Business
Lesotho, a Small African Nation, Expects a Big Hit From Trump’s Tariffs
The nation that the Trump administration slapped with the heftiest tariff this week is a small, rural, landlocked country in southern Africa that is among the world’s poorest.
Lesotho, which makes denim that goes into American-branded jeans, was hit with a 50 percent tariff. It was among several lower-income countries on the continent that were shocked by levies high above the minimum 10 percent imposed on nearly all of America’s trading partners. Madagascar, where three-quarters of the population lives in poverty, now will be met with a 47 percent tariff when its apparel, vanilla and other exports enter the United States.
Products from Algeria, Angola, Botswana, Libya and Mauritius all now have tariffs above 30 percent, as does South Africa, which has come under particular attack by the Trump administration.
Mr. Trump has justified the across-the-board tariffs by declaring that the world trading system has played the United States for a chump who picked up the tab for the world’s moochers.
But Lesotho is hardly a big player in global trade: It imported less than $3 million in goods from the United States and exported $240 million there last year.
The tariffs come as much of the African continent is already reeling. Just weeks ago, the Trump administration ended billions of dollars in aid to Africa that undergirded many countries’ health care systems and disaster relief efforts.
At the same time, governments across the continent are coping with a foreign debt load that exceeds $1.1 trillion. Many are spending more on repaying their loans than on health care or education.
For the most part, manufactured exports from Africa to the United States are minuscule. But to countries like Lesotho, the impact of tariffs is enormous. Exports of denim and diamonds make up more than a tenth of the country’s gross domestic product.
This will “devastate the economy,” said Jacques Nel, head of Africa Macro at Oxford Economics, a research firm. Lesotho is already a poor country. It has a population of two million and its entire national output is about $2 billion a year, with an annual per capita income of $975.
“This has nothing to do with actual tariffs,” Mr. Nel said. “They can’t import a lot from the U.S., because they don’t have a lot of money.”
The textile industry is Lesotho’s biggest private employer and produces its number-one export. The sector was nurtured after the United States passed the African Growth and Opportunity Act in 2000. Designed to boost manufacturing across the continent, the law removed most duties on goods from sub-Saharan Africa. That law expires later this year, although Mr. Trump effectively ended it this week.
Lesotho’s factories have made garments — particularly denim — for manufacturers like Levi’s and Wrangler. And although Mr. Trump recently called Lesotho a country that “nobody has ever heard of,” his own Trump-branded Greg Norman golf shirts feature labels that say “Made in Lesotho.”
Lesotho’s trade minister, Mokhethi Shelile, said the country has 11 factories that employ 12,000 workers. Seventy percent of what they produce is exported to the United States. “We are a small economy,” Mr. Shelile said. “We just have to speak to the U.S. administration because the tariff is not based on facts.”
Other top exporters of textiles in Africa, like Madagascar (47 percent tariff) and Kenya (10 percent), will also feel the sting.
Because South Africa does more trade with the United States, exporting automobiles, agricultural goods and more, it will be most affected, said Thea Fourie at S&P Global Market Intelligence.
African nations whose major exports are energy or certain critical minerals will be spared because the administration has exempted those items from tariffs.
While the United States is imposing tariffs on the relatively small amount of goods from Africa — just $39 billion worth last year — China has been trying to encourage trade. It eliminated all import duties on products from 33 African countries in December.
A bigger concern is the knock-on effects that the tariffs are expected to have on the global economy. The outlook has dimmed over the past week and analysts are expecting slower growth.
“Even African countries not facing very high tariffs are going to be suffering,” said Jayati Ghosh, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
As is the case with any global downturn, the poorest countries will feel the sharpest effects. Worsening economic prospects could slow trade with other partners like China and Europe. It also discourages investors.
If inflation prompts central banks to raise interest rates, African countries with large debt burdens are in for a double whammy. Their loan payments — most of which are priced in dollars — will increase at the same time that their ability to earn foreign exchange through exports is crippled.
Mavis Owusu-Gyamfi, the president and chief executive of the African Center for Economic Transformation, said the only way forward is to develop regional trade networks within the continent, a long-running goal.
The continent has to look for “opportunities to build intra-African trade,” she said.
