SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australia will expel two Russian diplomats in response to a nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy in Britain that the British government has blamed on Moscow, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said on Tuesday.

US leads diplomatic offensive to isolate Kremlin for alleged role in poisoning of ex-spy

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Two senior U.S. Republican senators asked the Trump administration on Monday to allow the sale of Lockheed Martin Corp. F-35 fighter jets to Taiwan, saying it would help it “remain a democracy” in the face of threats from China.

MANILA (Reuters) – Philippine law enforcement agencies still have no proof yet on allegations made by two government officials that human rights groups may have become the “unwitting tools” of drug lords, police and drug enforcement agency officials said on Tuesday.

NAIROBI (Reuters) – Kenyan authorities have detained and are trying to deport an opposition politician, who also holds Canadian nationality, in defiance of a court order letting him enter the country, his lawyer and a senior opposition member said on Tuesday.

Earlier Wall Street had rallied on optimistic comments coming out of both Washington and Beijing.

BEIJING/SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korea said on Tuesday it was closely watching events that are unfolding rapidly in Beijing, where diplomatic sources said a senior North Korean official was visiting amid reports it was leader Kim Jong Un ahead of a series of historic summits.

Last week, China announced that it would retaliate against U.S. tariffs by imposing its own duties on a range of American products including apples, port and steel pipes. Last Thursday, President Trump signed an executive memorandum that could lead to tariffs being imposed on up to $60 billion of Chinese products, a move which is designed to penalize China for alleged intellectual property theft. Beijing responded that it while it does not want a trade war, it is “absolutely not afraid of one”. Late last week, stock markets dropped sharply.

The Trump Administrations’s move to impose tariffs on Chinese imports as well as steel and aluminum imports in general, is a break with long-standing U.S. trade policy. As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, hHistorically, previous presidents have been in favor of lower tariffs and the removal of barriers to facilitate trade.

Today, the U.S. applies a weighted average tariff of 1.6 percent on its imports according to the World Bank and this is one of the lowest rates worldwide, equivalent to the EU and similar to Japan.

You will find more infographics at Statista

The World Bank’s tariff rates refer to 2016 and are weighted by product import shares without taking specific trade deals like NAFTA into account.

Although most developed countries have been pushing for lower trade tariffs, they are still very high in some parts of the world.

For example, India imposes weighted average tariffs of 6.3 percent while in China, the rate is 3.5 percent.

African countries have some of the highest rates with Gabon standing out at 16.93 percent.

The Bahamas is the country with the highest weighted-average tariff worldwide at 18.6 percent.

Can Zuckerberg fix the FB’s current breach of trust? Facebook is likely to implement a number of voluntary policy changes that will not unduly crimp its successful business model, and may even help Zuckerberg overcome the corporate myopia that has exposed the company to reputational risk in the past