Economic fears sent world markets into a dive

Stock markets around the world fell yesterday, a day after President Trump refused to rule out the possibility that his trade policies may cause a recession this year. The S&P 500 was down by nearly 3 percent, the sharpest drop in months. Several retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. also went into effect. Here’s what to know:

Stocks tumbled

Many stocks dropped yesterday as nervous investors reacted to a Trump interview that aired on Sunday in which he described “a period of transition” for the U.S. economy, and suggested more tariffs could come. Prices also plunged for several large tech companies, whose stocks have an outsize influence. Markets in Europe and Asia were under pressure, too, but the declines paled in comparison with losses on Wall Street.

Global effects

In a report, analysts at JPMorgan Chase warned that the possibility of a U.S. slowdown had resulted in a “materially higher risk of a global recession this year because of extreme U.S. policies.” They put the probability of a downturn at 40 percent.

Several countries issued their own tariffs

The Canadian province of Ontario imposed a 25 percent tariff on energy exports to Michigan, Minnesota and New York. The move will cost businesses and residents in each state up to $400,000 per day, Ontario’s top official said.

Beijing imposed tariffs on many farm products from the U.S. Japanese officials are expected to visit Washington this week for talks before tariffs hit exports from Japan. Trump is set to issue tomorrow a 25 percent tariff on all steel and aluminum imports, but some metals businesses said that was good news.

Mark Carney’s plan for Canada

Mark Carney, a former central banker, was swept into the leadership of Canada’s Liberal Party on Sunday night and is expected to be sworn in as prime minister this week. He will soon have to call a general election, in which the Liberals will face the Conservative Party, led by Pierre Poilievre.

Days ahead: Carney, who is seen as a centrist technocrat, revisited some of his main campaign promises in a speech, including immediately eliminating a widely criticized carbon tax. His campaign focused mainly on reorienting Canada’s struggling economy.

Outside threats: Adding to the country’s economic woes are Trump’s on-again-off-again tariffs, which are already taking their toll. His frequent statements about making Canada the 51st state have angered most of the public.

General election: In his victory speech, Carney referred to Poilievre as a leader that would leave Canada divided and “kneel” before Trump rather than stand up to him. Anger at the U.S. president has grown so much that Poilievre, seen as ideologically similar to Trump, has started to try to create some distance between them.

Kurdish militia signed a deal with Syrian leadership

The Kurdish-led militia that controls northeast Syria agreed yesterday to merge with the country’s new government. It was a major breakthrough for Damascus in its efforts to unify a country wrestling with violent turmoil.

The agreement stipulated that the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces would integrate “all civil and military institutions,” as well as its prized oil and gas fields, into the new Syrian state by the end of the year.

The decision by South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, to impose martial law on Dec. 3 was not made in a vacuum, but almost nobody saw it coming. Yoon came close to achieving the unthinkable: a military takeover.

A Times investigation uncovered Yoon’s many missteps. The first was overestimating his allies.

Lives lived: Athol Fugard, a South African playwright whose works exposed the realities of racial separatism in his homeland, died at 92.

CONVERSATION STARTERS

For those needing organs, hope may be a miniature pig

At an undisclosed farm in rural America, miniature pigs are given toys and kept warm under lights. The pampering is by design — they are clones, genetically engineered to have organs more compatible with humans. And their weak bodies need protection from the environment.

In 2022, researchers received permission to transplant pig organs into a few critically ill patients, and last year into healthier people. There are still unaddressed issues: Pigs carry pathogens that can jump to humans, for example. But as the first formal clinical trial begins, some scientists argue that there is a moral imperative to move forward.

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The Kurdish-led militia that controls northeast Syria agreed on Monday to merge with the country’s new government, marking a major breakthrough for Damascus in its efforts to unify a country wrestling with violent turmoil.

The agreement, announced by the office of Syria’s presidency and signed by both parties, stipulated that the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces would integrate “all civil and military institutions” into the new Syrian state by the end of the year, including its prized oil and gas fields.

The deal also outlined “the rights of all Syrians to representation and participation in the political process,” amid repeated pledges by Syria’s new leadership to form an inclusive government after years of sectarian strife.

The timing of the agreement, which came amid violent clashes in Syria’s coastal region that have left more than 1,300 people dead, signaled a moment of reprieve for Syria’s new interim president, Ahmed al-Shara.

