The Border Trade Alliance urged House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., in a Feb. 26 letter, to work with his congressional colleagues to prevent a lapse in appropriations for federal agencies in early March, saying a government shutdown would “exacerbate an already precarious situation at the U.S. southern border.”
The Federal Maritime Commission added Hede (Hong Kong) International Shipping and removed COSCO Shipping Lines (Europe) from its list of controlled carriers, the agency said in a Feb. 26 notice.
The Bureau of Industry and Security recently released a fact sheet to mark the one-year anniversary of its Disruptive Technology Strike Force, the group formed with DOJ to pool resources toward investigations and prosecutions of high-priority export control cases. In the last year, the group has charged 14 cases involving alleged sanctions, export control violations or illegal transfers, issued temporary denial orders against 29 entities and helped “numerous parties” be placed on the Entity List and the Specially Designated Nationals List. It also said it recently added enforcement teams in the Eastern District of North Carolina, the Western District of Texas, and the Southern District of Georgia.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and members of the President’s Export Council will travel to Bangkok March 13-14 to “identify opportunities” to strengthen economic, trade and supply chain ties between the U.S. and Thailand, the Commerce Department announced last week. Raimondo will also use the trip to participate in a hybrid Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity ministerial with IPEF partners, the first such meeting since the negotiations ended on the proposed IPEF Clean Economy Agreement, Fair Economy Agreement and overarching Agreement on IPEF, and also the first since the signing ceremony for the IPEF Supply Chain Agreement in November (see 2402010026).
The Commerce Department will soon request public comments on the risks, benefits and potential policy actions it should take to address advanced artificial intelligence models with widely available model weights, including how they may affect U.S. national security. The agency said “open-weight models” could make AI tools more available to small companies, researchers, nonprofits and others, which would “accelerate the diffusion of AI’s benefits” but also “increase the scale and likelihood of harms from advanced models.”
The State Department approved a potential military sale to Taiwan worth $75 million, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency said Feb. 21. The sale includes “Advanced Tactical Data Link System Upgrade Planning” and related equipment, and the principal contractor hasn’t yet been determined.
The State Department is offering rewards of up to $15 million for information leading to the arrest or conviction of people with ties to ransomware attacks carried out by LockBit and the group’s key leaders, the agency said this week. The announcement was made alongside new Treasury Department sanctions that designated two Russian nationals for their ties to the Russia-based ransomware group and its cyberattacks (see 2402200033). Since 2020, LockBit has carried out over 2,000 attacks, costing more than $144 million in ransom payments, the State Department said.
More than 100 government officials from over 25 countries met in Mexico City last week as part of the fourth meeting of the Semiconductor Informal Exchange Network (SIEN), discussing efforts to expand the semiconductor supply chain, the State Department said Feb. 21. Industry officials and academic leaders also used the meetings to speak about “challenges and opportunities” in the semiconductor sector, the agency said. The State Department said the countries involved in SIEN will hold a tabletop exercise later this year to “increase policymakers’ ability to address disruptions in the global semiconductor ecosystem.”
A federal government payment website, Pay.gov, will be offline Feb. 24 from 6 p.m. to midnight EST for "system testing and maintenance," the State Department's Directorate of Defense Trade Controls said. The outage will affect users paying their registration fees during this window. Users should direct questions and concerns to pay.gov customer support at 800-624-1373, option 2, or pay.gov.clev@clev.frb.org.
Maersk violated the Shipping Act by failing to keep its "automated tariff system" open for public inspection, shipper OL USA said in a complaint filed with the Federal Maritime Commission on Feb. 14. The shipper accused Maersk of being "deceptive" and its tariff platform of lacking "functionality," adding that it was "unable to verify Maersk’s representations regarding the substance of its tariffs."