Zimasa Matiwane contributed reporting from Lesotho.
Ford Motor Co. is suing a prominent Los Angeles lemon law firm for allegedly inflating their fees by as much as 7,000%, the company’s latest attempt to crack down on California attorneys who it says are exploiting the state’s unique law to protect consumers from defective cars.
Quill & Arrow, a personal injury firm that represents drivers suing over so-called “lemons” — vehicles with significant, unfixable manufacturing flaws — has long been a thorn in the side of Ford. Since 2021, Ford said its has paid them more than $100 million, roughly half in attorney fees.
That profit, Ford alleges in a federal lawsuit filed Thursday, came from billing records that were “utter fabrications.”
Quill & Arrow used an overseas “army” of low-paid, non-lawyers to help file thousands of lemon lawsuits and then pretended the work was done by California attorneys, who billed as much as $950 per hour, Ford alleged in its complaint.
Ford claims that the bulk of the work was actually done by non-lawyers in countries such as Mexico and the Philippines, who got paid as little as $13 per hour.
Quill & Arrow was founded in 2019 by attorneys Kevin Jacobson and Jonathan Shirian, according to the firm’s website, which touts recovering $500 million in lemon law payouts. The partners called Ford’s lawsuit “nothing more than an attempt to silence firms who would dare to hold them responsible and seek justice for consumers.”
“It grossly mischaracterizes the facts and the claim that Quill & Arrow created fabricated attorney billing records is absurd,” the firm said in a statement.
California’s lemon law, considered one of the strongest consumer protections in the nation, allows drivers to get a refund or replacement of a broken car if the manufacturer can’t fix it. If the driver is not satisfied, they can sue.
If the driver wins, the law allows attorneys to collect their fees from the car maker — rather than take a percentage of the client’s winnings, as is common in personal injury cases. This fee structure, Ford argues, has turned the law into a bonanza for plaintiff attorneys. The longer the case drags on, the company argues, the more the law firm can reap in profit.
Ford alleges the firm intentionally slowed down its clients’ cases to drive up their billable hours, instructing drivers not to communicate with Ford and pushing them toward filing a lawsuit.
“California’s Lemon Laws are in need of reform and the courts need to exercise more oversight, given the fraud we continue to expose,” said Doug Lampe, counsel at Ford, in a statement. The law is “being blatantly abused by the lemon law plaintiffs lawyers, the bar is not policing its own and the courts need to monitor fee awards with far more skepticism and scrutiny.”
The cases, he said, “have become about the lawyers for the lawyers.”
Lemon law cases have exploded in California in the last decade from about 4,500 cases in 2015 to roughly 30,000 in 2024, according to an analysis from the Assembly Judiciary. These cases, officials warned, “are poised to cripple the entirety of California’s civil justice system.”
In 2024, the legislature tightened the state’s lemon law, requiring additional steps before a driver could sue. The bill seems to have put little dent in the caseload: Lemon lawsuits surged to record levels the following year.
Ford’s lawsuit marks the second attempt by one of America’s largest car manufacturers to go on the offense against lemon law attorneys in Southern California.
Ford sued a cohort of local lemon law firms in May 2025, accusing attorneys of collecting at least $100 million in “phantom legal fees” by billing for hours they never worked. The case, which was brought under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, alleged lawyers worked together to file a flurry of fraudulent cases with billable hours that defied logic.
A partner at Knight Law Group, an L.A.-based lemon law firm, once billed an “ostensibly heroic but physically impossible” 57.5-hour workday, Ford alleged.
Knight Law Group denied inflating their billing, calling the suit a “thinly veiled attempt to silence firms who would dare to hold them responsible and seek justice for consumers.”
A judge threw out the suit in March on the grounds that lawyers were protected under the 1st Amendment from being sued for the content of their lawsuits unless the case was proved fraudulent. Ford says it plans to appeal.
After Quill found about the Knight Law Group case, Ford alleged, Quill dedicated a team to “scrubbing” their own timesheets of “impossible time entries.”
Ranch dressing is having a moment thanks to the World Cup and Kraft is ready to meet it.
The company said Thursday that it is working on a “TSA Compliant Ranch” for those looking to travel with the quintessentially American condiment. The announcement follows the influx of social media videos showing international soccer fans sampling the dressing for the first time.
