beijing — Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday urged visiting Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to play a “constructive role” in improving strained ties between Bejing and the European Union. 

Sanchez for his part said he hoped the EU could avoid a trade war with China, even as Brussels weighs imposing tariffs on China-manufactured electric vehicles.

In their meeting, Xi also talked up deepening commercial ties between China and Spain in sectors such as artificial intelligence, digital economy, new energy and other high-tech fields.

The Chinese leader said Beijing wanted to work with Brussels to further develop a China-EU relationship where the two maintain their independence and autonomy but also succeed together and bring benefit to the world, a Chinese readout said. 

“It is hoped Spain will continue to play a constructive role in this regard,” Xi added. 

Sanchez responded: “Spain wants to work constructively so that relations between the two are closer, richer and more balanced.” 

Beijing in June said that frictions with the EU over its plans to impose tariffs of up to 36.3% on its electric vehicles (EVs) could trigger a trade conflict, days after China announced a retaliatory anti-dumping probe into European pork imports. 

China in August then raised the stakes by opening an investigation into the bloc’s dairy subsidies. 

Prior to meeting Xi, Sanchez said at business events that Spain would work for a negotiated consensus to the EV dispute within the World Trade Organization and that a “trade war would benefit no one,” a government source said.  

Spain in 2023 exported $1.5 billion worth of the pork products that China will investigate, Chinese customs data showed, dwarfing the outbound shipments from the Netherlands and Denmark, which rank second and third. 

Spain also sold just under $50 million worth of targeted dairy products to China last year. 

But in a promising sign for Spain’s pork producers, a separate source with direct access to Xi’s meeting with Sanchez said the two leaders had “found harmony and understanding,” when asked about possible curbs on Spain’s outbound pork shipments. 

“The meeting went extremely well,” the source said, adding that both defended their positions while seeking agreements. 

Fair trade 

“We want to build bridges together to defend a trade order that’s fair,” Sanchez told China’s second-ranking official, Premier Li Qiang, before meeting Xi.  

Spain had a trade deficit of 17.27 billion euros ($19.07 billion) in the first half of this year, according to government statistics.  

Sanchez will also want reassurance that China will not strike back at Brussels by raising its own tariffs on imported large-engined gasoline-powered vehicles, as state Chinese media have suggested it might.  

Spain could also be impacted by the Chinese EV tariffs. Last week SEAT-CUPRA’s CEO said that an electric vehicle made in China and designed in Spain by CUPRA, which is owned by Germany’s Volkswagen, would be “wiped out” if the European Commission followed through with planned import tariffs on Chinese-made vehicles.  

Sanchez on Tuesday is expected to meet representatives of SAIC Motor, one of the Chinese automakers most affected by the EU tariffs, and sign a Memorandum of Understanding with greentech company Envision, which is building an EV battery plant in Spain. 

“In this increasingly geopolitical and economic context, as you have pointed out, we must work together to resolve differences through negotiation,” Sanchez told Xi. 

In an advisory vote in July, Spain, France and Italy supported the European Commission’s proposal to adopt additional duties on Chinese-made EVs on top of the bloc’s standard 10% tariff.  

But Beijing has been urging the EU’s member states to reject the curbs at a final vote on it in October.  

The tariffs would be implemented in addition to the EU’s standard 10% import tariff unless a qualified majority of 15 EU members representing 65% of the EU population vote against them.
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A lack of opportunities has resulted in underrepresentation of Black designers, stylists and other creatives in the fashion industry. It’s also created a new wave of Black entrepreneurs who are passing on lessons of the business. Tina Trinh reports. (Camera and Produced by: Tina Trinh)
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Обмеження стосуються оплати годинників, ювелірних виробів, коштовного каміння, монет і марок, а також оплати за проживання
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ALEXANDRIA, Va. — One month after a judge declared Google’s search engine an illegal monopoly, the tech giant faces another antitrust lawsuit that threatens to break up the company, this time over its advertising technology.

The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintains a monopoly over the technology that matches online publishers to advertisers. Dominance over the software on both the buy side and the sell side of the transaction enables Google to keep as much as 36 cents on the dollar when it brokers sales between publishers and advertisers, the government contends in court papers.

Google says the government’s case is based on an internet of yesteryear, when desktop computers ruled and internet users carefully typed precise World Wide Web addresses into URL fields. Advertisers now are more likely to turn to social media companies like TikTok or streaming TV services like Peacock to reach audiences.

In recent years, Google Networks, the division of the Mountain View, California-based tech giant that includes such services as AdSense and Google Ad Manager that are at the heart of the case, actually have seen declining revenue, from $31.7 billion in 2021 to $31.3 billion in 2023, according to the company’s annual reports.

