China placed retaliatory tariffs of 10-15% on certain American imports, including liquefied natural gas and crude oil. The move came shortly after Donald Trump’s 10% tariffs on all Chinese products came into effect. But Mr Trump agreed to delay tariffs of 25% on imports from Canada and Mexico after the two countries pledged to bulk up border security to crack down on the smuggling of fentanyl into America.
Marco Rubio, America’s secretary of state, announced that he had become acting director of USAID and that the development agency would in effect be absorbed by the State Department. He said “a lot of functions” would continue as long as they aligned with America’s foreign policy. Earlier, USAID employees were told not to report to work and hundreds lost access to their email accounts.
Mr Rubio said that Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, had offered to jail “dangerous American criminals” in the country’s prisons for “a fee”. America’s secretary of state said that this would include those with American citizenship. Meanwhile America began deporting Indian migrants who had entered the country illegally. Mr Trump has promised to do “whatever it takes” to crack down on illegal migration.
In his first interview since becoming Syria’s president, Ahmed al-Sharaa told The Economist he would take the country in “the direction of” democracy and promised to hold presidential elections. He called America’s military presence in Syria “illegal”, welcomed negotiations with Russia about its military bases and warned Israel that its recent advance into Syria “will cause a lot of trouble in the future”.
Anthropic, an artificial-intelligence startup, unveiled a new safeguarding technique to stop users generating illegal or harmful content from its large language models. It says its “constitutional classifiers” filtered out 95% of “jailbreaking” attempts during a trial. Other tech giants, such as Microsoft and Meta, are also racing to develop methods to stop users from getting access to such information.
Shares in Palantir closed at a record high on Monday and rose another 23% in after-hours trading after the American data firm forecast revenue of around $3.75bn this year. The average analyst estimate was $3.5bn. The company, which supplies software that can analyse sensitive data, looks set to benefit from Mr Trump’s focus on national security.
Norway’s government appointed Jens Stoltenberg, the former secretary-general of NATO, as finance minister. He previously served in the same post for the Labour Party from 1996 to 1997, and was dubbed the “Trump-whisperer” for his expert handling of the American president at NATO. His appointment comes after the Centre Party on Thursday pulled out of a coalition with Labour over a disagreement about implementing EU energy policy.
Figure of the day: 13, the number of people employed by America’s State Department in its “office of diversity and inclusion” last year. Read the full story.
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