Cobalt, a chemical element crucial for making lithium-ion batteries, continues to be mined using child labor in the Democratic Republic of Congo. With the DRC producing two-thirds of the world’s cobalt and demand expected to increase, companies are struggling to clean up their supply chains, CNN reported.

Google is banning the development of artificial-intelligence software that can be used in weapons, chief executive Sundar Pichai said last week, setting strict new ethical guidelines for how the tech giant should conduct business in an age of increasingly powerful AI.

For all his bluster about trade wars, President Trump seems willing to push China only so far: Witness the deal last week to grant Chinese telecom giant ZTE a reprieve from harsh American penalties. The reason is likely to lead straight to Iowa soybean and corn farmers like Benjamin Schmidt.

Behind the daily skirmishes over tariffs, the U.S. and China are gearing up for a longer-term battle between two very different systems of innovation. To win, America may need to start using some of its rival’s weapons.

President Donald Trump’s tariff on imported solar panels has led U.S. renewable energy companies to cancel or freeze investments of more than $2.5bn in large installation projects, along with thousands of jobs, the developers told Reuters.

The CEO of Taiwan’s Foxconn, which assembles Apple iPhones and other products for tech companies, said Wednesday that Washington’s dispute with China is over technology rather than trade.

Mexico will import more pork products from Europe after imposing a 20 percent tariff on U.S. pork legs and shoulders in retaliation to steel tariffs, Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said on Tuesday.

Several of the world's largest container shipping companies have imposed emergency bunker surcharges upon their customers in the past two weeks, seeking to claw back revenues lost to rising fuel bills caused by the jump in crude prices in recent months.