The trial over the alleged ad tech monopoly begins Monday in Alexandria, Virginia. It initially was going to be a jury trial, but Google maneuvered to force a bench trial, writing a check to the federal government for more than $2 million to moot the only claim brought by the government that required a jury.

The case will now be decided by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who was appointed to the bench by former President Bill Clinton and is best known for high-profile terrorism trials including Sept. 11 defendant Zacarias Moussaoui. Brinkema, though, also has experience with highly technical civil trials, working in a courthouse that sees an outsize number of patent infringement cases.

The Virginia case comes on the heels of a major defeat for Google over its search engine. which generates the majority of the company’s $307 billion in annual revenue. A judge in the District of Columbia declared the search engine a monopoly, maintained in part by tens of billions of dollars Google pays each year to companies like Apple to lock in Google as the default search engine presented to consumers when they buy iPhones and other gadgets.

In that case, the judge has not yet imposed any remedies. The government hasn’t offered its proposed sanctions, though there could be close scrutiny over whether Google should be allowed to continue to make exclusivity deals that ensure its search engine is consumers’ default option.

Peter Cohan, a professor of management practice at Babson College, said the Virginia case could potentially be more harmful to Google because the obvious remedy would be requiring it to sell off parts of its ad tech business that generate billions of dollars in annual revenue.

“Divestitures are definitely a possible remedy for this second case,” Cohan said “It could be potentially more significant than initially meets the eye.”

In the Virginia trial, the government’s witnesses are expected to include executives from newspaper publishers including The New York Times Co. and Gannett, and online news sites that the government contends have faced particular harm from Google’s practices.

“Google extracted extraordinary fees at the expense of the website publishers who make the open internet vibrant and valuable,” government lawyers wrote in court papers. “As publishers generate less money from selling their advertising inventory, publishers are pushed to put more ads on their websites, to put more content behind costly paywalls, or to cease business altogether.”

Google disputes that it charges excessive fees compared to its competitors. The company also asserts the integration of its technology on the buy side, sell side and in the middle assures ads and web pages load quickly and enhance security. And it says customers have options to work with outside ad exchanges.

Google says the government’s case is improperly focused on display ads and banner ads that load on web pages accessed through a desktop computer and fails to take into account consumers’ migration to mobile apps and the boom in ads placed on social media sites over the last 15 years.

The government’s case “focuses on a limited type of advertising viewed on a narrow subset of websites when user attention migrated elsewhere years ago,” Google’s lawyers write in a pretrial filing. “The last year users spent more time accessing websites on the ‘open web,’ rather than on social media, videos, or apps, was 2012.”

The trial, which is expected to last several weeks, is taking place in a courthouse that rigidly adheres to traditional practices, including a resistance to technology in the courtroom. Cellphones are banned from the courthouse, to the chagrin of a tech press corps accustomed at the District of Columbia trial to tweeting out live updates as they happen.

Even the lawyers, and there are many on both sides, are limited in their technology. At a pretrial hearing Wednesday, Google’s lawyers made a plea to be allowed more than the two computers each side is permitted to have in the courtroom during trial. Brinkema rejected it.

“This is an old-fashioned courtroom,” she said.
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Athens — Greece plans to impose a 20-euro ($22) levy on cruise ship visitors to the islands of Santorini and Mykonos during the peak summer season, in a bid to avert overtourism, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said Sunday. 

Greece relies heavily on tourism, the main driver of the country’s economy which is still recovering from a decadelong crisis that wiped out a fourth of its output. 

But some of its most popular destinations, including Santorini, an idyllic island of quaint villages and pristine beaches with 20,000 permanent residents, risk being ruined by mass tourism. 

Speaking at a news conference a day after outlining his main economic policies for 2025, Mitsotakis clarified that excessive tourism was only a problem in a few destinations. 

“Greece does not have a structural overtourism problem… Some of its destinations have a significant issue during certain weeks or months of the year, which we need to deal with,” he said. 

“Cruise shipping has burdened Santorini and Mykonos, and this is why we are proceeding with interventions,” he added, announcing the levy. 

Greek tourism revenues stood at about 20 billion euros ($22 billion) in 2023 on the back of nearly 31 million tourist arrivals. 

In Santorini, protesters have called for curbs on tourism, as in other popular holiday destinations in Europe, including Venice and Barcelona. 

Part of the revenues from the cruise shipping tax will be returned to local communities to be invested in infrastructure, Mitsotakis said. 

The government also plans to regulate the number of cruise ships that arrive simultaneously at certain destinations, while rules to protect the environment and tackle water shortages must also be imposed on islands, he said. 

