• Canada and Mexico have secured a 30-day reprieve on tariffs from US President Donald Trump.
• In exchange for a tariff pause, Canada and Mexico agreed to boost border security and curb illegal activities.
• A 10% tariff on Chinese goods was not delayed, prompting China to slap retaliatory tariffs on the US.

US President Donald Trump has just shown the world how the Art of the Deal works.

In a matter of days, Trump threatened three key partners — China, Canada, and Mexico — with tariffs over illegal immigration and fentanyl. The threats paid off for the short term: He got a temporary deal with Canada and Mexico.

"President Trump has started his second term with his tariff guns blazing, and so far it has worked extremely well in achieving his policy goals," Rajiv Biswas, the CEO of Asia-Pacific Economics, a Singapore-based research firm, told Business Insider.

On Saturday, Trump, using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, imposed a 25% tariff on most goods from Canada and Mexico.

The tariffs were initially set to take effect on Tuesday. But after an early morning stock market downturn on Monday, talks with Canada and Mexico resulted in a 30-day tariff delay.

In exchange for the pause, Mexico agreed to deploy 10,000 National Guard troops to its northern border to curb illegal activities. Canada agreed to a set of initiatives targeting drug trafficking, money laundering, and border security.

"Mexico and Canada have immediately capitulated to the threat of US tariffs and agreed to enforce tougher border security measures, which is what President Trump had clearly requested them to do weeks ago, even prior to his inauguration," Biswas said.

The US is trading off, too

While Trump's deals with Canada and Mexico may have been swift, the tradeoff is ill will toward the US in both countries and uncertainty in the international trade order.

"The trade rules are valuable because they create a predictability and certainty for countries and for companies that do business in North America and in the world," said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Fore­­­ign Relations. "And to mess with those rules for no good reason is truly irresponsible."

"He has no evidence to show he is able to use tariffs to achieve significant concessions, economic or otherwise," he added.

Some experts said the agreements could have been achieved without threatening tariffs.

"Using the issues around fentanyl and illegal immigration to justify a trade war is somewhat bizarre," said Romel Mostafa, an assistant professor in economics and public policy at the Ivey Business School in Ontario. "It seems like we put the cart before the horse here, which is we basically went into this tariff imposition and counter-tariffs and then came to the discussion table."

Alden said the agreements are "not in the slightest" a significant concession because the Mexican government has long had an interest in cracking down fentanyl smuggling and better controlling its border. As for Canada, he pointed to data from the US Customs and Border Protection showing that the northern neighbor accounts for just 0.2% of US border fentanyl seizures.

"The bigger question is whether potentially we could come back again a month later and there could be other demands coming in," Mostafa said of Trump's actions.

China retaliates

While Canada and Mexico have secured brief reprieves from Trump's tariffs, China hasn't. Blanket tariffs of 10% on Chinese goods took effect at 12:01 a.m. ET on Tuesday.

China hit back swiftly, announcing tariffs on a range of US goods, including coal, liquefied natural gas, crude oil, and agricultural machinery.

"The US's unilateral imposition of tariffs seriously violates the rules of the World Trade Organization," China's Finance Ministry said in its tariffs announcement. "It is not only unhelpful in solving its own problems, but also undermines the normal economic and trade cooperation between China and the US."

China has said fentanyl is the US' own problem and that Beijing would challenge the tariffs at the World Trade Organization.

"The US needs to view and solve its own fentanyl issue in an objective and rational way instead of threatening other countries with arbitrary tariff hikes," a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said on Sunday.

Trump is taking the same brinkmanship approach to China, said Alex Capri, an international trade specialist and a senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore's business school.

"Trump will take the same approach to China and I think Beijing will, in fact, welcome this transactional way of doing business," Capri said.

• I've spent hours talking to college students about personal finance.
• Many of them don't fully understand how compounding works and, importantly, how to benefit from it.
• More high schools in the US are requiring students to take a personal finance class, but we need to keep talking about it.

Every January, Middlebury College invites me to its campus to talk to a group of students about money.

The guest lecture ranges between 90 and 120 minutes in length and is titled "Good Financial Hygiene — Lessons in Personal Finance."

I'm not a financial advisor, nor do I pretend to be, but in my decadelong career reporting on money and asking wealthy people, "What do you wish you'd known about money in your 20s?" I've learned some key lessons.

Most of these lessons — pay yourself first, automate your savings and investments, etc — are surprisingly simple and don't require a finance degree, or even a degree at all, to understand and use to your advantage. Had I understood them earlier and started building smart money habits in my late teens and early 20s, I'd be in a stronger financial position now at 32.