Since the rebel coalition headed by Mr. al-Shara toppled the dictator Bashar al-Assad in December, the new government has sought to unify the complex web of rebel groups operating across Syria — the most powerful of them being the Kurdish-led forces in the northeast. However, the security situation has remained unstable, and the Kurdish militia has been among the most challenging groups to bring under the new government’s fold.

Syria’s new government has ordered all armed groups in the country to dissolve, and in recent weeks, several prominent militias have agreed to work with the new authorities, despite their skepticism about sweeping promises to create an inclusive government. As a rebel leader, Mr. al-Shara commanded an armed group once allied with Al Qaeda, and skeptics question whether he has given up its former hard-line jihadist views.

It remains unclear whether those militias have dissolved as directed and fully integrated into a single national army under Mr. al-Shara’s authority, or if they have simply agreed to cooperate with Mr. al-Shara’s government but remain as semi-independent forces in regions they effectively control.

For years, the Kurdish-led militia has been the main U.S. partner in the fight in Syria against the Islamic State, and made hard-fought territorial gains amid the country’s civil war, to the extent that it now administers a de facto state in Syria’s northeast. The group has long sought to position itself as the protectors of Syrian Kurds, who make up about 10 percent of the country’s population.

Despite the breakthrough on Monday, there were some questions that were left unanswered.

For one, it remained unclear whether the S.D.F. would be allowed to operate as a distinct military bloc within Syria’s armed forces, a key demand in recent months by the Kurdish-led administration. It was also unclear how exactly the call for “a cease-fire on all Syrian territories” would be carried out as stipulated in the agreement.

Even on Monday, fighting continued to rage in the northeast between Kurdish-led forces and armed groups backed by Turkey, a close ally and backer of the new government in Damascus.

Turkey has long viewed the S.D.F. as an extension of Kurdish separatist insurgents who have fought the Turkish state for four decades. Amid dramatic changes in Syria’s political landscape, many Kurds have grown unnerved at the prospect of ending up worse off under a government supported by their longtime foe, Turkey.

Before a packed crowd of oil and gas executives on Monday, Chris Wright, the new U.S. energy secretary, delivered a scathing critique of the Biden administration’s energy policies and efforts to fight climate change and promised a “180 degree pivot.”

Mr. Wright, a former fracking executive, has emerged as the most forceful promoter of President Trump’s plans to expand American oil and gas production and dismantle virtually every federal policy aimed at curbing global warming.

“I wanted to play a role in reversing what I believe has been a very poor direction in energy policy,” Mr. Wright said as he kicked off the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston, the nation’s biggest annual gathering of the energy industry. “The previous administration’s policy was focused myopically on climate change, with people as simply collateral damage.”

Mr. Wright’s speech was greeted with enthusiastic applause.

It was quite different from a year ago, when Jennifer Granholm, the energy secretary during the Biden administration, told the same gathering that the transition to lower-carbon forms of energy like wind, solar and batteries was unstoppable. “Even as we are the largest producer of oil and gas in the world,” Ms. Granholm said, “the expansion of America’s energy dominance to clean energy is striking.”

Mr. Wright, however, was dismissive of renewable power, which he said played only a small role in the world’s energy mix. Natural gas currently supplies 25 percent of raw energy globally, before it is converted into electricity or some other use. Wind and solar only supply about 3 percent, he said. He noted that gas also had a variety of other uses — it could be burned in furnaces to heat homes or used to make fertilizer or other chemicals — that were hard to replicate with other energy sources.

“Beyond the obvious scale and cost problems, there is simply no physical way wind, solar and batteries could replace the myriad uses of natural gas,” Mr. Wright said.

Mr. Wright has argued that there is a moral case for fossil fuels, saying they are crucial for alleviating global poverty and that moving too quickly to cut emissions risks driving up energy prices around the world. He has denounced efforts by countries to stop adding greenhouse gas to the atmosphere by 2050, calling that a “sinister goal.”

At a conference in Washington last week, Mr. Wright said that African countries needed more energy of all kinds to lift themselves out of poverty, including coal, the most polluting fossil fuel. “We’ve had years of Western countries shamelessly saying don’t develop coal, coal is bad,” he said. “That’s just nonsense.”

In Houston on Monday, other oil and gas executives echoed Mr. Wright’s remarks, pitching oil and gas as the best solution to energy poverty around the world.

