EU and US to restart trade talks as sticking points on July tariff deal remain
The EU and US are set to restart trade negotiations next week after a two-month pause to try to settle unresolved sticking points in their controversial tariff deal struck in July.The US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, and trade representative Jamieson Greer will hold high-level meetings in Brussels on Monday with ministers, EU commissioners and industry bosses.The face-to-face meetings are the first talks since the six-week US government shutdown that began at the start of October.In a high-risk move, Lutnick and Greer have been invited to lunch with 27 trade ministers who are gathering for a summit on Monday.One insider said: “We need to keep it focused, what we don’t want is individual countries going up to them and demanding deals on this, this and that.
”Brussels struck a deal with Donald Trump at his golf course in Scotland in July to avert his threat of 50% tariffs, instead agreeing a baseline 15% levy on most EU imports into the US.Now Washington officials have made it clear they are frustrated with the EU’s slow pace of implementation on that deal, which is not legally binding and needs to be passed by parliament, a process that could take until February.Among the significant outstanding problems expected to be discussed at Monday’s talks are the continuing 50% tariffs on steel and aluminium, separate tariffs on products with steel elements, and food and drink levies.Several member states want to see the removal of the 15% tax on wine and spirits including France, which has been hit by duties on Cognac, Ireland on whiskey and all the wine-producing countries.Before a dinner on Monday night Lutnick and Greer will hold talks with the EU’s trade commissioner, Maroš Šefčovič, its defence commissioner, Andrius Kubilius, and the commissioner responsible for technology, Henna Virkkunen, to discuss the continuing crisis involving chip supply from China.
They will also meet industry bosses at a business round table expected to included the heads of Volkswagen and the French company TotalEnergies, said insiders.Persuading the US that the steel derivatives go entirely against spirit of the deal struck in July was a “top priority” said one EU insider.In September, the US listed 407 products that included an element of steel, ranging from knitting needles to wind turbines and washing machines, that would face separate tariffs.And now, as part of a rolling programme to protect its industries, it is looking at adding a further 700 products including tin cans and bicycles.Companies such as the German agriculture machinery firm Krone, have said the “hidden” tariffs are alarming and causing a nightmare for exporters with US customs officials charging 200% in tariffs to anyone who has failed to complete a mountain of paperwork citing the origin of all steel from the “suppliers” and the “supplier to the supplier to the supplier”.
The EU and US will also discuss the prospect of working in alignment to “ringfence” their domestic steel industries to protect against cheaper Chinese imports.Brussels hopes that steel anti-dumping proposals announced in October, which match Trump’s steel tariffs, will persuade the US president to slash the 50% tariffs on EU steel.
Bad season of bird flu in UK hits supply of Christmas turkeys
UK poultry producers are battling a “bad season” of bird flu, with cases much worse than at this point last year, putting a squeeze on supplies of Christmas birds including turkeys, chickens and ducks.Two industry insiders said they expected supplies of all poultry to be tight ahead of the festive season, especially for organic and free-range birds, which are seen as the most vulnerable to infection.There are also likely to be fewer heavier birds available as some producers have started processing them earlier to try to avoid the risk of infection.About 5% of the UK Christmas poultry flock, including turkeys, ducks and chickens, representing about 300,000 birds, are thought to have been culled so far this season.The current avian influenza outbreak has seen higher numbers of cases in the UK than last winter, although it is not yet as severe as 2022/23, which was the largest outbreak the country has ever experienced
EU and US to restart trade talks as sticking points on July tariff deal remain
The EU and US are set to restart trade negotiations next week after a two-month pause to try to settle unresolved sticking points in their controversial tariff deal struck in July.The US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, and trade representative Jamieson Greer will hold high-level meetings in Brussels on Monday with ministers, EU commissioners and industry bosses.The face-to-face meetings are the first talks since the six-week US government shutdown that began at the start of October. In a high-risk move, Lutnick and Greer have been invited to lunch with 27 trade ministers who are gathering for a summit on Monday.One insider said: “We need to keep it focused, what we don’t want is individual countries going up to them and demanding deals on this, this and that
Meet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AI
When the people making AI seem trustworthy are the ones who trust it the least, it shows that incentives for speed are overtaking safety, experts sayKrista Pawloski remembers the single defining moment that shaped her opinion on the ethics of artificial intelligence. As an AI worker on Amazon Mechanical Turk – a marketplace that allows companies to hire workers to perform tasks like entering data or matching an AI prompt with its output – Pawloski spends her time moderating and assessing the quality of AI-generated text, images and videos, as well as some factchecking.Roughly two years ago, while working from home at her dining room table, she took up a job designating tweets as racist or not. When she was presented with a tweet that read “Listen to that mooncricket sing”, she almost clicked on the “no” button before deciding to check the meaning of the word “mooncricket”, which, to her surprise, was a racial slur against Black Americans.“I sat there considering how many times I may have made the same mistake and not caught myself,” said Pawloski
Bro boost: women say their LinkedIn traffic increases if they pretend to be men
Do your LinkedIn followers consider you a “thought leader”? Do hordes of commenters applaud your tips on how to “scale” your startup? Do recruiters slide into your DMs to “explore potential synergies”?If not, it could be because you’re not a man.Dozens of women joined a collective LinkedIn experiment this week after a series of viral posts suggested that, for some, changing their gender to “male” boosted their visibility on the network.Others rewrote their profiles to be, as they put it, “bro-coded” – inserting action-oriented online business buzzwords such as “drive”, “transform” and “accelerate”. Anecdotally, their visibility also increased.The uptick in engagement has led some to speculate that an in-built sexism in LinkedIn’s algorithm means that men who speak in online business jargon are more visible on its platform
Formula One: Las Vegas Grand Prix – live
Lewis Hamilton will not start 20th. Red Bull changed out the power unit on Yuki Tsunoda’s car, so he’ll start from pit lane.Neat! Tara Davis-Woodhall and Hunter Woodhall, the US Olympic/Paralympic couple. Tara is a Red Bull fan and supporting Verstappen.Now it’s Damron Idris, one of the stars of the recent F1 film and frequent grid-walker
Wallabies fans are entitled to be frustrated but it’s not all grim for this tired, talented side
At the end of a frenetic first half, where Angus Bell ran in one of the great tries by a Wallaby prop, where Matt Faessler powered over for a brace, where Louis Bielle-Biarrey scored a solo stunner and Thomas Ramos and Nicolas Depoortère dotted down as well, Tane Edmed gathered a pass at first receiver.The young fly-half, playing in his seventh Test, was having a decent game. He’d slotted two of his three shots at goal. He was brave to the line, carrying with zip, stitching moves together as he tried to spark a backline short on fluency. But with the clock in the red, he attempted a raking kick to the corner
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