Greece also wants to increase a tax on short-term rentals and ban new licenses for such rentals in central Athens to increase the housing stock for permanent residents, Mitsotakis said Saturday. 

The government will provide more details on some of the measures Monday.
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FRANKFURT, Germany — Volkswagen is considering closing some factories in its home country for the first time in the German automaker’s 87-year history, saying it otherwise won’t meet the cost-cutting goals it needs to remain competitive.

CEO Oliver Blume also told employees Wednesday that the company must end a three-decade-old job protection pledge that would have prohibited layoffs through 2029.

The statements have stirred outrage among worker representatives and concern among German politicians.

Here are some things to know about the difficulties at one of the world’s best-known auto brands:

What is Volkswagen proposing and why?

Management says the company’s core brand that carries the company’s name needs to achieve 10 billion euros in cost savings by 2026. It recently became clear the Volkswagen Passenger Car division was not on track to do that after relying on retirements and voluntary buyouts to reduce the workforce in Germany.

With Europe’s car market smaller than before the coronavirus pandemic, Volkswagen says it now has more factory capacity than it needs — and carrying underused assembly lines is expensive.

Chief Financial Officer Arno Antlitz explained it like this to 25,000 workers who gathered at the company’s Wolfsburg home base: Europeans are buying around 2 million cars per year fewer than they did before the pandemic in 2019, when sales reached 15.7 million.

Since Volkswagen has roughly a quarter of the European market, that means “we are short of 500,000 cars, the equivalent of around two plants,” Antlitz told the workers.

“And that has nothing to do with our products or poor sales performance. The market simply is no longer there,” he said.

Does Volkswagen make money?

The Volkswagen Group, whose 10 brands include SEAT, Skoda, CUPRA and commercial vehicles, turned an operating profit of 10.1 billion euros ($11.2 billion) in the first half of this year, down 11% from last year’s first-half figure.

Higher costs outweighed a modest 1.6% increase in sales, which reached 158.8 billion euros but were held down by sluggish demand. Blume called it “a solid performance” in a “demanding environment.” Volkswagen’s luxury brands, which include Porsche, Audi and Lamborghini, are selling better than VW models.

So why is Volkswagen struggling?

The discussion about reducing costs focuses on the core brand and its workers in Germany. Volkswagen’s passenger car division recorded a 68% earnings drop in the second quarter, and its profit margin was a bare 0.9%, down from 4% in the first quarter.

One reason is the division took the bulk of the 1 billion euros that went to job buyouts and other restructuring costs. But growing costs, including for higher wages, and sluggish sales of the company’s line of electric vehicles are a deeper problem. On top of that, new, competitively priced competitors from China are increasing their share of the European market.

Volkswagen must sell more electric cars to meet ever-lower European Union emission limits that take effect starting next year. Yet the company is seeing lower profit margins from those vehicles due to high battery costs and weaker demand for EVs in Europe due to the withdrawal of consumer subsidies and the slow rollout of public charging stations.

Meanwhile, VW’s electric vehicles also face stiff competition in China from models made by local companies.

The world’s automakers are in a battle for the future, spending billions to pivot to lower-emission electric cars in a race to come up with vehicles that are competitive on price and have enough range to persuade buyers to switch. China has dozens of carmakers making electric cars more cheaply than their European equivalents. Increasingly, those cars are being sold in Europe.

Profits have also declined at Germany’s BMW and Mercedes-Benz thanks to the same pressures.

Why are VW’s proposed factory and job cuts a big deal in Germany?

Volkswagen has 10 assembly and parts plants in Germany, where 120,000 of its 684,000 workers worldwide are based. As Europe’s largest carmaker, the company is a symbol of the country’s consumer prosperity and economic growth after World War II.

It has never closed a German factory before. VW last closed a plant in 1988 in Westmoreland, Pennsylvania; its Audi division is in discussions about closing an underutilized plant in Belgium.

Far-right parties fueled by popular disenchantment with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s quarreling, three-party coalition government scored major gains in Sept. 1 elections in Thueringia and Saxony states, located in the former communist East Germany. Nationwide polls show the government’s approval rating at a low point. Plant closings are the last thing the Scholz government needs.

The chancellor spoke with VW management and workers after the possible plant closings became known but was careful to stress that the decision is a matter for the company and its workers.

Why hasn’t Volkswagen already made the cost cuts management wants?

Employee representatives have a lot of clout at Volkswagen. They hold half the seats on the board of directors. The state government, which is a part-owner of the company, also has two board seats — together with the employee representatives a majority — and 20% of the voting rights at the company. Lower Saxony Gov. Stephan Weil has said the company needs to address its costs but should avoid plant closings.

That means management will have to negotiate — a process that will take months.

