Berlin / AFP The EU won’t sacrifice its high food safety standards for better US auto market access in a transatlantic trade deal being negotiated, a German minister said. The comments by Agriculture Minister Christian Schmidt were the latest criticism of the thorny negotiations toward sealing a wide-ranging pact that would create a free-trade zone covering 850 million people. …

  Washington / AFP   US employers cut back hiring in April in the wake of the economy’s sharp downturn, raising worries of a protracted slowdown in the world’s largest economy. Net new jobs fell unexpectedly to the lowest level in seven months, with just 160,000 additional jobs generated, over 40,000 less than economists predicted, the Labour Department reported. That was …

  Bloomberg The dollar’s biggest gain in six months may run out out fuel as reports from sectors of the U.S. economy keep pointing to sluggish growth. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index that tracks the currency versus 10 peers rallied this week from a one-year low, shrugging off a patchy jobs report. The employment data prompted Goldman Sachs Group Inc. …