Free Republic

THE HAGUE -- The United Nations' top court on Wednesday ordered the United States to lift sanctions on "humanitarian" goods to Iran that President Donald Trump re-imposed after pulling out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) unanimously ruled that Washington "shall remove by means of its choosing any impediments arising from the measures announced on May 8 to the free exportation to Iran of medicines and medical devices, food and agricultural commodities" as well as airplane parts, said judge Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf. The court said sanctions on goods "required for humanitarian needs... may have...

Bloomberg link only.

Data center equipment run by Amazon Web Services and Apple may have been subject to surveillance from the Chinese government via a tiny microchip inserted during the equipment manufacturing process, according to a Bloomberg BusinessWeek report on Thursday. The claims in the report have been strongly disputed by the technology giants. -- Just noticed this, thought I would post this. Not yet clear, whether this report is accurate. I don't trust Bloomberg, but then again I greatly suspect China. So we will see.

Unlike sales taxes, American tariffs are not applied to a product’s retail price, nor are they applied to the wholesale price. In fact, they’re often not even levied on the entire import price. Instead, tariffs are levied on the first sale price—the price paid to foreign vendors by American companies or their middlemen. This method of calculation reduces the tax burden on American consumers, but preserves the tariff’s punitive effect on foreign producers. For example, suppose President Trump were to impose a 10 percent tariff on all Chinese toasters. Black & Decker makes toasters in China. These toasters sell for...

Iran's Regime Faces international pressure and Domestic tension. By: Hassan. Mahmoudi In The 73rd session of the UN General Assembly Trump, said the oil-related sanctions will be followed by other punitive measures to thwart what he characterized as a “corrupt dictatorship” that still harbors nuclear weapons ambitions and foments turmoil in the Middle East through its support of militant groups. “We ask all nations to isolate Iran’s regime as long as its aggression continues,” he said. he added, “we ask all nations to support Iran’s people as they struggle to reclaim their religious and righteous destiny.” Meanwhile, Iranian regime claim...

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said this week that the combination of low inflation and low unemployment shows that the U.S. economy is in "extraordinary times." “This historically rare pairing of steady, low inflation and very low unemployment is a testament to the fact we remain in extraordinary times,” Powell said in a speech Thursday. “I was asked at last week’s news conference whether these forecasts are too good to be true — a reasonable question.” "From the standpoint of our dual mandate, this is a remarkably positive outlook," Powell said. "Since 1950, the U.S. economy has experienced periods of...

President Trump’s first and most enduring promise has been kept, and the American worker can rejoice. A deal experts said was dead in the water materialized last weekend when Canada announced it had reached an agreement with the United States to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The deal came about as a frustrated Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a late night meeting with his cabinet. Indeed, the materialization of an agreement serving to improve America’s trade position in North America would not have occurred were it not for the negotiating prowess and vision of President Donald Trump....

I’m still going through the USMCA text (even speed reading, it will likely take a while); here’s the link to the AGREEMENT DETAILS. However, many people have asked about how the NAFTA loophole was being closed. Well, the answer is exactly what it had to be – there was really no option. The U.S. now has veto authority over any trade deal made by Canada and/or Mexico with third parties. This is what Ambassador Lighthizer described as the “Third pillar”. Last year, despite the inevitability of it, we didn’t think Canada and Mexico would agree to it. The NAFTA loophole...

MOUNT LAUREL, New Jersey–The Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), a leading Republican super PAC, continues to lead the charge to deploy the Republican grassroots to defy history and hold the House Republican majority, as seen by their efforts in New Jersey’s third congressional district and documented by Breitbart News. The Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC endorsed by the House Republican leadership, announced on Saturday that they held their fourth “Super Saturday” to reach a record number of Republican voters across the nation. CLF is using its 40 field offices to engage with over 500,000 targeted voters in key congressional districts...

Trump Rally tonight!!