I try to convey that to the students: Time is on your side. Don't wait. Start now!

A two-part lecture: The reason we save is to invest

The crux of the lecture is that putting your money to work is a powerful way to grow your wealth over time.

But before we pull out the compound interest calculator and discuss investment strategies, we start with two prompts: How do you feel about money? How do you want to feel about money?

I ask them to pull out their notebooks and do two to three minutes of independent thinking.

The answers to the first prompt represent their starting point. Everyone has a different starting point — we all come from different financial backgrounds — but where they start from really isn't all that important. What matters is that they have some level of control over their trajectory, and they get from what they wrote down for prompt No. 1 to what they wrote down for prompt No. 2.

Next, we get into two components of personal finance that can impact trajectory: Saving — how to keep a portion of your income — and investing, which is the key to building wealth.

I acknowledge the importance of paying yourself first. When they ask how much, I point to the 50/30/20 rule of thumb, which suggests putting 50% of your income toward needs, 30% toward wants, and 20% toward savings. I emphasize that starting with a small savings rate of even just 1% is better than nothing.

Most students are familiar with the concept of budgeting, even if they don't actively budget. I challenge them to think about budgeting not as restrictive, as it's often portrayed, but as liberating. If they successfully divvy up their paycheck according to the 50/30/20 rule, for example, they have 30% of their income to spend on whatever fills their cup.

Part two is all about growing your savings by putting it to work, taking advantage of compound interest, and understanding that time is on your side as a young investor. Every year, without fail, this is the moment when the energy in the room shifts. Ears perk. Hands shoot up.

This is when I'm reminded that young people are fascinated by the concept of investing — and data shows this generation is curious enough to take action: Gen Z started investing at a much earlier age on average, 19, than baby boomers (35) and millennials (25), according to the 2024 Schwab Modern Wealth survey.

Still, a handful of my students don't fully understand how compounding works or how it relates to an investment account. They're smart kids, but chances are that they didn't engage with this material in high school: In 2022, just 23% of high school students in the US were required to take a personal finance class, up from 16% in 2018, according to research from Next Gen Personal Finance. That percentage has continued to increase: As of 2024, more than two-thirds of all states require personal finance classes for high school graduation.

We analyze compound interest charts that show just how much of an edge they have simply by starting young, including this one from the St. Louis Fed comparing an investor who starts at 25 and another who starts at 35. The one who starts early ends up with a significantly bigger portfolio, even though they invest for 20 fewer years than the investor who started at 35.

We also plug numbers into a compound interest calculator and figure out how much money they'd have to save a month to become millionaires by 50. It's often less than they think.

The tricky lesson to convey is how to actually take advantage of compounding: How to start investing.

This is where there seems to be a significant lack of understanding. The common misconceptions I've picked up on are:

• Investing is for rich people
• Investing is for people who know a lot about finance and economics
• Investing means buying individual stocks
• Investing is risky

As we discuss passive investing strategies and how anyone can invest in funds that track the S&P 500 with a small amount of money, I can sense the eagerness and excitement as the students start to understand that they can actually participate — that investing isn't just for rich people — and that they can contribute starting today.

I'm reminded every year I step into the classroom that there's an appetite for financial literacy. We just need to keep talking about it.

Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has launched a sweeping effort to cut programs, fire federal workers and slash government spending.

The future king's comments caught attention on TikTok: "George ate them up."

The grenade launcher was forced to stand for nine hours in a pine forest in Kherson, Ukraine, according to a report.

On January 29 67 people were killed when an American Airlines jet and an Army Black Hawk collided.

Ukraine hit back at claims from Russia last week that Moscow's forces had captured Novoyehorivka, a village in the eastern Luhansk region.

In 1934, German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl directed and produced the film "Triumph of the Will," funded directly by Adolf Hitler.

“This makes me feel like...I should ask for the other person’s boarding pass just to verify,” one Reddit user wrote of the potentially sketchy situation

Aubrey Schoenekase and Rachel Clifton met in high school

You can do better than this powerful and basic rabbit vibrator.

Donald Trump's immigration crackdown isn't just about making arrests. It's about choreography, photo ops, wardrobe changes and tough talk — all designed to discourage undocumented people from wanting to be in the U.S.

Why it matters: The underbelly of Trump's immigration strategy is, as one White House official told Axios, "the visuals" — showing force and creating a sense of urgency through viral videos and photos of top officials at the border and on raids.

