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      Mexico to Give U.S. More Water From Their Shared Rivers

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      A joint agreement appeared to avert a threat by President Trump of tariffs and sanctions in a long-running dispute over water rights in the border region.Mexico has agreed to send water to the United States and temporarily channel more water to the country from their shared rivers, a concession that appeared to defuse a diplomatic crisis sparked by yearslong shortages that left Mexico behind on its treaty-bound contribution of water from the borderlands.Earlier this month, President Trump threatened additional tariffs and other sanctions against Mexico over the water debt, amounting to about 420 billion gallons. In a social media post, Mr. Trump accused Mexico of “stealing” water from Texas farmers by not meeting its obligations under a 1944 treaty that mediates the distribution of water from three rivers the two countries share: the Rio Grande, the Colorado and the Tijuana. In an agreement announced jointly by Mexico and the United States on Monday, Mexico will immediately transfer some of its water reserves and will give the country a larger share of the flow of water from the Rio Grande through October.The concession from Mexico averted the threat of more punishing tariffs and diplomatic enmity with the United States amid the rollout of Mr. Trump’s new trade policies. But fulfilling the agreement is expected to significantly strain Mexico’s farmlands and could revive civil unrest triggered by previous water payments to the United States. Much of the Mexican borderlands are enduring extreme drought conditions, according to Mexico’s meteorological agency and water commission, and Mexico’s water reserves are at historic lows.Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has taken a conciliatory approach in negotiations with the Trump administration. Hours after Mr. Trump’s threat of tariffs over the water dispute earlier this month, Ms. Sheinbaum acknowledged that her country had fallen short of its treaty commitments, citing the extreme drought and saying that Mexico had been complying “to the extent of water availability.”In a statement on Monday, the State Department lauded Ms. Sheinbaum “for her personal involvement” in negotiating the agreement, and spoke of “water scarcity affecting communities on both sides of the border.” A statement from the Mexican foreign ministry on the agreement noted that the United States had agreed not to seek a renegotiation of the 1944 water treaty.Longstanding tensions over water have simmered between Mexico and the United States. In 2020, those tensions exploded into violence in Mexico, as farmers rioted and seized control of a dam in the border region in an effort to shut off water deliveries to the United States.Rising temperatures and drought have made the water from rivers Mexico and the United States share all the more valuable.According to data provided by the International Boundary and Water Commission, which mediates water disputes between the two countries, Mexico has fallen well short of its treaty commitments on water delivery in the last five years. Between October 2020 and October 2024, Mexico provided just over 400,000 acre-feet of water, far less than the roughly 1.4 million acre-feet called for under treaty stipulations. The debt has only grown since.Emiliano Rodríguez Mega More

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      Canada’s Political Landscape Upended by Trump, Trudeau and Tariffs

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      After nearly a decade in power, the Liberal Party seemed destined to be swept out on a wave of anti-incumbency sentiment. Then events took a surprising turn.Until January, polls suggested that the Conservative Party would handily regain power from the Liberals in any Canadian election held this year.Two things overturned that expectation: the resignation of Justin Trudeau as prime minister and President Trump’s trade war with Canada, along with his threat to annex the country and make it the 51st state by sowing economic chaos.Trump’s Trade WarWhile Mr. Trump pulled back from his initial threat of tariffs on everything imported from Canada, he has imposed several measures that hit key sectors of Canada’s economy: a 25 percent tariff on automobiles, aluminum and steel, and a similar one on Canadian exports that do not qualify as North American goods under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which he signed during his first term in office. An auto parts tariff of 25 percent is scheduled to take effect on Saturday. Last week, Mr. Trump suggested that the automobile tariffs, which are reduced based on their U.S.-made content, could be increased. He offered no specifics.Autos and auto parts are Canada’s largest exports to the United States, outside oil and gas. Canada Hits BackUnder Mr. Trudeau, Canada placed retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods coming into Canada that are expected to generate 30 billion Canadian dollars, about $22 billion, in revenue over a year.After becoming prime minister in March, Mark Carney imposed an additional 8 billion Canadian dollars, about $5.7 billion, in tariffs, including a 25 percent levy on autos made in the United States — but not on auto parts. Automakers with assembly lines in Canada will still largely be able to bring in American-made cars of those brands duty free.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Has Destroyed What Made America Great. It Only Took 100 Days.