“There are billions of people on this planet that still live sad, short, difficult lives because they live in energy poverty, and that’s a shame,” said Michael Wirth, chief executive of Chevron. “It should be unacceptable but affordability had left the conversation, at least in the West.”

In recent years, much of the world has been investing heavily in renewable energy. Last year, nations invested roughly $1.2 trillion in wind, solar, batteries and electric grids, slightly more than the $1.1 trillion they spent on oil, gas and coal infrastructure, according to the International Energy Agency.

But Mr. Wright warned against a shift to renewable energy that he said was likely to prove costly. “Everywhere wind and solar penetration have increased significantly, prices went up,” he said.

That is not always true. Texas has seen its electricity prices decline slightly over the past decade as wind and solar have grown rapidly and now supply more than one-quarter of the state’s power. The costs of wind turbines and solar panels have dropped precipitously in the last decade. But some places, like California and Germany, have seen electricity prices rise significantly at the same time they ramped up their use of renewable energy.

Some energy executives at the conference were more optimistic about renewable energy. John Ketchum, the chief executive of NextEra Energy, the largest producer of wind and solar power in the United States, said that renewables were essential for meeting growing demand for electricity in the United States over the next few years — especially since there was a large backlog for new turbines that burn natural gas.

Renewable energy “is cheaper and it’s available right now,” Mr. Ketchum said. “When you look at gas as a solution, as an example, to get your hands on a gas turbine and to actually get it built throughout the market, you’re really looking at 2030, or later.”

In his speech, Mr. Wright sharply criticized the Biden administration for slowing the growth of natural gas exports. Last year, the Energy Department paused approvals of new terminals that export liquefied natural gas, saying that it was concerned about the environmental and price impacts of shipping more gas overseas. Despite the pause, the United States was still the world’s largest exporter of natural gas in 2024.

On Monday, Mr. Wright signed the fourth export approval since Mr. Trump took office, extending an approval for the Delfin terminal off the coast of Louisiana. He said the Biden administration’s review of gas exports had found only modest impacts on global emissions and domestic U.S. prices.

On the topic of climate change, Mr. Wright said he didn’t deny that the planet was warming, calling himself a “climate realist.”

But he added that rising greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels — which have increased global average temperatures to their highest levels in at least 100,000 years — were a “side effect of building the modern world.”

“We have indeed raised global atmospheric CO2 concentration by 50 percent in the process of more than doubling human life expectancy, lifting millions of the world’s lifting almost all of the world’s citizens out of grinding poverty, launching modern medicine,” he said. “Everything in life involves trade-offs.”

Mr. Wright did not dwell on the downsides of climate change, which include the growing risks of heat waves, drought, floods and species extinction. He also did not address the costs of adapting to a hotter planet, which experts estimate could reach trillions of dollars for developing countries alone this decade.

Instead, Mr. Wright rebuked Britain for slashing its greenhouse gas emissions faster than any other wealthy country, saying that doing so had driven key industries overseas.

“I find it sad and a bit ironic that once mighty steel and petrochemical industries of the United Kingdom have been displaced to Asia where the same products will be produced with higher greenhouse gas emissions, then loaded on a diesel powered ship back to the United Kingdom,” Mr. Wright said. “The net result is higher prices and fewer jobs for U.K. citizens, higher global greenhouse gas emissions, and all of this is termed a climate policy.”

Mr. Wright said he was not against low-carbon energy and supports advanced forms of nuclear power and geothermal power, which multiple startups in the United States are pursuing.

But he said that the administration’s “all-of-the-above” approach to energy likely would not extend to wind farms, citing opposition in some communities. President Trump has railed against wind farms, saying falsely they cause cancer. The administration has stopped approvals for wind farms on public land and in federal waters and has threatened to block projects on private land.

“Wind has been singled out because it’s had a singularly poor record of driving up prices and getting increasing citizen outrage, whether you’re a farm or you’re in a coastal community,” Mr. Wright said. “So wind is a little bit of a different case.”

The Trump administration’s policies are not uniformly popular among oil and gas producers. Many companies have warned that Mr. Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum could raise prices for essential materials like pipes used to line new wells, while the constant threat of tariffs on Canadian oil could raise prices for refineries in the Midwest.

Mr. Wright mostly sidestepped questions on the tariffs, saying that “it’s very early on” and pointing out that inflation was low during Mr. Trump’s first term.

