Trump targeted protected Venezuelans in the U.S.

The Trump administration revoked Temporary Protected Status yesterday for more than 300,000 Venezuelans in the U.S., leaving the population vulnerable to potential deportation in the coming months.

Those under T.P.S. from Venezuela who received the protections in 2023 will lose their temporary status 60 days after the government publishes the termination notice. The move could face legal challenges from immigrant rights activists.

Background: T.P.S. is meant for migrants who cannot be returned to a country that is facing a natural disaster or conflict. In recent years, migrants have fled Venezuela as its government has unraveled under President Nicolás Maduro. Republicans have criticized T.P.S., describing it as a temporary measure that turned into a permanent arrangement.

Tariffs: Canada said yesterday that it would place retaliatory tariffs of 25 percent on more than $100 billion worth of U.S. goods, after President Trump imposed stiff tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico. U.S. items that would be affected beginning tomorrow include honey, tomatoes, whiskey, peanut butter and garments. Justin Trudeau, Canada’s leader, added that more measures, including curbing or taxing energy exports, were being considered.

China’s commerce minister vowed “countermeasures” and said it would file a legal case at the World Trade Organization against the U.S. Mexico’s president promised retaliatory “tariff and nontariff measures.”

Analysis: Trump took to social media yesterday to defend the tariffs while acknowledging that there could be “some pain.” They could upend the world economic order in China’s favor.

More on Trump

Syria’s leader went to Saudi Arabia for his first foreign visit

Ahmed al-Shara, Syria’s newly appointed interim president, landed in Saudi Arabia yesterday to forge a partnership with the oil-rich Gulf nation. He met with the kingdom’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, according to Syrian and Saudi state news media.

The trip reflected Syria’s political shift away from Iran, a key ally of its longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad. For Saudi Arabia, recent events have presented an opening to reassert influence in both Syria and Lebanon, two countries where the kingdom had once vied for sway and largely lost out to Iran.

Negotiations: A Kremlin delegation arrived in Syria last week to see if Russia could keep its military bases in the country. To do so, the delegation would need to win over a country that Russia bombed ruthlessly while al-Assad was in power.

Strikes killed 18 civilians, Ukraine said

At least 14 people were killed on Saturday in a Russian missile attack on the city of Poltava, Ukrainian officials said. Later, a bomb smashed into a boarding school, killing four people in Sudzha, a Russian town held by Ukraine. Each country blamed the Sudzha attack on the other.

It was one of the highest single-day tolls this year and a grim reminder of the war’s enduring devastation and brutal toll on civilians. Since Russia’s invasion began, more than 12,300 civilians have been killed, the U.N. reported.

MORE TOP NEWS

Nova Scotia’s lobster fishers have been at war for decades, stealing one another’s crates, slashing rivals’ buoys, setting fires and shooting at homes. At the center of the conflict are two questions: Who gets to fish for lobster, and when?

The saga — further complicated by a group of criminals — affects Indigenous rights, economic equity and the future of Canada’s lobster industry.

Lives lived: James Carlos Blake, whose lyrical novels about outlaws, bootleggers and gunslingers resurrected the violent history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, died at 81.

CONVERSATION STARTERS

How a Monty Python veteran remains silly

In 1969, Michael Palin, a founding member of the sketch troupe Monty Python, quit his 40-cigarette-a-day habit and started a diary. His recollections, which began being published in 2006, chronicle the rise of the group that gave us “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and “Life of Brian.”

A fourth volume of entries will hit U.S. shelves tomorrow. Though he tackles sobering subjects — like his sister’s depression and the death of his friend George Harrison — he says that silliness remains very important: “People ask me, ‘What do you want on your tombstone?’ I want one that says, ‘Gone to lunch.’”

Read the interview here.

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That’s it for today. See you tomorrow. — Emmett

We welcome your feedback. Send us your suggestions at [email protected].

A correction was made on Jan. 30, 2025: A caption in an earlier version of this newsletter misspelled the name of an Israeli hostage released by Hamas on Thursday. It is Arbel Yehud, not Yehoud. The caption also misstated her occupation. She worked as a guide at a space and technology center; she was not a soldier.

The United States and its biggest trading partners were hurtling on Sunday into a new era of protectionism as Canada, Mexico and China said they would adopt countermeasures against new tariffs levied by President Trump.

From honey to tomatoes, and from clothes to toilet bowls, a wide range of American goods that cross the border into Canada, worth more than $100 billion, will soon be hit with a 25 percent tariff.

“We don’t want to be here,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a somber televised address from Ottawa on Saturday night in which he spoke of the deep bonds between the neighbors. “We didn’t ask for this.”

On Sunday, China said it would “take corresponding countermeasures to firmly safeguard its rights and interests.” It also said it would take legal action at the World Trade Organization.

And in a video released on Sunday, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico said that she would unveil the first steps of her government’s so-called Plan B plan on Monday if an agreement with the United States could not be reached. Ms. Sheinbaum earlier warned of retaliatory “tariff and nontariff measures.”