---

Zoom in: That's why a casually dressed Pete Hegseth, Trump's new defense secretary, traveled to El Paso on Monday to meet with some of the 1,500 active-duty troops deployed to the southern border by a Trump executive order.

• In recent days the Department of Homeland Security touted DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, dressed like an ICE agent, joined a raid in New York City.
• On Sunday, Noem posted a video of herself on X, riding horseback with Border Patrol agents in the Southwest and wearing an olive green Border Patrol jacket and a cowboy hat. The post was praised by MAGA loyalists — and mocked by critics who called Noem's appearance "cosplay."
• Trump-supporting celebrities have gotten into the action as well. "Dr. Phil" McGraw embedded with ICE agents and border czar Tom Homan in a Chicago immigration raid, boosting media coverage (and drawing ridicule on "The Daily Show.")
• The White House's feed on X, meanwhile, is amplifying images of military airplanes ready to deport illegal immigrants. In the first week, it touted the number of deportations and featured mugshots of "the worst" criminals who were being expelled.

The big picture: Trump's team figures that the more undocumented immigrants who see such images and decide not to try entering the U.S. — or who "self-deport" without being arrested — the better.

• Beyond the U.S., the White House's messaging is aimed not just at discouraging migrants, but also smugglers and human traffickers.
• "The visuals are important," the White House official said, noting that the voter anger that helped get Trump elected was driven partly by "the visuals of hordes of people overwhelming [the] Border Patrol and storming the border."
• "We've been elected on a campaign promise to fix the border, and it would be foolish of us to sit back and just let the media tell our story."

Between the lines: It's not totally clear how much the pace of immigration arrests has picked up under Trump compared to the last days of the Biden administration.

• What is clear is that the arrests made since Trump took office two weeks ago have received more attention, even in the same cities.

One example: ICE agents, during a week-long surge of raids in Newark, N.J., in December, arrested 33 noncitizens, including a Mexican national convicted of sexual assault of a minor teen and a Brazil national convicted of murder. Those arrests got little attention.

• During Trump's first week in office, an ICE raid of a Newark seafood restaurant that netted three people drew international attention and condemnation from Newark Mayor Ras Baraka.
• One U.S. citizen — a Puerto Rican who was a military veteran — allegedly was harassed by federal agents, the mayor and the restaurant owner said.

Zoom out: The White House press office is regularly promoting the arrests of migrants with criminal records from the briefing room and on its official X page.

• ICE hit a high under Trump of more than 1,000 daily arrests on Jan. 27, according to an X post. The White House hasn't disclosed how many of those arrested have criminal backgrounds or are simply unauthorized to be in the U.S., which is only a civil offense.
• Trump's team has said it considers all undocumented immigrants to be criminals.
• "I know the last administration didn't see it that way, so it's a big culture shift in our nation to view someone who breaks our immigration laws as a criminal, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said last week.
• "But that's exactly what they are."

President Trump and Elon Musk promised to break Washington. No one thought it would look this easy.

Why it matters: Trump 2.0 has already laid waste to democratic norms, precedents and even some laws. Paralyzed by the breadth of disruption, many of the president's demoralized critics have been left sputtering: "He can't do that."

---

• And yet he is.

The big picture: With a popular mandate, unified control of Congress, a pliant Republican Party, a struggling opposition and the resources of the world's richest man, there are few guardrails to curb Trump's maximalist agenda.

• Short of a court order, Trump's opponents have so far failed to stop him from bending and breaking the limits of presidential authority.

Zoom in: The extraordinary empowerment of Musk, who spent at least $288 million to help elect Trump, has triggered new fears over the administration's lack of accountability to Congress.

• This weekend, Musk's allies orchestrated a physical takeover of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), ousting security officials who tried to stop them from accessing classified spaces.
• With USAID employees locked out of their accounts and Musk vowing to shutter the "evil" agency, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took over as acting administrator and notified Congress of a "potential reorganization."

Democrats reacted furiously, holding a press conference outside USAID headquarters to sound the alarm over what they called an "illegal" takeover of an independent agency authorized by Congress.

• "We don't have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk," said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).
• "You cannot wave away an agency that you don't like ... by literally storming into a building and taking over the servers," said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), who vowed to stall Trump's State Department nominations in protest.
• Trump, meanwhile, disputed that shutting down USAID would require an act of Congress — arguing it would be justified because the agency is rife with "fraud."

Between the lines: Beyond rhetoric, Democrats have limited recourse to slow Trump's agenda — especially with the party still grappling with an identity crisis in the wake of the disastrous 2024 election.