Ivan Penn contributed reporting

A prince of Luxembourg has died at 22 of a genetic disease for which he spent his brief life raising awareness.

Prince Frederik, the second cousin of the heir to the Luxembourg throne, discovered at age 14 that he had a mutation in his POLG gene, which is involved in the replication and repair of DNA. He died on March 1 in Paris, his father, Prince Robert, said in a statement through the POLG Foundation.

Estimates vary, but roughly one in 10,000 people are thought to have POLG, or polymerase gamma, disease, according to the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation. It is a mitochondrial disorder, a group of conditions that affect how mitochondria in cells produce energy. POLG disease affects multiple organs and can lead to seizures and poor coordination, among other symptoms.

“One might compare it to having a faulty battery that never fully recharges, is in a constant state of depletion and eventually loses power,” Prince Robert said.

POLG deficiency is a particularly brutal type of mitochondrial disease, according to Sir Doug Turnbull, an emeritus professor of neurology at Newcastle University and a member of the POLG Foundation’s scientific advisory board. “It is so relentlessly progressive,” he said, “attacking so many different systems with sadly the same conclusion.”

Prince Frederik was a founder and the creative director of the POLG Foundation. The organization used his DNA for research, initiated studies and made a short film about the disease. Frederick also designed a clothing line to raise money for research.

Frederik was born in Aix-en-Provence, France, and grew up in Switzerland. He was a fan of the American television show “The Office,” his father said, and had seen the full series 10 times.

In his last days, Frederik was in the hospital with pneumonia and another serious infection that left him unable to move, but he could still look out the window, Prince Robert said.

“Through the small, mesh-covered window, he saw the Eiffel Tower glistening with its hourly dance of lights,” his father said. Frederik asked his brother, Alexander, to take a photograph of the setting sun.

Frederik was a second cousin of Prince Guillaume, who will be taking over the throne of Luxembourg when his father, Grand Duke Henri, retires in October. Frederik and Guillaume share great-grandparents: Charlotte, Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, who reigned from 1919 to 1964, and her husband, Prince Félix.

“When you’re a kid, you have all these dreams, all these aspirations,” Frederik said in the film produced by his foundation. “I’m not sure I understood all the consequences of POLG when I first got diagnosed. It’s more subtle, where slowly the world is getting smaller and smaller.”

Gunmen attacked a position held by Syrian security forces in Damascus overnight, a war monitor said Monday, raising fears that the deadly violence sweeping Syria’s coastal region could spread to other parts of the country.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has monitored the Syrian conflict since 2011, said that unidentified gunmen threw grenades and opened fire overnight on a building housing government security forces in the highly fortified Mezzeh district of the capital, Damascus. Clashes with government security forces ensued, and it was unclear if anyone was injured, the observatory said. It added that an unspecified number of arrests had been made.

There was no immediate comment from Syria’s new government or on state news media, and the information could not be independently verified.

The attack came as the country was reeling from a spate of violence that erupted last week between fighters affiliated with Syria’s new government, headed by Ahmed al-Shara, and those loyal to the ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad.

More than 1,300 people have been killed since the fighting began, largely in the coastal Latakia and Tartus Provinces, the heartland of Syria’s Alawite minority, according to the observatory. It said on Monday that about 1000 civilians were included in that figure, most of whom were killed by armed forces affiliated with or loyal to the new government. The information could not be independently verified.

The violence has stoked fears of a renewed sectarian conflict and presented what appeared to be the most serious challenge yet to Syria’s new leaders as they attempt to unite the country after more than a decade of war. The Assad family is Alawite and the sect dominated the country’s upper class and highest ranks of the former regime’s military.

While state news media quoted a spokesman for the defense ministry, Col. Hassan Abdul Ghani, as saying on Monday that the “military operation” was over, the violence reportedly continued, as fighters affiliated with the government stormed a town near the coastal port city of Baniyas and set fire to homes, according to the observatory. .

Syria’s interim president, Mr. al-Shara, said on Sunday that the government was forming a fact-finding committee to investigate the violence in the coastal regions and to bring the perpetrators to justice. But it wasn’t clear if he was acknowledging possible killings at the hands of his forces or laying the blame on former regime elements.

In an apparent bid to reassure the nation, he appealed for calm on Sunday and repeated calls for Assad loyalists to lay down their arms.

“We must preserve national unity and civil peace,” Mr. al-Shara said at a mosque in Damascus, according to video that circulated online.