What does the employee side say?

Managers at the employee assembly faced several minutes of boos, whistles and tooting horns before they could start their presentation on the potential explanation. “We are Volkswagen, you are not,” workers chanted.

Daniela Cavallo, who chairs the company works council representing employees, said the council “won’t go along with plant closings.” Reducing labor costs won’t turn around Volkswagen’s financial situation, she argued.

“Volkswagen’s problem is upper management isn’t doing its job,” Cavallo said. “There are many other areas where the company is responsible… We have to have competitive products; we don’t have the entry-level models in electric cars.”
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KAJIADO, Kenya — The blood, milk and meat of cattle have long been staple foods for Maasai pastoralists in Kenya, perhaps the country’s most recognizable community. But climate change is forcing the Maasai to contemplate a very different dish: fish.

A recent yearslong drought in Kenya killed millions of livestock. While Maasai elders hope the troubles are temporary and they will be able to resume traditional lives as herders, some are adjusting to a kind of food they had never learned to enjoy.

Fish were long viewed as part of the snake family due to their shape, and thus inedible. Their smell had been unpleasant and odd to the Maasai, who call semi-arid areas home.

“We never used to live near lakes and oceans, so fish was very foreign for us,” said Maasai Council of Elders chair Kelena ole Nchoi. “We grew up seeing our elders eat cows and goats.”

Among the Maasai and other pastoralists in Kenya and wider East Africa — like the Samburu, Somali and Borana — cattle are also a status symbol, a source of wealth and part of key cultural events like marriages as part of dowries.

But the prolonged drought in much of East Africa left carcasses of emaciated cattle strewn across vast dry lands. In early 2023, the Kenya National Drought Management Authority said 2.6 million livestock had died, with an estimated value of 226 billion Kenya shillings ($1.75 billion).

Meanwhile, increasing urbanization and a growing population have reduced available grazing land, forcing pastoralists to adopt new ways to survive.

In Kajiado county near Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, the local government is supporting fish farming projects for pastoralists — and encouraging them to eat fish, too.

Like many other Maasai women, Charity Oltinki previously engaged in beadwork, and her husband was in charge of the family’s herd. But the drought killed almost 100 of their cows, and only 50 sheep of their 300-strong flock survived.

“The lands were left bare, with nothing for the cows to graze on,” Oltinki said. “So, I decided to set aside a piece of land to rear fish and monitor how they would perform.”

The county government supplied her with pond liners, tilapia fish fingerlings and some feed. Using her savings from membership in a cooperative society, Oltinki secured a loan and had a well dug to ease the challenge of water scarcity.

After six months, the first batch of hundreds of fish was harvested, with the largest selling for up to 300 Kenyan shillings each ($2.30).

Another member of the Maasai community in Kajiado, Philipa Leiyan, started farming fish in addition to keeping livestock.

“When the county government introduced us to this fish farming project, we gladly received it because we considered it as an alternative source of livelihood,” Leiyan said.

The Kajiado government’s initiative started in 2014 and currently works with 600 pastoralists to help diversify their incomes and provide a buffer against the effects of climate change. There was initial reluctance, but the number of participants has grown from about 250 before the drought began in 2022.

“The program has seen some importance,” said Benson Siangot, director of fisheries in Kajiado county, adding that it also addresses issues of food insecurity and malnutrition.

The Maasai share their love for cattle with the Samburu, an ethnic group that lives in arid and semi-arid areas of northern Kenya and speaks a dialect of the Maa language that the Maasai speak.

The recent drought has forced the Samburu to look beyond cattle, too — to camels.

In Lekiji village, Abdulahi Mohamud now looks after 20 camels. The 65-year-old father of 15 lost his 30 cattle during the drought and decided to try an animal more suited to long dry spells.

“Camels are easier to rear as they primarily feed on shrubs and can survive in harsher conditions,” he said. “When the pasture dries out, all the cattle die.”

According to Mohamud, a small camel can be bought for 80,000 to 100,000 Kenyan shillings ($600 to $770) while the price of a cow ranges from 20,000 to 40,000 ($154 to $300).

He saw the camel’s resilience as worth the investment.

In a vast grazing area near Mohamud, 26-year-old Musalia Piti looked after his father’s 60 camels. The family lost 50 cattle during the drought and decided to invest in camels that they can sell whenever they need cattle for traditional ceremonies. Cows among the Samburu are used for dowries.

“You have to do whatever it takes to find cattle for wedding ceremonies, even though our herds may be smaller nowadays,” said Lesian Ole Sempere, a 59-year-old Samburu elder. Offering a cow as a gift to a prospective bride’s parents encourages them to declare their daughter as “your official wife,” he said.
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