“Some visitors leave with souvenirs. Others leave with America’s favorite dressing,” Kraft wrote in a caption accompanying an AI image of a TSA-approved clear bag packed with ranch dressing packets posted to social media. The image showed the bag — complete with a luggage tag resembling a ranch dressing bottle — placed in an airport security screening bin along with other travel essentials.
Additional details will be announced later, the company said.
TSA has also leaned into ranch’s apparent newfound popularity among international travelers, providing some helpful tips (and warnings) on social media.
“If you’re visiting for a very large sporting event & you happen to discover RANCH while you’re here… pls pack it in your CHECKED BAG on your way home,” the agency posted on Instagram Tuesday. It also asked travelers to “avoid chugging your ranch outside security” lines.
“Who knew dip-lomacy could be achieved through addressing the obvious: ranch is the king of condiments,” TSA wrote in the caption accompanying its carousel of humorous ranch-related quips. “If you’re traveling within the U.S., make sure to keep your carry-on sauces to 3.4 oz or less and place any larger containers in your checked bags.”
“Some heroes wear capes. Others bring ranch,” it added.
According to 1987 Times reports, ranch dressing was invented by Steve Henson, who opened the Hidden Valley Guest Ranch in Santa Barbara in the mid-1950s with his wife, Gayle. The unnamed condiment originally mixed herbs and spices with buttermilk and mayonnaise and its popularity with guests led to it being jarred so they could take some home. The more travel-friendly powdered form followed.
A landmarked downtown Los Angeles apartment building designed by famed Los Angeles architect John Parkinson is on the market as its owners face foreclosure.
Residences in the Metropolitan, a 10-story tower built in 1913, are nearly filled with tenants but its ground floor retail spaces on Broadway and 5th Street are unoccupied, as are other street-level stores in downtown’s Historic Core.
The historic building was once considered one of the best in the city and is owned by the Fallas family, which operated a chain of value-priced clothing stores based in Gardena including one called Fallas Paredes in the Metropolitan.
Fallas-Paredes at 449 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90013.
(Google Maps)
Around 2011, Michael Fallas, who once worked in family’s downtown store as a stock boy, converted the upstairs floors from offices to apartments while continuing to operate Fallas Paredes. The store closed more than five years ago in the wake of a 2018 filing by its parent company for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Earlier this month in state Superior Court, a special servicer representing Fallas’ lender asked for a judicial foreclosure of the property, alleging that Fallas had stopped making payments on a $32 million loan dating to 2017. After leasing the property for years, Fallas bought the building in the 1990s.
Fallas didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The location of the Metropolitan where the buildings stands was hailed in a Times story in 1912, saying “it is regarded by many realty men as the most valuable piece of real estate in Los Angeles.”
The building today is recognized as a city historic-cultural monument because “Broadway became the commercial center of the Southland, a title it retained until well after World War II,” with its development, the city said. One of the architects who designed the Metropolitan in the Beaux-Arts style was John Parkinson, who is credited with designing such well-known local structures as City Hall, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and Union Station.
Notable tenants in the Metropolitan have included the Los Angeles Public Library, Owl Drug Co., variety store J.J. Newberry and real estate company Janns Investment Co., which sold the land where UCLA is built and developed Westwood Village, among other Los Angeles neighborhoods.
In recent years, the buildings around the Metropolitan have struggled to keep retail tenants after a spurt of residential conversions of historic buildings starting in the early 2000s brought commerce to the neighborhood. Many downtown businesses have struggled since the pandemic reduced occupancy in offices downtown and reduced the flow of visitors.
“The lack of bodies on the street is generally hurting downtown, and that’s one of the reasons that has building has problems,” said downtown real estate broker Hal Bastian, who lives in the Historic Core.
There are close to 1,000 residential units in historic buildings at the intersection of Broadway and 5th Street, Bastian said, but all the ground floor stores are closed. Drug stores there suffered substantial losses from shoplifting he said, and now, “our challenge on Broadway is leasing.”
The 88 apartments in the Metropolitan are 91% rented, according to a listing for the property by the Zacuto Group, which also touts its roof deck with pool, fitness center and barbecue grills. No sale price is set.
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