• House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) unveiled a plan Monday to try to stop Trump from freezing or diverting congressionally appropriated funds, namely by using leverage in government funding negotiations.
• But Democrats are fundamentally limited by life in the minority. Even if they reclaim a majority in the 2026 midterms, history suggests Trump officials will have no qualms about blowing off subpoenas.
• "We'll speak out. We will open investigations, and we will demand accountability," Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said Monday. "The one tool we do not have is the majority in this Congress. So that means our Republican colleagues have to say enough."

Reality check: So far, there's no sign Republicans will put up any resistance. In Trump's first two weeks in office, his administration has:

• Temporarily frozen all federal grants, loans and financial assistance, signaling a desire to challenge Congress' power of the purse.
• Offered "deferred resignations" to roughly 2 million federal workers, promising to pay them through September even though the government hasn't been funded past March 14.
• Fired at least 17 independent agency watchdogs, openly defying a statute requiring an explanation to Congress 30 days in advance.
• Fired federal prosecutors involved in Trump-related investigations and hinted at an additional purge for thousands of FBI agents.
• Signed an executive order directing the attorney general not to enforce the law Congress passed requiring TikTok to be sold by its Chinese parent company or face a U.S. ban.

What to watch: The courts acted swiftly to block Trump's most audacious Day One executive order: terminating birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants.

• Still, the judicial branch is inherently a slow-moving, last line of defense — one that Democrats can't always count on to curb Trump's executive encroachment.

Challenges to the U.S. government's checks and balances are likely to continue in the coming weeks, months and years.

• Trump officials are now discussing an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education, fulfilling a longtime conservative goal, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Joe Biden has left Washington, but he still seems to be living rent-free in Donald Trump's mind.

Why it matters: Trump has brought his grievance-laden playbook against Biden to the White House and frequently derides his Democratic rival — in speeches, executive orders, off-the-cuff comments and social media posts.

---

• Trump's criticisms follow a strategy he's used since he first took office in 2017: Accuse his predecessor of doing a terrible job (then it was Barack Obama, now Biden) and blame them for any problems or setbacks.

Driving the news: This time it began moments after Trump was sworn in on Jan. 20. With Biden sitting just a few feet away, Trump said in his inaugural speech that the outgoing president had left the country in "decline."

• Since then, Trump has issued dozens of executive orders, many of which he cast as remedies for problems he claimed Biden or his administration created.
• As investigators began looking into the deadly in-air collision near Reagan National Airport last week, Trump — without evidence — blamed the Biden administration's diversity programs for the crash.
• In a Truth Social post Sunday, Trump took aim again, announcing that he'd ordered airstrikes against the Islamic State in northern Somalia and accusing "Biden and his cronies" of not acting quickly enough to "get the job done."

That's just a sample of Trump's darts at Biden.

• He also trashed Biden's border policies as "stupid," and cast the former president as weak on everything from relations with China to disaster response and inflation.

Zoom in: It's not just Trump. His allies have made a sport of criticizing the Biden White House.

• Press secretary Karoline Leavitt last week attributed the increase in egg prices during Trump's first week in office to the Biden administration's "mass killing of more than 100 million chickens" amid concerns about bird flu.
• She also cast Biden as a president who slept on the job.
• Democrats counter that Trump's moves dismantling the federal government in D.C. threaten to become far more destructive than beneficial.

Between the lines: Trump and Biden, who was Obama's vice president, have had a bitter rivalry for years.

• Trump blames his many legal troubles on Biden and his administration's Justice Department.
• Even after Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and was replaced on the Democratic ticket by Kamala Harris, Trump continued to bash Biden.

What they're saying: "Anything bad that happens on your watch, you try to find someone else to blame, and Donald Trump has a good foil in Joe Biden," Arizona-based Republican political consultant Barrett Marson told Axios, referring to Biden's low favorability ratings.

• "Trump is untethered to facts and ... will blame Biden and Democrats for anything that goes wrong," Marson said.
• But he added that with Republicans' in full control of the federal government and the rapid pace at which Trump is dismantling many Biden administration policies, "he's going to run out of that excuse quickly."

Go deeper: Trump gets a jump on his presidency — with Biden's help

President Trump and many Republicans are steadfastly defending Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Trump's pick to lead Health and Human Services. But some MAGA loyalists aren't convinced — they're wary of the influence of Kennedy's closest adviser, a longtime Democratic activist.

Driving the news: For weeks, conservative-leaning groups, activists and policy groups have been privately sharing links to Kennedy aide Stefanie Spear's past social media and blog posts that show her support for Democratic causes, three people familiar with the messages tell Axios.