The policy announced by Mr. Trump on Saturday hit Canada and Mexico with tariffs of 25 percent on all goods, with a carve-out for Canadian energy and oil exports. Those are to be taxed at 10 percent. He also placed a 10 percent tariff on Chinese goods.

He also ordered an end to the ability of Americans to buy up to $800 of goods per day from each country without paying tariffs. It was a blow to the giant businesses that online companies like Temu and Shein have built by shipping directly from factories in China to American homes, bypassing American retailers.

The levies are to go into effect just after midnight on Tuesday and will be added on top of existing tariffs. The removal of duty-free treatment for small shipments from all three countries means that their buyers will have to start paying not only the new tariffs but all the other many tariffs that have accumulated over the years on clothing and other consumer goods.

Mr. Trump defended the tariffs on Sunday, while acknowledging that they could have repercussions. “Will there be some pain? Yes, maybe (and maybe not!),” he said in an early-morning social media post.

Mr. Trump has said that the tariffs are intended to reduce the flow of the deadly opioid fentanyl over the border, as well as of migrants. (The traffic of both people and illegal drugs from Canada is, however, very small.) If there is economic pain, he suggested, it will be worth it.

When Mr. Trump imposed tariffs on China during his first term in the White House, some studies found that part of the cost was passed on to American consumers. Suppliers in China also cut their prices in many cases to offset part of the cost of the tariffs.

Most Republicans in Congress have stayed silent or praised Mr. Trump’s tariffs, even as their constituents express anxiety about rising prices.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the rare Republican who regularly criticizes the president, was once again an exception. “Tariffs are simply taxes,” he said on social media. “Conservatives once united against new taxes. Taxing trade will mean less trade and higher prices.”

If other Republicans share Mr. Paul’s belief that the economy may take a hit, they kept it to themselves.

“Ohio is open for business and will roll out the red carpet for any company manufacturing in America!” Senator Bernie Moreno, Republican of Ohio, wrote on social media.

Party leaders, too, were falling into line.

“I support what the president’s doing,” the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, John Barrasso of Wyoming, said Sunday on Fox News. “We need to get rid of the fentanyl. We need to tell China as well as Mexico as well as Canada to get the fentanyl out of our country.”

Democrats spent the weekend hammering the message that Mr. Trump was responsible for making life in America more expensive.

“In one reckless move,” said Representative Gabe Vasquez, Democrat of New Mexico, “the president just raised the price you pay for gas, the truck you drive to work, a computer for your small business and everything at the grocery store, from avocados to tequila.”

It was uncertain how much success China might find at the World Trade Organization, which has lost much of its ability to handle such legal challenges since the United States began blocking the appointment of judges to it in Mr. Trump’s first term. The W.T.O.’s appellate body lost judges as their terms expired and has not been able to form a quorum to hear cases since the end of 2019.

The organization can still form panels to compile reports on the merits of cases, but reports can no longer go to the appellate body for a legally binding decision.

When Mr. Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese goods during his first term, China responded each time with tariffs on American exports, but because China sells far more to the United States than it buys, it quickly ran out of goods to put tariffs on.

Last month, American law enforcement officials called for an end to the duty-free shipments from China, which they blamed for allowing considerable quantities of fentanyl and related supplies into the United States because the shipments receive little or no inspection by customs agents.

In a statement on Sunday, China’s Ministry of Commerce urged the United States to “view and handle its fentanyl and other issues in an objective and rational manner, rather than threatening other countries with tariffs.” The Foreign Ministry defended China’s record on the issue, saying it had led the world when it imposed stringent regulations on fentanyl-related substances in 2019.

The true cause of the epidemic of fentanyl deaths in the United States, China has argued, is an American failure to curb drug addiction, not the large-scale production or export by China of chemicals used mainly by illegal labs in Mexico to make the drug.

Ms. Sheinbaum, the Mexican president, took a similar stance on Sunday.

“If they want to act,” she said, “they should not set their sights on Mexico, but on their own country, where they have done nothing to stop the illegal sale of this and other drugs.”

Ms. Sheinbaum said she was still awaiting Mr. Trump’s response to her offer to establish a working group of security and health officials from both countries to tackle the fentanyl problem.

In announcing the new Canadian tariffs on Saturday, Mr. Trudeau addressed Americans directly, saying that the U.S. tariffs on Canadian goods would harm them, too.

“This is a choice that, yes, will harm Canadians, but beyond that, it will have real consequences for you, the American people,” he said. “As I have consistently said: Tariffs against Canada will put your jobs at risk, potentially shutting down American auto assembly plants and other manufacturing facilities.”

The Canadian provinces of Ontario and Nova Scotia announced that they would pull American, beer, wine and spirits from government-owned liquor stores. The Liquor Control Board of Ontario imports about 1 billion Canadian dollars — about $690 million — worth of U.S. products each year.

One Canadian province took a more targeted approach, singling out areas of the United States where support for Mr. Trump’s policies has been especially strong.

In British Columbia, the premier, David Eby, announced that the province would stop sales of alcohol produced in “red states.”

