423 stories · Page 23 of 43
On 17 Jan 2026 the EU and Mercosur finally signed their long-negotiated trade pact in Asunción, formally creating a 700-million-person free-trade area that still awaits parliamentary ratification on both sides.
On 18 Jan 2026 Seoul opened emergency negotiations with Washington, citing a 2025 joint fact sheet guaranteeing equal treatment, after President Trump’s new AI-chip duties and threats of up to 100 % tariffs put Samsung and SK Hynix at risk unless they expand U.S. manufacturing.
On 17-18 Jan 2026, Google formally appealed the 2024 U.S. antitrust judgment and asked Judge Amit Mehta to suspend his mandate that it hand over search-index and user-interaction data to rivals such as OpenAI until the appeal is resolved.
On 17 Jan 2026, the EU and Mercosur formally inked a pact in Paraguay that scraps tariffs on over 90 % of their trade, ending a 25-year negotiation deadlock.
Within 48 hours of unveiling a tariff-exemption formula for Taiwanese chipmakers, the Trump administration said every other semiconductor-exporting nation will face tailor-made negotiations—or tariffs as high as 100 %—rather than a single global standard.
On 16 Jan 2026, Ottawa cut its punitive 100 % duty to 6.1 % on up to 49,000 Chinese electric cars per year, and Beijing agreed to slash its combined tariff on Canadian canola seed from ~85 % to 15 % by 1 Mar 2026.
Washington and Taipei have agreed in principle to cut the Trump-era 20 % reciprocal tariff to 15 %, provided TSMC roughly doubles its U.S. footprint by adding at least five more semiconductor plants in Arizona.
On 15 Jan 2026, President Trump ordered a new 25 % import tariff on two specific high-performance AI chips slated for re-export, after a nine-month national-security probe under Section 232.
In their inaugural phone conversation on 15 Jan 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump and Venezuela’s acting president Delcy Rodriguez opened formal dialogue after Maduro’s capture, pairing promises of oil shipments and prisoner releases with talk of a U.S.–managed political transition.
Customs figures released 14 Jan 2026 show China’s 2025 trade surplus jumped 20 % to $1.19 trillion, the largest in history, as exporters pivoted from a tariff-hit U.S. market to faster-growing regions.
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