Month: April 2018

Stock markets in Asia fell Tuesday, but did not suffer losses as steep as those Monday in U.S. markets where continued fears about a U.S.-China trade war and a verbal attack on an online retailer by President Donald Trump sent stocks lower. Markets in Japan and Hong Kong fell by more than one percent in early trading, but by midday had rebounded to make back half the losses. The U.S. Down Jones Industrial Average closed down 1.9 percent Monday, while the Standard & Poor's 500 dropped 2.3 percent and the NASDAQ fell nearly three percent. Trump has strongly criticized online giant Amazon three times in the last few days. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post, whose revelatory stories on Trump and his administration frequently draw the president's…

First, the United States imposed a tax on Chinese steel and aluminum. Then, China counterpunched Monday with tariffs on a host of U.S. products, including apples, pork and ginseng.  On Wall Street, the stock market buckled on the prospect of an all-out trade war between the world's two biggest economies. But it hasn't come to that - not yet, anyway. "We're in a trade slap-fight right now,'' not a trade war, said Derek Scissors, resident scholar and China specialist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. China is a relatively insignificant supplier of steel and aluminum to the United States. And the $3 billion in U.S. products that Beijing targeted Monday amount to barely 2 percent of American goods exported to China. But the dispute could escalate, and quickly. Already, in…

For farmers trying to figure out how to heal a sick cow or grow tomatoes commercially in this Himalayan community, help is at hand in the form of a crumbling, earthquake-scarred library. In a rural area where searching for information online or paying for expert advice is rarely an option, the library is a first stop for female farmers daunted by their new role: running the family farm while their husbands are away looking for work. "Most of the men have migrated for money now in Nepal. It's a very huge problem," said Meera Marahattha, the "human Google" who runs the library. But there's an upside. "Because of this male migration, females have the opportunity to lead," she added - sometimes for the first time. Migration is growing around the…

China raised import duties on a $3 billion list of U.S. pork, fruit and other products Monday in an escalating tariff dispute with President Donald Trump that companies worry might depress global commerce. The Finance Ministry said it was responding to a U.S. tariff hike on steel and aluminum that took effect March 23. But a bigger clash looms over Trump's approval of possible higher duties on nearly $50 billion of Chinese goods in a separate argument over technology policy. The tariff spat is one aspect of wide-ranging tensions between Washington and Beijing over China's multibillion-dollar trade surplus with the United States and its policies on technology, industry development and access to its state-dominated economy. Forecasters say the immediate impact should be limited, but investors worry the global recovery might…