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China announced Friday that it will raise tariffs on U.S. goods from 84% to 125% the latest salvo in an escalating trade war between the world’s two largest economies that has rattled markets and raised fears of a global slowdown.While U.S. President Donald Trump paused import taxes this week for other countries, he raised tariffs on China and they now total 145%. China has denounced the policy as “economic bullying” and promised countermeasures. The new tariffs begin Saturday.Washington’s repeated jacking up of tariffs “will become a joke in the history of the world economy,” a Chinese Finance Ministry spokesman said in a statement announcing the new tariffs. “However, if the U.S. insists on continuing to substantially infringe on China’s interests, China will resolutely counter and fight to the end.”China’s Commerce Ministry said it would file another lawsuit with the World Trade Organization against the U.S. tariffs.Trump’s on-again, off-again measures have caused alarm in stock and bond markets and led some to warn that the U.S. could be headed for a recession. There was some relief when Trump paused the tariffs for most countries but concerns remain since the U.S. and China are the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 economies, respectively.The trade war between the U.S. and China “could severely damage the global economic outlook,” the head of the WTO, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, said earlier this week.Chinese tariffs will affect goods like soybeans, aircrafts and their parts and drugs all among the country’s major imports from the U.S. Beijing, meanwhile, suspended sorghum, poultry and bonemeal imports from some American companies last week, and put more export controls on rare earth minerals, critical for various technologies.The United States’ top imports from China, meanwhile, include electronics, like computers and cell phones, industrial equipment and toys and consumers and businesses are likely to see prices rise on those products, with tariffs now at 145%.Trump announced on Wednesday that China would face 125% tariffs, but he did not include a 20% tariff on China tied to its role in fentanyl production.White House officials hope the import taxes will create more manufacturing jobs by bringing production back to the United States a politically risky trade-off that could take years to materialize, if at all. This story has been updated to correct the attribution of the quote about the U.S. raising tariffs to a spokesman from the Finance Ministry spokesman, not the Commerce Ministry. Associated Press
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E-Commerce
If you recently bought celery sticks from Walmart, youll want to check to make sure they are not of a certain variety. Thats because a select celery stick product is being recalled due to fears that it may be contaminated with Listeria, a potentially deadly bacterium. Heres what you need to know. What is the reason for the recall? On April 10, Duda Farm Fresh Foods, Inc. of Oxnard, California, issued a voluntary recall for one of its products: a bag of celery sticks sold under the Marketside brand, according to a recall notice posted on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) website. The company issued the recall because the celery sticks have the possibility to be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes. Duda Farm Fresh Foods said the possibility for contamination was discovered when the Georgia Department of Agriculture tested multiple samples, and one came back positive for Listeria monocytogenes. What product is being recalled? Only one product is being recalled: a bag of celery sticks, but the recall impacts 1,587 cases of the product. Here are the details of the product, according to the recall listing on the FDAs website: Name: Marketside Celery Sticks 4 in/1.6 oz Bundle Pack Product UPC Code: 6 81131 16151 0 Lot Code: P047650 Best If Used by Date: 03/23/2025 Pack Size & Packaging: 4/1.6-ounce, bag It should be noted that while the best-by date of March 23, 2025, has now passed by a few weeks, the recall notice cautions that people may have purchased the celery sticks and kept them frozen in their freezer for use at a later date. Photographs of the recalled product in its packaging can be found here. Where were the recalled products sold? The recalled celery sticks were sold across the nation at Walmart stores in 28 states and the District of Columbia. Here are the states where the recalled products were sold: Alabama California Colorado District of Columbia Delaware Florida Georgia Hawaii Iowa Illinois Indiana Kansas Kentucky Maryland Michigan Missouri Montana North Carolina New Jersey New York Ohio Pennsylvania South Carolina Tennessee Texas Virginia Wisconsin West Virginia Wyoming What is Listeria? Listeria is a bacterium that has the possibility to cause severe illness in people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The agency says Listeria infections are the third leading cause of death from foodborne illness in the United States. It is estimated that 1,600 people become infected each year in the United States, and as many as 260 of those die. Relatively healthy people can fully recover from a Listeria infection. However, infection can present a more grave danger to certain types of people. This includes individuals who are pregnant, newborns, people aged 65 or above, and those with weakened immune systems. What are the symptoms of a Listeria infection? A Listeria infection can present with several symptoms depending on your other physical conditions and the type of infection you have (invasive or intestinal illness). The CDC says that symptoms of invasive illness (where the bacteria has spread beyond the gut) in pregnant people include: Fever Flu-like symptoms, such as muscle aches and fatigue In individuals who are not pregnant, symptoms of invasive illness can include: Fever Flu-like symptoms, such as muscle aches and fatigue Headache Stiff neck Confusion Loss of balance Seizures Those who have intestinal Listeria illness usually have the following symptoms: Diarrhea Vomiting Has anyone been harmed by the recalled product? Thankfully, according to the notice on the FDA website, no illnesses have yet been reported as a result of the products associated with this recall. What do I do if I have the recalled celery sticks? You should check your refrigerators and freezers for the recalled product. If you have it in your possession, you should not consume it. Instead, you should discard the recalled product. Consumers who have this product in their possession, including in their freezer, should not consume and discard the product, the recall notice states. You can find the full details of the product recall here.