Annie Karni contributed reporting from Washington, Ian Austen from Windsor, Ontario, and James Wagner from Mexico City,

When tens of thousands of protesters blocked three key bridges across the Danube River, paralyzing Serbia’s second-biggest city this weekend, the Balkan country’s beleaguered governing party issued a stern warning — not to the protesters but to the state-controlled broadcasting service for reporting on them.

After mostly ignoring three months of student-led street demonstrations across the country, Radio Television Serbia, long a propaganda bullhorn for President Aleksandar Vucic, had suddenly shifted gears and put protests in Novi Sad atop its news bulletins.

Worse still, at least for the governing party, it reported factually without denouncing the protesters as traitors in the pay of foreign intelligence services or puppets of the opposition, as it has in the past.

President Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party complained in an unusual statement late Saturday about the “scandalous reporting” by the broadcaster, saying it “grossly abused the journalistic profession by siding with politicians who would destroy the constitutional order of the Republic of Serbia.”

Control of the media has been a central pillar of Serbia’s system under Mr. Vucic, allowing him to weather multiple rounds of protests by demonizing and discrediting protesters, and to keep a firm grip on power for more than 12 years.

Many, however, are now asking whether this control is slipping, and with it perhaps the president’s increasingly authoritarian rule.

“This is a small but possibly revolutionary change,” said Jasmina Paunovic, a veteran state prosecutor in Belgrade, the capital. She added that longtime royalists were wavering throughout the system as “they shake off their fear” of losing their state jobs or facing disciplinary action.

She said that many judges and prosecutors she knows, though all ultimately dependent on the state for their careers, now support the students, at least privately. Serbia’s bar association voted on Sunday for lawyers to suspend work for a month in solidarity with students, who have barricaded campuses across the country.

The weekend protests in Novi Sad, held three months after a structural failure at a newly renovated railway station in the city killed 15 people, drew not only students from local universities and Belgrade but also throngs of older people angry over what they see as a system riddled with corruption.

The Nov. 1 collapse of a concrete canopy suspended over the station’s entrances crushed the people below it and triggered the snowballing protest movement, which was driven by a belief that official negligence and graft were responsible for the tragedy. The station was renovated by a consortium of state-owned Chinese companies, and work on the canopy was carried out by a private Serbian contractor that had been promoted by officials.

The recent protests over several weekends represent the biggest outpouring of discontent since street demonstrations in the late 1990s against Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia’s nationalist leader during the Balkan Wars that followed the collapse of communist Yugoslavia.

Svetlana Bistrovic, 43, a nurse and mother of two, said she had decided to cheer on students blocking a major railway and road bridge in Novi Sad on Saturday after seeing the Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic appear at a basketball game on Friday night wearing a shirt with the words “Students are champions.”

She waved a sign emblazoned with protest slogans and featuring a plastic tennis racket.

That Mr. Djokovic, whose family has in the past been outspoken in backing President Vucic, was siding with protesters, she said, showed that “change is coming in this country.”

But Mr. Vucic shows no sign of giving up. Last week he jettisoned his prime minister, Milos Vucevic, a loyal ally, a former mayor of Novi Sad and chairman of the governing party, known as SNS, leaving the country without a government.

But Mr. Vucic, confident that his party can defeat fractious opposition parties in any new election, given the uneven electoral playing field, has since vowed to go on the offensive against his political opponents and to call a general election if Parliament fails to approve a new government to his liking.

“I will not give anyone this state on a platter,” he told supporters on Saturday. “I will fight, fight, fight.”

Nebojsa Vladisavljevic, a political science professor at the University of Belgrade, described Serbia as a “spin dictatorship,” which, like other post-communist governments in neighboring Hungary and elsewhere, “is less repressive but much more manipulative.”

He said the sudden shift in messaging by the state broadcaster, RTS “is just part of a game to show that there is a bit of fair media coverage.”

And even without state television and radio firmly on the president’s side, he added, Mr. Vucic still controls a battery of potent media weapons, like the private television station Pink, which remains unswervingly loyal. And an array of vitriolic tabloids show no sign of wavering in their support for the president.

Tabloids like Informer, a particularly vicious attack dog for the government, have savaged student activists as traitors serving neighboring Croatia, Serbia’s main enemy during the wars of the early 1990s over the ruins of Yugoslavia.

Mila Pajic, a university student in Novi Sad active in organizing protests, said she had been portrayed by government-aligned media as “mentally unstable.” She was demonized as anti-Serbian, with Informer publishing a video of her arguing with her boyfriend and asserting that the couple was fighting over clandestine funding from abroad. It accused her of being in cahoots with Croatia.

The tabloid story, she said, “was completely invented” and turned “an ordinary argument between two people in their 20s into a national scandal.”

She said the state broadcaster’s shift to more sympathetic coverage of the protests “is not a huge step forward but a small step in the right direction.”

Mr. Vladisavljevic, the Belgrade political scientist, interpreted the governing party’s denunciation of RTS journalists for their neutral coverage of events in Novi Sad as a “pre-emptive move to keep them in line” and a message to the party’s heavily rural base that “nothing has really changed.”

“They worry that the media might flip. They worry about the military, about the prosecutors, everyone,” he said. “But we are not at a tipping point yet.”