The EU announced on April 10 that it has placed its planned counter-tariffs on hold for 90 days following President Donald Trump's April 9 decision to withdraw his reciprocal tariffs on most countries (see 2504090069).
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations expressed concern over U.S. tariff policy but said it wants to pursue diplomacy and not "impose any retaliatory measures."
The State Department approved a possible $1.04 billion military sale to Australia, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency said this week. The sale includes "AIM-120C and AIM-120D Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles" and related equipment. The principal contractor will be RTX Corp.
In an April 9 memorandum, President Donald Trump instructed all "executive departments and agencies" to "identify certain categories of unlawful and potentially unlawful regulations within 60 days" and establish plans to repeal them. The memo told the agencies to review their regulations for compliance with 10 recent Supreme Court decisions, the first of which is Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the decision eliminating the concept of deferring to agencies' interpretations of ambiguous statutes.
Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., tried unsuccessfully April 9 to persuade the Senate to take up and pass a bill that would give China’s ByteDance about six more months to comply with a law requiring the company to divest TikTok.
Sens. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., announced April 9 that they are introducing a bill designed to strengthen sanctions enforcement against Russia’s “ghost fleet” of oil-carrying ships.
The EU and the United Arab Emirates agreed to launch negotiations on a free trade deal, the European Commission said April 9. The talks will focus on liberalizing trade in goods while "deepening cooperation in strategic sectors," including critical raw materials. The commission is confident both sides "can move swiftly and ambitiously," it said, adding that trade commissioner Maros Sefcovic "will soon return to the UAE to take the talks forward."
Senior trade officials from China and the EU spoke about U.S. tariffs and other trade issues during an April 10 call, and they also agreed to “start consultations” on boosting trade between the two sides “as soon as possible,” China’s Ministry of Commerce said, according to an unofficial translation. Those talks will include “in-depth issues related to market access, create a more favorable business environment for enterprises” and touch on electric vehicle trade (see 2411080024), China said. “Both sides support restarting the China-EU trade remedy dialogue mechanism, discussing trade diversion issues, and properly handling trade frictions.”
The U.K. this week amended four entries under its domestic counterterrorism sanctions list to make them subject to "director disqualification" sanctions. These sanctions block them from directly or indirectly being a director of a U.K. company. The people are Mohammed Fawaz Khaled, Aozma Sultana, Nazem Ahmad and Mustafa Ayash.
The U.K. added four Georgian officials to its global human rights sanctions regime April 10. The Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation sanctioned Shalva Bedoidze, Georgia's first deputy minister of internal affairs; Giorgi Gabitashvili, general prosecutor; Karlo Katsitadze, head of the special investigatory service; and Mirza Kezevadze, deputy chief of the special task department.