President Donald Trump said the U.S. will place the “highest-level sanctions” and a “complete embargo” on Cuba if it does not stop “military and other operations” in Venezuela. The announcement, made April 30, came hours after Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido called for a military uprising. U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton said earlier that Cuban troops were aiding Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, according to the Associated Press.

Export Compliance Daily is providing readers with some of the top stories for April 22-26 in case they were missed.

Jacob Lew, a former chief of staff and Treasury secretary under President Barack Obama, called the Trump administration's approach to trade and sanctions “troubling,” saying the administration is placing unneeded stress on U.S. allies and damaging the effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy. Speaking April 30 at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think-tank focused on national security, Lew was critical of Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, was skeptical of the president’s “brute force” approach to trade deals and pointed to “worrisome trends” that he said will lead to U.S. undermining its own sanctions. Among those trends, Lew said, are “ambiguous diplomatic objectives, growing unpredictability, increased unilateral action” and a “narrow focus on isolated policies with less regard for the broader context.”

The U.S. consumer technology sector exported $172.4 billion worth of goods in 2017, said a PricewaterhouseCoopers economic-impact report commissioned by the Consumer Technology Association. PwC, using the Census Bureau’s “origin of movement” (OM) data, estimated Texas was the top export state with shipments of $44.8 billion, followed by California ($35.7 billion) and Florida ($12.3 billion). Canada was the top market for U.S. consumer tech sector goods, followed by the Netherlands and Germany, it said. There are “limitations” to using OM data for the analysis, the report said. One is that it doesn’t cover services exports, another is that its focus is on “the transportation origin of exports, as opposed to the production origin,” it said. This runs the risk it will “misallocate credit for certain exported goods to states where there are major export hubs,” it said. “However, we are not aware of another data set that provides better visibility” into state- and product-specific “trade flows,” it said.

The Plastics Industry Association added Bradley Hoppe, previously a marketing specialist in export finance at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service's Office of Trade Programs, as director of global packaging regulations, the group said in a news release. Hoppe will "lead the association’s regulatory and advocacy programs and projects that relate to the safety of plastic packaging," it said.

In the April 29 edition of the Official Journal of the European Union the following trade-related notices were posted:

It's unclear how North Korean leader Kim Jong Un got the armored Mercedes-Maybach limousines made by Daimler that Kim used for several recent meetings with international leaders, a spokesman for the company said. In an April 29 email, a Daimler spokesman said the company has a “comprehensive export control process” to “prevent” all sales to North Korea. “We have no indication how those vehicles have come to the use of” North Korea, he said. Exports of luxury goods to North Korea are banned under United Nations sanctions, and sanctions imposed by the U.S. allow the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control to designate any person who “engages in a significant export to or import from North Korea,” according to the Treasury.

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

The government of Canada recently issued the following trade-related notices as of April 29 (note that some may also be given separate headlines):

Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau met with Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe on April 28 and discussed the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), according to a news release from Trudeau's office. "There has been a significant increase in demand for Canadian products since the CPTPP came into force," it said. "For example, some Canadian beef products exported to Japan have increased nearly threefold." Also, the two leaders signed a Memorandum of Cooperation that "will make it easier for Canadian and Japanese companies to work in partnership, and will drive investment in both our countries." Jim Carr, minister of international trade diversification, said: "Our close economic ties with Japan have never been stronger thanks in large part to our new trade deal with Asia and Pacific countries -- and our government is strengthening those ties even further. That’s why we’re adding trade commissioners right across Canada, and putting new trade commissioners in three major Japanese cities to help our businesses and economy grow."