15 April,2025 08:21 AM IST | Washington | Agencies
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One during a flight to Washington DC. Pic/AFP
US President Donald Trump has said that no one is "getting off the hook" on trade after his administration appeared to dial down pressure on China by issuing a notice exempting certain high-tech products from his "reciprocal" tariffs.
Trump on Sunday said that there were no exceptions to the tariffs, as smartphones, laptops and other products were still subject to an existing 20 per cent duty and the items were being moved to a different tariff "bucket", as per Al Jazeera. "We will not be held hostage by other Countries, especially hostile trading Nations like China," Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.
China's President Xi Jinping and Vietnam's General Secretary To Lam are welcomed by children at the Presidential Palace in Hanoi
Speaking to reporters on board Air Force One later on Sunday, Trump said he would announce new tariffs on semiconductors this week. "The tariffs will be in place in the not distant future," Trump said, adding that there would be flexibility for some companies in the sector. US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said earlier that the reprieve for high-tech products, many of which are manufactured in China, would be temporary and that semiconductor tariffs would be in place within weeks.
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Singapore has downgraded its gross domestic product (GDP) growth forecast for 2025 to 0-2 per cent, the Ministry of Trade and Industry said on Monday, citing the impact of US President Donald Trump's tariffs. The Monetary Authority of Singapore, the de facto central bank, has also loosened monetary policy for the second time in a row as economic fears rise due to the trade war brewing between the US and China.
China's exports jumped 12.4 per cent in March from a year earlier as companies rushed to beat increases in US tariffs. Imports fell 4.3 per cent, the country's customs administration
reported.
Visiting Vietnam to enhance political and trade ties amid a major tariff row with the US, Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday said that China will ensure continuity and stability in its neighbourhood diplomacy and jointly advance the modernisation of Asia. Xi arrived in Hanoi on his first visit abroad after US President Donald Trump slapped steep tariffs against China while pausing levies on a host of other countries, including Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia - the three countries on the Chinese president's current itinerary.
President Donald Trump is hosting Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, at the White House on Monday as the small Central American nation becomes a critical lynchpin of the US administration's mass deportation operation. Since March, El Salvador has accepted from the US more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants - whom the Trump administration has accused of gang activity and violent crimes - and placed them inside the country's notorious maximum-security gang prison just outside of the capital, San Salvador. It is also holding a Maryland man who the administration admits was wrongly deported but has not been returned to the US, despite court orders to do so.
President Trump bitterly attacked â60 Minutes' shortly after CBS broadcast stories on Ukraine and Greenland on Sunday, saying the network was out of control and should "pay a big price" for going after him. "Almost every week, 60 Minutes ... mentions the name TRUMP in a derogatory and defamatory way, but this Weekend's BROADCAST tops them all," the president said on his Truth Social.
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