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      In 1941, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt marshaled support for the fight against fascism, his chief antagonists were isolationists at home. “What I seek to convey,” he said at the beginning of an address to Congress, “is the historic truth that the United States as a nation has at all times maintained clear, definite opposition to any attempt to lock us in behind an ancient Chinese wall while the procession of civilization went past.” Roosevelt prevailed, and that victory expanded America’s relationship with the world in ways that remade both.Eighty-four years later, President Trump is systematically severing America from the globe. This is not simply a shift in foreign policy. It is a divorce so comprehensive that it makes Britain’s exit from the European Union look modest by comparison.Consider the breadth of this effort. Allies have been treated like adversaries. The United States has withdrawn from international agreements on fundamental issues like health and climate change. A “nation of immigrants” now deports people without due process, bans refugees and is trying to end birthright citizenship. Mr. Trump’s tariffs have upended the system of international trade, throwing up new barriers to doing business with every country on Earth. Foreign assistance has largely been terminated. So has support for democracy abroad. Research cuts have rolled back global scientific research and cooperation. The State Department is downsizing. Exchange programs are on the chopping block. Global research institutions like the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Wilson Center have been effectively shut down. And, of course, the United States is building a wall along its southern border.Other countries are under no obligation to help a 78-year-old American president fulfill a fanciful vision of making America great again. Already a Gaza cease-fire has unraveled, Russia continues its war on Ukraine, Europe is turning away from America, Canadians are boycotting our goods and a Chinese Communist Party that endured the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution seems prepared to weather a few years of tariffs. Travel to the United States is down 12 percent compared with last March, as tourists recoil from America’s authoritarian turn.The ideologues driving Mr. Trump’s agenda defend their actions by pointing to the excesses of American foreign policy, globalization and migration. There is, of course, much to lament there. But Mr. Trump’s ability to campaign on these problems doesn’t solve them in government. Indeed, his remedies will do far more harm to the people he claims to represent than to the global elites that his MAGA movement attacks.Start with the economic impact. If the current reduction in travel to the United States continues, it could cost up to $90 billion this year alone, along with tens of thousands of jobs. Tariffs will drive up prices and productivity will slow if mass deportations come for the farm workers who pick our food, the construction workers who build our homes and the care workers who look after children and the elderly. International students pay to attend American universities; their demonization and dehumanization could imperil the $44 billion they put into our economy each year and threaten a sector with a greater trade surplus than our civilian aircraft sector.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Dinner That Helped Save Europe

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      In 1979, during John Paul II’s first visit to the United States as pope, he met with President Jimmy Carter at the White House. Shortly after that, he invited Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, to dinner at the Vatican Embassy in Washington. Along with world affairs, Carter wanted to discuss declining morals with the recently elected pope, but Brzezinski had more practical subjects in mind.For the pontiff and the adviser, their mutual obsession was the Soviet Union. Over a simple meal at the Apostolic Nunciature of the Holy See, they explored how they could together weaken Moscow’s grip over its captive nations. Brzezinski was stunned by the pope’s geopolitical knowledge. He joked that Carter was more like a religious leader while the pope seemed more like a world statesman. The vicar of Christ affirmed the quip with a belly laugh, Brzezinski noted in his personal diary, to which I acquired exclusive access.From that dinner onward, the two Polish-born figures — one the first non-Italian pope in 455 years, the other America’s first (and to date, probably the only) Polish-speaking grand strategist — became intimate allies.Their serendipitous relationship proved critical in late 1980 in dissuading the Soviets from invading Poland, where the Solidarity movement had just emerged as a serious challenge to the Communist government. It was a partnership sustained by a running dialogue conducted during Brzezinski’s visits to the Vatican, in long handwritten correspondence and over the phone. His White House speed dial had P for “pope.”John Paul’s relationship with Brzezinski is a vivid example of how diplomacy works when there is mutual trust. Good chemistry is rare but extremely productive. Sustained dialogue with both friends and adversaries in today’s volatile world is, if anything, even more critical. The ability at a tense moment to pick up the phone and know that you can trust the person on the other end is the fruit of constant gardening.Yet it is increasingly hard to find the time. Technology means that presidential envoys are always within White House reach to respond to the cascade of competing demands. The world is also a more complex place than it was 40 years ago, and U.S. diplomats have rarely been held in lower regard at home. Twenty-four-hour media scrutiny also makes secrecy far harder. Henry Kissinger’s covert visit to Beijing in 1971 to pave the way for U.S. rapprochement with Mao Zedong’s China is hard to imagine today.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Russia Claims to Have Retaken Final Village in Its Kursk Region

