OPEC boosts exports, stocks jump in response

Compiled from news services

VIENNA — Major oil-producing countries agreed Friday to raise exports, a decision that has driven division among them but could temper criticism from President Donald Trump.

Officials from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, as well as other producers like Russia, were set to increase their total output by around 1 percent of the global oil supply. The move signals a willingness by international suppliers to address rising prices.

The price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, neared $75 a barrel, and has been little changed over the course of the week, because traders expected a deal. But it briefly topped $80 a barrel last month.

The deal to cut output, reached in 2016, had been a cooperative effort by OPEC and other producers. Countries that had historically been at odds agreed to restrict their overall crude sales to bolster prices, with Saudi Arabia and Russia holding back the most.

Tariffs draw blood

WASHINGTON — A brawl that the United States provoked with its closest trading partners is starting to draw blood. On Friday, the European Union began imposing tariffs on $3.4 billion in American goods — from whiskey and motorcycles to peanuts and cranberries — to retaliate for President Donald Trump’s own tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. China, India and Turkey had earlier begun penalizing American products in response to the U.S. tariffs on metals.

Pork producers are already suffering from plunging prices and reduced income since China imposed a 25 percent tariff on American pork in retaliation for Mr. Trump’s tariffs on imported steel and aluminum.

On July 6, the United States is set to slap tariffs on $34 billion in Chinese goods to punish Beijing for forcing American companies to hand over technology in exchange for access to China’s market and other brassknuckled attempts to supplant U.S. technological dominance.

Beijing has vowed to retaliate. And Mr. Trump has threatened to punch back again with tariffs that could eventually cover $450 billion in Chinese products — representing nearly 90 percent of all goods Beijing exports to the United States.

POTUS: Korea still a threat

WASHINGTON— The gulf between President Donald Trump’s rhetoric and a thorny geopolitical reality widened a bit further Friday, when the White House said it would extend a decade-old executive order declaring a national emergency over the nuclear threat from North Korea.

The announcement came days after Mr. Trump declared to the world that “everybody can now feel much safer” after his meeting with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un: “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” Mr. Trump said on Twitter. Apparently, there still is. “The existence and risk of proliferation of weapons, usable fissile material on the Korean Peninsula and the actions and policies of the government of North Korea continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy and economy of the United States,” read the notice, delivered through the press secretary Friday.

The national emergency has been in place since 2008.

Time runs correction

NEWYORK — The photo of a nearly 2-year-old Honduran girl crying as her mother is being patted down quickly went viral. It has been used for a Facebook fundraiser to raise more than $18 million to help reunite families that have been separated. And the whole thing culminated in its placement in a photo illustration on the cover of Time magazine. The image features the girl against a red background, with President Trump towering over her and the words, “Welcome to America.”

The implication was clear: This was a girl who, like 2,300 other children, was being separated from her mother. Time and many others made a decision to suggest that this was an example of Mr. Trump uprooting our American ideals.

But that’s not what it was. As The Washington Post reports, the girl’s father says the child and her mother were not separated. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol and the Honduran deputy foreign minister confirmed.

Time clearly thought that was the case. A correction on the piece currently says:

“The girl was not carried away screaming by U.S. Border Patrol agents; her mother picked her up and the two were taken away together.”

Amazon, Bezos and ICE

SEATTLE— Employees at Amazon.com are calling on chief executive Jeff Bezos to end the sale of facial recognition technology to law enforcement agencies and to discontinue partnerships with firms that work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In a letter, a group of Amazon workers said they are also troubled by a recent report from the ACLU, revealing the company’s sale and marketing of Rekognition, its facial recognition technology, to police departments and government agencies. Workers at Amazon are protesting the recently halted Trump administration policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.