Donald Trump has paused his threatened punitive tariff on Canada just hours before it was due to come into effect. After Trump’s announcement, the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, said “substantial progress” had been made towards a trade deal, but more work was needed. Tuesday’s 11th-hour backdown comes after a contentious year for the two countries, with the longstanding alliance strained by tit-for-tat tariffs and online broadsides in which Trump has mused about wanting to turn Canada into a US state.
In February 2025, the White House hit Canada with a 25% tariff, citing what it regarded as inadequate progress in curbing cross-border illegal immigration and drug trafficking. In retaliation, Canada announced a reciprocal levy, calling the US’s actions “unwarranted and unreasonable”. How much trade do the two countries do?
Historically, Canada and the US have been strong trading partners. In 2024, trade between the countries was estimated to be roughly $909bn, according to the office of the US trade representative. In an upset for the Democratic establishment, the progressive Angie Nixon won the party’s US Senate primary in Florida, beating the former army intelligence officer Alexander Vindman.
Nixon, a state representative and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, had significantly less funding going into the primary. Vindman served on the national security council in Trump’s first term and became a well-known whistleblower and witness in the president’s first impeachment. What else happened in Florida’s elections?
Byron Donalds, a congressman backed by Trump, won the Republican nomination for governor in the race to succeed Ron DeSantis. Donalds trounced three reasonably prominent Republican rivals, including Jay Collins, DeSantis’s handpicked lieutenant governor. If he wins the November election, as he is expected to do in the conservative stronghold, Donalds would become the first Black governor in any southern US state.
OpenAI said it had slowed down the pace of its AI development while it overhauled its research and training systems. The company’s researchers were caught unaware last month when an AI agent under testing hacked another AI firm, Hugging Face. The AI research lab behind ChatGPT said its new measures included pausing its model testing for two weeks and investing more in adding other systems to monitor the activities of AI agents in testing.
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