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      Ukraine denied that it had been pushed out of the region and said that its military operations inside Russia were continuing. Russia’s top military commander said on Saturday that Moscow’s forces had retaken the last village that Ukraine was holding in the Kursk region of western Russia, though Ukrainian officials denied that their brazen campaign in the area had finally come to an end.The Russian claim was made by Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, who has managed the invasion of Ukraine and defense of Russia as chief of the general staff. His statement came six weeks after his forces retook all but a tiny sliver of the Russian territory that Ukraine had been holding since a surprise offensive into Russia’s western Kursk region last summer.In a televised video, General Gerasimov reported to President Vladimir V. Putin that Russian forces had on Saturday recaptured the village of Gornal, on the border with Ukraine. Speaking to Mr. Putin via a video link, General Gerasimov said that the advance had “completed the defeat of the Ukrainian armed forces that attacked the Kursk region.”The Ukrainian General Staff denied that its forces had withdrawn fully from the region, saying the country’s military operation there was ongoing.“The operational situation is difficult, but our units continue to hold their positions,” the General Staff said in a statement.The expulsion of Ukrainian troops from Russia’s Kursk region could remove one of the major complications vexing the peace talks pushed by President Trump, whose special envoy, Steve Witkoff, met with Mr. Putin for more than three hours in Moscow on Friday to discuss a deal that could end the conflict.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      This Is Not the America My Immigrant Father Was Determined to Reach

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      As the Trump administration disappears immigrants into foreign prisons and sees this as a source of American strength, I think back to when my dad was disappeared, why he came to America and, indeed, why I exist.My dad’s journey through war and concentration camps teaches me that authoritarianism does not strengthen a nation and that, notwithstanding Elon Musk’s warning that empathy is “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization,” it has been one of our national strengths — and that because of our president, it is now in peril.My father’s family was Armenian. During World War II, my family members were living throughout Eastern Europe and were secretly involved in a network that was spying on the Nazis and transmitting information to the West. The Gestapo uncovered the network, and my dad’s heroic cousin Izabela was arrested in Poland in 1942 and sent to Auschwitz, along with her daughter, Teresa. Izabela died in Auschwitz, and Teresa was subjected to medical experiments by the Nazis.My father and other immediate family members were arrested as well for being part of the spy network. But they were detained in Romania, where officials and the police — the “deep state” — shielded them from the Gestapo, so they were imprisoned for a time but survived and were eventually released. (Bribery helped.)Izabela’s son-in-law, Boguslaw Horodynski, a Pole, oversaw the spy network and survived the war. But the Soviets, seeing a freedom fighter as a potential threat to the emerging Communist bloc, arrested him and dispatched him to a labor camp in the Siberian gulag. We believe Boguslaw was enslaved in a mine in Kolyma — which the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described as the “pole of cold and cruelty.”Romania’s prime minister personally asked Stalin to show mercy. But Stalin wouldn’t budge.Perhaps this is the prism through which Stalin saw Boguslaw: He’s an immigrant in Romania, he’s potentially a risk to national security, and due process is a silly concept that would slow us down, so we’re sending him to a prison in another country.