---

• Spear has worked closely with Kennedy, a former Democrat, for several years. They've known each other for more than a decade, drawn together by their activism on environmental issues and skepticism about vaccines.
• The chatter among her conservative critics casts Spear — who functions as Kennedy's executive assistant, scheduler and manager — as a potential gatekeeper to Kennedy.
• "This woman just has every appearance of being a disaster from a conservative perspective," one person from a conservative-leaning organization told Axios.

What they're saying: Spear did not respond to several requests for comment.

• A spokesperson for Kennedy said Spear's past Democratic activism hasn't been an issue and that she's "a team player," not an obstacle.
• "She is crucial in fulfilling the promise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump to Make America Healthy Again and end the chronic disease epidemic," spokesperson Katie Miller said in a text.

Zoom in: Even so, Trump's team has decided that Spear would not be Kennedy's chief of staff at HHS, if he's confirmed by the Senate, according to the Wall Street Journal.

• Instead, Spear is in line to be deputy chief of staff and senior counsel to the HHS secretary. Kennedy's chief of staff would be Heather Flick, a department veteran who served in Trump's first term.

Catch up quick: Spear was the traveling press secretary and principal communications staffer on Kennedy's long-shot presidential campaign.

• Kennedy began his campaign as a Democrat, then ran as an independent before dropping out and endorsing Trump.
• Spear is "a safety blanket for Bobby," said one person familiar with their relationship.
• She's one of the few former Kennedy campaign staffers being considered for a role in the new administration.

State of play: Kennedy has just finished two days of of often-heated confirmation hearings before separate Senate's committees. Spear was among the Kennedy supporters at the hearings.

• Kennedy received pushback from several senators for his past statements questioning vaccine safety, including childhood inoculations for polio and measles.
• Among those expressing skepticism about Kennedy was Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Cassidy said he wasn't sure he could back an HHS nominee who "spent decades criticizing vaccines, and who's financially vested in finding fault with vaccines."
• Cassidy is also on the Senate Finance Committee, which also questioned Kennedy. That panel is scheduled to vote on Kennedy's confirmation Tuesday.

‘We’re picking a fight with our most reliable and pleasant friend? The labradoodle of allies?’ joked Stewart

© The Daily Show/Comedy Central

The top clubs largely resisted the sort of excess spending that has characterised past windows, while middle-class sides like Aston Villa are closing the gap

© Getty Images

Donald Trump's press secretary could not confirm Elon Musk's security clearance as a "special government employee."

© AP

Dogs lined up in San Francisco to receive free vaccines on Monday to combat an outbreak of parvovirus

© Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, signed a bill Monday aimed at shielding the identities of doctors who prescribe abortion drugs after a New York physician was indicted for prescribing abortion pills to a pregnant minor in Louisiana.

The new law, which is effective immediately, allows for doctors' names to be omitted from abortion pill bottles and instead replaced with the name of their respective healthcare practices.

This comes after a grand jury in West Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, indicted New York physician Margaret Carpenter, her company and an associate on Friday for allegedly using telemedicine to prescribe abortion pills to a girl.

Hochul said she would not sign an extradition request to send Carpenter to Louisiana.

NEW YORK DOCTOR INDICTED FOR ALLEGEDLY PRESCRIBING ABORTION PILL TO PATIENT VIA TELEMEDICINE IN LOUISIANA

Authorities in Louisiana learned the name of the doctor because it was listed on the medication label.

"After today, that will no longer happen," Hochul said at the bill signing.

The case appears to be the first time a doctor has been charged for allegedly sending abortion pills to a patient in another state since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022 by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Louisiana prosecutors said the girl experienced a medical emergency after taking the medication and was transported to a hospital. The girl's mother was also charged and turned herself in to police on Friday.

It is unclear how far along the girl was in her pregnancy.

TEXAS AG SUES NEW YORK DOCTOR WHO ALLEGEDLY PRESCRIBED ABORTION PILLS TO WOMAN IN LONE STAR STATE

District Attorney Tony Clayton, who is prosecuting the Louisiana case, said the arrest warrant for Carpenter is "nationwide" and that she could be arrested in GOP-led states with abortion restrictions.

Physicians in Louisiana, which has a near-total abortion ban, could face up to 15 years in prison, $200,000 in fines and the loss of their medical license if they are convicted of performing abortions, including via medication.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Hochul said she would push for another piece of legislation this year requiring pharmacists to follow doctors' requests to leave their name off a prescription label.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against Carpenter in December over allegations she sent abortion pills to a woman in the Lone Star State, though criminal charges were not brought in that case.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.