The Commerce Department published notices in the May 22 Federal Register on the following AD/CV duty proceedings (any notices that announce changes to AD/CV duty rates, scope, affected firms, or effective dates will be detailed in another ITT article):

The Commerce Department issued the preliminary results of its antidumping duty administrative review on solid fertilizer grade ammonium nitrate from Russia (A-821-811). The agency preliminarily calculated zero percent AD duty rates for JSC Acron and MCC EuroChem. If the agency's finding is continued in the final results, ammonium nitrate from these companies entered between April 2012 and March 2013 will not be assessed AD duties, and future entries from these companies will not be subject to an AD duty cash deposit requirements until further notice.

The Commerce Department announced the opportunity to request administrative reviews by April 30 for producers and exporters subject to nine antidumping duty orders and one countervailing duty orders with April anniversary dates.

Mexico's Diario Oficial of March 19 lists notices from the Secretary of the Economy, Secretary of Agriculture, and Secretary of Finance as follows:

Policy and legal questions can obscure underlying civil rights issues that big data exacerbates, said experts at a New America Foundation event. “Whether we use the language of big data or privacy or civil rights, the questions are the same,” said Corinne Yu, managing policy director of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “We're talking about criminal justice, we're talking about jobs, we're talking about financial inclusion, we're talking about what kind of society we want to be in.” Big data has accelerated established discriminatory tactics such as profiling -- whether by police officers, the government or retailers, said American Civil Liberties Union Legislative Director Chris Calabrese. This intersection of big data analytics and these discriminatory practices “is a deep and fertile terrain,” he said.

The Drug Enforcement Administration temporarily added three synthetic cathinones to Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, applying strict controls to the import and export of the chemicals because of their potential for abuse. The agency says products containing synthetic cathinones are being sold at smoke shops, head shops, convenience stores, adult book stores, gas stations, and on the internet, and are marketed as “research chemicals,” “jewelry cleaner,” “stain remover,” “plant food or fertilizer,” “insect repellants,” or “bath salts.” The chemicals have no known medical use, said DEA. The final order is effective Feb. 7, and will be in effect for up to three years pending completion of a permanent scheduling order.

The Jan. 29 issue of the CBP Customs Bulletin (Vol. 48, No. 4), CBP published two notices of modification of rulings and treatment regarding Brussels sprouts and reagent kits.

The Commerce Department issued its quarterly list of (i) completed antidumping and countervailing duty scope rulings and (ii) anticircumvention determinations. The following list covers completed scope and anticircumvention rulings for the period July 1, 2013, through Sept. 30, 2013:

The Court of International Trade ordered the Commerce Department to rethink the 308.33% antidumping duty rate assigned to Blue Field in the 2010-11 administrative review of preserved mushrooms from China (A-570-851). Blue Field said the unusually high AD duty rate, which was calculated from data and not assigned as punishment, was skewed by the agency’s valuation of its rice straw and cow manure inputs. The high “surrogate values,” used because Commerce doesn’t trust Chinese input prices, drove up the agency’s estimate of Blue Field’s domestic prices, which resulted in the company’s U.S. prices looking extremely cheap (and dumped) by comparison. Blue Field pointed out that the Colombian rice straw prices used by Commerce were higher than Colombian prices for actual rice, and that the Colombian fertilizer prices used by Commerce were not specific to cow manure, and approached the price of hamburger meat. The court agreed that something was fishy with Commerce’s numbers, and remanded for agency reconsideration.

On Nov. 1 the Foreign Agricultural Service posted the following GAIN reports: