Belt & Road

China’s Belt and Road Initiative is an infrastructure project that spans over 60 countries, and will cost over a trillion dollars. The plan is to make it easier for the world to trade with China, by funding roads, railways, bridges, tunnels, and pipelines in Asia and Africa. A Vox video by Sam Ellis.

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Trump Tariffs to Cause Bible Shortage

President Donald Trump is waging a trade war with China, but most of America’s Bibles are printed there, so publishers warn of a Bible shortage if the next round of tariffs goes through. The U.S. imports some 150 million Bibles from China each year, where they’re printed on ultra-thin paper subject to a proposed 25 percent tariff. Maybe American Christians can substutute copies of The Art of the Deal for the Good Book. Lord knows many of them have done that already.

More:

“Bible shortage? Publishers say tariffs could cause it,” Travis Loller, Associated Press

“A ‘Bible tax’: Christian publishers warn that China tariffs could lead to costly Bibles,” Emily McFarlan Miller, Religion News Service via Washington Post

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Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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Trump Erects Trade Barrier With Canada

Developer-in-Chief Donald Trump just increased the cost of America’s new homes and decreased US construction jobs. How? putting a punitive tariff on imports of wood from Canada. “We’re going to be putting a 20 percent tax on softwood lumber coming in — tariff on softwood coming into the United States from Canada,” tweeted the president.

Canadian softwoods — pine, spruce, fir — are used to frame most new home construction in the USA.

More:

“In New Trade Front, Trump Slaps Tariff on Canadian Lumber,” Peter Baker and Ian Austen, New York Times

“Why Is Trump Bashing Canada All of a Sudden?” Joshua Keating, Slate

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Image (“Scott Walker’s Northern Border, after Alex Anderson, Jr.”) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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EU Food Imports from China

“Many Germans only realized how much of the food on their plates is harvested and produced in China when thousands of schoolchildren in eastern Germany were afflicted with diarrhea and vomiting two weeks ago in an epidemic thought to have been triggered by Chinese strawberries contaminated with norovirus..”

“…by last Friday, 262 reports on Chinese products had been received in Brussels for 2012 alone. They included noodles infested with maggots, shrimp contaminated with antibiotics, foul-smelling peanuts and candied fruit with an excessively high sulfur content (see graphic).”