Afternoon Coffee: Medius-Wax Digital deal recap; Connecticut to try different approach to procurement; U.S.-China trade deal finally on horizon?

China’s President Xi Jinping has said he wants to work out an initial trade pact with the U.S. to avoid a trade war, but added a rider that his country was also not afraid to retaliate when necessary, reports Reuters.

Xi was fielding questions from representatives of the New Economy Forum organized by Bloomberg LP in Beijing. “We want to work for a ‘phase one’ agreement on the basis of mutual respect and equality,” Xi told representatives of an international forum, according to a pool report.

“When necessary we will fight back, but we have been working actively to try not to have a trade war. We did not initiate this trade war and this is not something we want.”

Medius-Wax Digital: Week in Review

Here’s the coverage of the deal that rippled through the procurement technology world this past week:

Railway strike may impact steel, copper movement between Canada and U.S.

Around 3,200 workers at the Canadian National Railway went on strike Tuesday over issues, including working conditions and medical benefits, posing a risk to the movement of the supply of steel, copper, aluminum and zinc between the U.S. and Canada.

Union Pacific Corp., the largest freight rail provider in the U.S.’s western region, has said that it would stop accepting shipments into or from CN Railway’s Canada locations until operations returned to normal.

Connecticut to try “different” approach to procurement

The State of Connecticut is all set to try out a “problem-based” procurement process, according to the state’s Chief Information Officer Mark Raymond.

In an interview to StateScoop, he said that procurement processes of state governments often get mired in inflexible and outmoded processes, which also discourage competition and can lead to the purchase of suboptimal solutions. Connecticut’s approach was now an attempt to reverse this trend.

“We’ve launched our first digital government procurement and it was a problem-based approach, which said ‘Here’s ten pages, not 200, tell me how you’re going to help us solve this problem,’” Raymond is quoted as saying.