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E-Commerce
How can you measure productivity you cant see? When we try to evaluate whether someone is killing it in their role simply by hearing them mansplain their digital transformation strategy or their AI-powered journey of innovation, its hard to disentangle facts from fiction, competence from confidence, and talent from, well, BS.The harder it is to decipher what someone is doing, the easier it is to fake it. Ironically, this means that the more you get paid for doing what you dobecause specialized skills and in-demand jobs tend to involve operating in abstract, intellectual, and symbolic processes rather than visible, tangible, observable workthe harder it is to know if you are any good at it. Welcome to the modern workplace, where the line between working and pretending to work is not just thin, its vanishing. This is particularly true with the advent of AI, which produces content indistinguishable from what humans produce, if not better. If knowledge workers are merely promptly AI and instructing the AI agents to work for them, are humans still working? When work became hard to see One of the great historical transitions in the knowledge economy is that as work became more “intellectual,” it also became less visible. Unlike a farmers harvest or a blacksmiths horseshoe, knowledge work is abstract. You cant see a PowerPoint decks impact (if we could, we would probably not devote so many hours in our life to create slides), or touch a well-formatted spreadsheet (though we can admire it, sure). And when results are ambiguous, evaluations become subjective. More importantly, the connection between the behaviors people perform or display (typing, thinking, reading, writing) and the desirable work or organizational outcomes (growth, productivity, innovation, performance) is invisible, which allows people to brag about their apparent accomplishments on LinkedIn and their resumés: during my tenure we increased profits by 25% . . .. because of you, despite you, or coincidentally while you were there? The modern office was once thought to be a factory of ideas, but more often, it is a theater of activity. Slack pings, emails sent at 11:47 p.m., and meetings scheduled for no good reason serve as proxies for productivity. As psychologist Adam Grant noted, we confuse responsiveness with competence. Presencewhether physical or digitalis misread as performance, or even talent. Even performance reviews have become more performative than evaluative. As my colleagues and I have shown, most managers are bad at assessing performancebiased by recent events, likability, and self-confidence. The upshot? Its easier to reward those who are good at appearing to work than those who are actually working. And our notion of adding value is conflated with being rewarding to deal with. Confidence over competence It gets worse. As work becomes more cerebral, we also become better at gaming the system. Impression management has become a meta-skill: not the work itself, but the ability to make others believe that we are working, and working well. This isn’t just anecdotal. Psychological studies repeatedly show that people are poor judges of competence, often mistaking confidence for ability. One study shows that speaking more than others in group settings predicts being selected as leader to that group: Yes, there is an ROI to mansplaining! In fact, in a world where perception trumps reality, those who can tell a compelling story about their work often outperform those who quietly produce real results. This explains why buzzwords thrive in business: leveraging synergies sounds more important than talking to another department. And therein lies the tragedy: The more time you devote to pretending to work, which by definition decreases the time you can devote to actually working, the more successful you may be in an organizational setting. As our skills evolved to navigate complex knowledge ecosystems, so did our capacity to appear productive. This is a uniquely modern skill, honed through LinkedIn updates, Zoom facial expressions, and the subtle art of replying-all. For all the talks of authenticity and being yourself at work, as my upcoming book documents, there is hardly ever a reward for being honest and transparent when you are up against masters of deceptions and deception eclipses reality. Those who confess that they prefer to have their achievements speak for themselves are no doubt noble and ethicalbut they will generally go unnoticed compared to people who proactively engaged in politics, self-promotion, and sucking up to their boss. The rise of meaningless work In Bullshit Jobs, the late anthropologist David Graeber describes a category of work so pointless that even the people doing it cant justify its existence. Entire industriescorporate compliance, middle management, strategic communicationsare filled with people who arent sure what their job is for, but are sure it requires a calendar full of meetings. Consider the following real-but-ridiculous tasks: Creating decks to summarize meetings that summarized other decks. Emailing to circle back on a thread that no one cared about in the first place. Editing internal mission statements for tone. Filling out time-tracking software to account for the time spent filling it out. These are not edge casesthey are routine. In a 2015 YouGov poll in the UK, 37% of workers said their job makes no meaningful contribution to the world. Thats not burnoutits existential despair. So, why do these jobs persist? Because they look like work. And if your boss can’t measure your output, theyll settle for being impressed by your process.
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E-Commerce
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