Iran is suspending some of its commitments under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that involve selling enriched uranium in exchange for natural uranium and making “heavy water reserves” available on the open market, according to a May 8 press release from the Iran Ministry of Foreign Affairs. If the “E3, Russia and China” do not “fulfill their banking and oil commitments to Iran” within 60 days, the country may “not respect the current limits on uranium enrichment and may take measures to modernise the Arak heavy water reactor,” according to a May 8 post on the EU Sanctions blog.

The Trump administration on May 8 announced an executive order placing sanctions on Iran’s iron, steel, aluminum and copper sectors in what it said are the country’s “largest non-petroleum-related sources of export revenue."

China will take “necessary countermeasures” if the U.S. follows through on threats to increase tariffs on Chinese goods, according to an unofficial translation of a statement released by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on May 8. “The escalation of trade friction is not in the interests of the people of the two countries and the people of the world,” the statement said. “The Chinese side deeply regrets that if the US tariff measures are implemented, China will have to take necessary countermeasures.”

The government of Canada recently issued the following trade-related notices as of May 8 (note that some may also be given separate headlines):

The State Department announced that R. Clarke Cooper was confirmed April 30 in the Senate as the assistant secretary for Political Military Affairs, in a May 2 notice. Cooper previously served as director of intelligence planning for Joint Special Operations Command’s Joint Inter-Agency Task Force -- National Capital Region, State said, and was a George W. Bush administration U.S. alternate representative to the United Nations Security Council. The White House advanced the nomination to the Senate, for a second time, in January.

The World Customs Organization issued the following release on commercial trade and related matters:​​

In the May 7 edition of the Official Journal of the European Union the following trade-related notices were posted:

The United Kingdom on May 3 published guidance on several sanctions regimes, including the ISIL (Da’esh) and Al-Qaida sanctions, the Democratic Republic of Congo sanctions, the Counter-Terrorism sanctions and the Zimbabwe sanctions. The guidance documents describe practices for sanctions compliance, including in financial- and trade-related sectors, and detail exceptions for the sanctions regimes. Licenses for trade exceptions may only be issued under the Zimbabwe sanctions and the Congo sanctions, according to the documents. Violating any of the sanctions in the financial sector can lead to a six-month prison sentence and a fine, while sanctions violations in the trade sector can lead to a maximum 10-year prison sentence and a fine.

Recent editions of Mexico's Diario Oficial list trade-related notices as follows:

Mexico will move the headquarters of its customs service to Nuevo Laredo, said General Administrator of Customs Ricardo Peralta, according to a report in La Verdad de Tamaulipas. Peralta confirmed the move during a meeting in Mexico City with Mayor Enrique Rivas Cuellar of Nuevo Laredo, Mayor Pete Saenz of Laredo, Texas, and Edgardo Pedraza Quintanilla of the Nuevo Laredo Customs Broker Association, the report said. The “decentralization” process is part of a broader customs reform that will see the creation of an independent Mexican customs agency (see 1904150042).