It drives the media, Democrats and more than half of America mad, but President Trump's unorthodox, jam-your-opponent style can be effective. What he's done: He erased NAFTA, as a word, and replaced the trade pact with a different name (the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA) and better terms for America. Sure, he infuriated Canada and Justin Trudeau, but he delivered the goods. (And helped some farm-state candidates just before midterms.) Show less His tax cut, jammed through last year, continues to juice a red hot economy that has consumers confident, stocks soaring, joblessness sinking. His wild, improvisational press conferences and...

A senior software engineer at Google with responsibility for a key feature of Google’s search engine labeled Tennessee Senate candidate Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) a “violent thug” and a “terrorist,” who Google shouldn’t “negotiate” with, according to internal emails obtained by Breitbart News. The employee also defended the censorship of her campaign ads on social media. The comments took place in an internal email discussion that began on June 19 this year. The topic of discussion was Rep. Blackburn’s Fox News op-ed of the same month, which urged Silicon Valley companies to address bias against conservatives on their platforms. Blackburn,...

California has become the first state in the US to require publicly traded companies to include women on their board of directors. Governor Jerry Brown signed the new measure – which necessitates at least one female director on the board of each California-based public operation by the end of 2019 – into law on Sunday. Firms will need up to three female directors by the end of 2021, depending on the size of their boards. Hundreds of companies will be affected by the law and those who violate it can be fined $100,000 (£76,600) for a first violation and $300,000...

The NAFTA 2.0 agreement, or USMCA as Donald Trump wants to call it — and he would appear to have won the right to call it anything he wants — ought to be sending chills up the spines of diplomats and trade negotiators around the world. Trump largely got his way. And now, no one can tell him his bull-in-a China-shop way won't work. Should Sunday night's sudden 11th-hour approval of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement give hope or dismay to Europeans hoping to do a trade deal with America, to China fearing a trade war with the United States, or to...

Gold has gotten a bad rap. Long seen as the investment choice of the cranky and the fearful, the metal yields nothing; as Warren Buffett has said, it just “looks at you.” This year has been especially lackluster for gold. Its price has slumped 8%, to about $1,200 an ounce, and is off more than 35% from its high of $1,900 in 2011. Adding insult to injury, Vanguard will soon rechristen the largest gold-oriented U.S. mutual fund and shift its focus away from the metal. But this out-of-favor asset class now deserves a place in investment portfolios. Compared with stocks...

Retailers say they are OK with new trade rules that will allow Canadians to buy more from the United States duty free — because dire alternatives that would have been worse never came to pass. One aspect of the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement announced over the weekend is an increase in the so-called de minimis threshold for duty-free shopping — the amount that Canadians can buy from a store in the U.S. and import to Canada without having to pay a duty. Under the old rules, Canada's limit was $20. That's much less than what the U.S. allows, a discrepancy that...

This is a tale of two Politicos... In the October 1 USA edition of Politico, the new NAFTA agreement was viewed through the lens of President Donald Trump's supposed braggadocio starting with the very title, "Trump hails 'historic' trade deal with Canada, Mexico" while being rather light on the details, making it seem that it was mainly Trump's opinion that the trade deal was  "historic." In contrast the Politico Pro Canada edition of the same day went much heavier into the details which revealed just how successful Trump was in getting a better deal for the United States.

The North American Free Trade Agreement reportedly reemerged from the ashes of President Trump’s trade hostilities late Sunday. While the details of the renegotiated deal were still trickling out, they appeared unlikely to justify months of manufactured drama that rattled markets, frayed alliances and hurt business.

A GREAT MOMENT NEAR THE END OF THE TRADE NEWS CONFERENCE ....... President Trump: ( In response to the question of who were the "bad" players with weak character in Congress.) President Trump: "I THINK I'LL SAVE IT FOR A BOOK .... LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE". LMAO!

Thread by @TheLastRefuge2: "1. The economics will be in the details. But the big issue was always a problem. Canada no longer manufactures much. They have no heavy indu […]" 1. The economics will be in the details. But the big issue was always a problem. Canada no longer manufactures much. They have no heavy industry left, and generally only assemble stuff now. They are a narrow and weak economy by design @manny_ottawa