Friday.
Ross, are financial markets taking bets on this one?
They're not really.
They've been fairly calm about tariffs.
They think that the president may lose and the Supreme Court may rule against the tariffs imposed under the 1977 Act.
But they also think the president will find ways around that.
He'll either appeal or use new laws or simply just go and do it anyway.
And even if the president loses again, they're not sure that there'll be a way of reimbursing the tariffs, mainly stopping new payments.
Like you always tell us, Ross.
I think it's just priced in.
Ross Mould, Investment Director at AJ Bell.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Now it's been described as one of the world's most advanced computers.
Google's Willow, a quantum computer which is at the centre of a battle between the world's biggest tech companies.
The technology is so advanced it's creating a race for economic supremacy between the US and China.
Our economics editor Faisal Islam went to Santa Barbara in California for an exclusive look.
We've just arrived in Santa Barbara, a couple of hours away from Los Angeles, and we're about to visit one of the most important technological developments in the world right now, which is the quantum lab of Google.
So we're going to go in and actually have a look at one of the world's first functioning, most advanced quantum computers.
Hello.
I'm Hartmut.
I'm the founder and leader of the Quantum AI Lab.
I'm Julian Kelly, Senior Director of Hardware.
Thanks for showing us around this facility.
I assume it's restricted.
Thanks for letting us in, actually.
Please come in.
Okay, so we're coming into a restricted area now and we're starting to see the real deal the actual conversion of this high theoretical physics into an actual computer.
Let's take a look at our latest chip called Willow.
The exponential power of quantum is what you're trying to harness with this chip we're holding here.
Yes, for certain computations the power of these chips is rather mind-boggling.
So in December we actually ran a benchmark computation on this chip, which took just a few minutes here on the Willow chip, but it would have taken 10 septillion years.
This is a one with 25 zeros on today's top supercomputer. take us 20 years into the future.
What are we doing with quantum computers in 2045?
So I think we will use it to help with many problems that humankind has.
It will enable us to discover drugs more efficiently.
It will help us make food production more efficient.
It will help us with the energy economy, like to produce energy, to transport energy, to store energy all of these things.
Climate change, maybe?
Yes, absolutely.
I think, just by virtue of being able to model nature at its finest level, essentially speak the language of nature.
This allows us to understand nature much better and then unlock its secret to build technologies that make life more pleasant for all of us.
That report was by Faisal Islam.
And that's it from World Business Express.
Please subscribe to get the latest for us from us.
Just search for World Business Express wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Leanna Byrne.
Thanks for listening.
