The headline news that was jointly reported by global financial media last night and this morning mainly included:

According to reports, Trump plans to continue providing military assistance to Ukraine.

The team of elected president Trump in the USA expressed to European officials that Trump will push NATO member countries to increase their defense spending from the current 2% of gross domestic product (GDP) to 5%, but plans to continue providing military aid to Ukraine.

A source familiar with the discussions told the newspaper that Trump would be satisfied with countries spending 3.5%.

Currently, only 23 of the 32 NATO member countries meet the 2% military spending benchmark. By 2024, defense spending in the USA is expected to be about 3.1% of GDP, down from 3.4% in the last year of Trump's first presidential term.

Volkswagen reached an agreement with the union to reduce production capacity while maintaining operations at its German plants.

Volkswagen reached an agreement with labor leaders to cut production capacity of the namesake brand while avoiding plant closures. This concluded three months of intense negotiations and prevented further union strikes.

The union stated on Friday that Volkswagen agreed to maintain operations at 10 plants in Germany until 2030 and to restore job security agreements. In return, workers agreed to forgo part of their bonuses, reduce the number of trainees eligible for formal employment, and cut production capacity by hundreds of thousands at five plants.

These measures, concluded after five rounds of negotiations, are far from the significant cost-saving proposals initially put forth by Volkswagen. Union leaders strongly opposed plans to lay off thousands, cut monthly salaries, and close three German plants to enhance the competitiveness of the Volkswagen brand.

OpenAI released the next generation of simulation reasoning models, o3 and o3-mini.

On Friday, on the 12th day of the "OpenAI 12-day event," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced its latest AI "reasoning" models o3 and o3-mini, which are developed based on the o1 model released earlier this year. The company has not publicly released these models yet but will make them available for public safety testing and research today.

These models use what OpenAI calls a "private thought chain," where the model pauses to check its internal dialogue and plans ahead before responding, which can be called "simulated reasoning" (SR), a form of AI that goes beyond basic large language models (LLMs).

To avoid potential trademark conflicts with the telecommunication operator in the United Kingdom, O2, the company named itself "O3" instead of "O2."

Italy imposed a fine of 15 million euros on OpenAI for violating privacy regulations.

Italy's privacy regulator Garante announced on Friday that it has decided to impose a fine of 15 million euros (15.58 million dollars) on OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, after concluding its investigation into the use of personal data.

Garante is one of the most active regulators in the EU regarding the assessment of whether AI platforms comply with EU data privacy regulations.

Garante stated that it found OpenAI's processing of users' personal data "was aimed at training ChatGPT without adequate legal basis, violating transparency principles and obligations to inform users."

Party City will scale back operations and close all stores.

Party City is a popular party and balloon supply store with hundreds of locations across the USA, including more than 20 stores in the Chicago area. The store will "immediately" close all its locations and gradually shut down its Business.

The closure marks the end of nearly 40 years of operation for this retailer.

Party City CEO Barry Litwin told company employees during a meeting on Friday that the company is "gradually shutting down" the Business, adding that their last working day will be December 20.

The only Federal Reserve official to vote against emphasized inflation concerns and stated that monetary policy is not far from neutral.

Beth Hammack, President of the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank, explained why she cast a dissenting vote at this week's interest rate meeting, stating that interest rates should be kept stable until more progress is made in reducing inflation.

Hammack stated that she believes interest rates are close to a neutral level that neither hinders nor stimulates the economy, and suggested that rates should remain elevated enough to moderately limit economic activity for "a period of time."

In a statement released on Friday, Hammack wrote, "Based on my assessment, monetary policy is not far from a neutral stance, and I prefer to keep policy unchanged until we see further evidence that the inflation rate is once again falling back to our 2% target."