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      Ukrainian Peace Plan Hints at Concessions, but Major Obstacles Remain

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      Officials in Kyiv plan to deliver their proposal to President Trump’s team, after rejecting a White House plan that would have given the Kremlin much of what it wants.Ukraine’s leadership has drafted a counterproposal to a Trump administration plan that has drawn criticism for conceding too much to Russia. While the counteroffer digs in on some of Kyiv’s earlier demands, it hints at possible concessions on issues that have long been seen as intractable.Under the plan, which was obtained by The New York Times, there would be no restrictions on the size of the Ukrainian military, “a European security contingent” backed by the United States would be deployed on Ukrainian territory to guarantee security, and frozen Russian assets would be used to repair damage in Ukraine caused during the war.Those three provisions could be nonstarters for the Kremlin, but parts of the Ukrainian plan suggest a search for common ground. There is no mention, for instance, of Ukraine fully regaining all the territory seized by Russia or an insistence on Ukraine joining NATO, two issues that President Volodymyr Zelensky has long said were not up for negotiations.Mr. Trump flew to Rome on Friday to attend the funeral of Pope Francis on Saturday; Mr. Zelensky had planned to as well, but his spokesman said on Friday that this would depend on the situation in Ukraine, where Russian attacks this week on the capital, Kyiv, and elsewhere have left dozens dead and wounded.In a social media post after landing in Rome, Mr. Trump said Russia and Ukraine were “very close to a deal” and urged the two sides to meet directly to “finish it off.” Earlier in the day, he said it was possible he and Mr. Zelensky could meet on the sidelines of the funeral. A senior Ukrainian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that if Mr. Zelensky goes to Rome, he might try to present Mr. Trump with Ukraine’s counterproposal personally.“In the coming days, very significant meetings may take place — meetings that should bring us closer to silence for Ukraine,” Mr. Zelensky said on Friday in remarks that were uncharacteristically optimistic when compared with the tone of previous statements this week.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      China Rejects Trump Claim of Tariff Talks With Xi

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      President Trump said “we’re meeting with China” on tariffs, comments aimed at soothing jittery financial markets. But Chinese officials say no talks have taken place.President Trump, whose trade war with China has rattled financial markets and threatened to disrupt huge swaths of trade, suggested on Friday that he has been in touch with Xi Jinping, China’s president, even as officials in China insist that no negotiations are occurring.In an interview with Time, Mr. Trump said Mr. Xi had called him and asserted that his team was in active talks with the Chinese on a trade deal. Speaking to reporters outside the White House on Friday morning, the president reiterated that he had spoken with the Chinese president “numerous times,” but he refused to answer when pressed on whether any call had happened after he imposed the tariffs earlier this month.Mr. Trump’s comments appeared aimed at creating the impression of progress with China to soothe jittery financial markets, which have fallen amid signs that the world’s largest economies are not negotiating. The S&P 500 is down 10 percent since Mr. Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.But his claims of talks have been rejected by Chinese officials, who have repeatedly denied this week that they are actively negotiating with the United States.“China and the U.S. have not held consultations or negotiations on the issue of tariffs,” Guo Jiakun, the spokesman for the foreign ministry, said in a news conference on Friday. “The United States should not confuse the public.”On Thursday, He Yadong, a spokesman for China’s commerce ministry, had said that there were “no economic and trade negotiations between China and the United States.”“Any claims about progress in China-U.S. economic and trade negotiations are baseless rumors without factual evidence,” he said.Asked in the Time interview if he would call Mr. Xi if the Chinese leader did not call first, Mr. Trump said no.“We’re meeting with China. We’re doing fine with everybody,” the president said.Mr. Trump also said, without evidence, that he had “made 200 deals.” He added that he would finish and announce them in the next three to four weeks.With the two governments at an impasse, businesses that rely on sourcing products from China — varying from hardware stores to toymakers — have been thrown into turmoil. The triple-digit tariff rates have forced many to halt shipments entirely.Trump officials have argued that the status quo with China on trade is not sustainable. Mr. Trump has rapidly ratcheted up tariffs on Chinese products, from 54 percent on April 2 to 145 percent just one week later. The Chinese government has argued that the actions are unfair and closely matched his moves, raising its tariffs on American goods to 125 percent. More