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Mexican and Canadian officials are increasingly frustrated by tariff negotiations with the Trump administration, with a lack of clarity over exactly what the U.S. wants making any resolution seem impossible, sources from both countries told Reuters. After implementing across-the-board 25% tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico earlier this week, President Donald Trump on Thursday announced a one-month reprieve for Mexico with an exemption for the North American auto sector also in the works. On Thursday, just after midday Eastern Time, tariffs remained in place for Canada. The on-again, off-again tariffs and the high-level discussions surrounding them have exasperated negotiating teams, according to three Mexican officials and two Canadian sources familiar with negotiations. It’s like “dealing with an angry partner and you dont know what they’re mad about,” one Mexican official. “It’s not clear what they want.” The press person for Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum responded to a request for comment by directing Reuters to Sheinbaum’s public comment on Thursday. In a post on X, Sheinbaum said: “We had an excellent and respectful call,” that respected the “sovereignties” of both countries. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office and the White House both did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Trump based the legal justification for the tariffs on combating fentanyl and illegal immigration, but he and others in his administration often expand the justification to include trade deficits and protecting U.S. industries like autos and lumber. Despite the shared frustration of Mexico and Canada, the two countries have taken distinct tones in public. Sheinbaum has stressed her respect for Trump and the close cooperation with the U.S. Canada has bluntly criticized the chaos. Trudeau on Thursday said Canada will be in a trade war with the United States for “the foreseeable future.” U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called Trudeau “a numbskull.” Trudeau’s foreign minister has been even franker. “We won’t get through this, another psychodrama every 30 days,” Foreign Minister Melanie Joly told business leaders in Toronto earlier this week. “The problem we’ve had is it’s not clear what the American president wants,” she added. “I’ve had conversations with colleagues in Washington saying, ‘Okay, but at the end of the day, what do you guys want?’ And I got the answer, ‘We’re about to know.’ There’s one decision maker in the system. He’s the only one to know.” U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick dismissed the idea that he didn’t know what Trump wants as “fake news” and “so silly” in an interview on Thursday with CNBC. Trump “calls everybody all the time,” Lutnick said. “I speak to him all the time. You’ve got to be kidding me. The president knows exactly what he wants. We know exactly what he wants.” But Canadian and Mexican officials said the lack of clarity over demands as well as uncertainty over whether Trump administration officials in bilateral meetings were actually able to deliver on what they said was making discussions incredibly challenging. The scope of negotiations is not clear, they said, with talks sometimes seeming to be focused on fentanyl and at other times on migration, while on some occasions the focus seemed to be trade deficits. “The U.S. reasons for the tariffs constantly shift, said another Mexican official. “If we can’t identify the problem, we can’t identify the solution.” Emily Green, Jarrett Renshaw, David Ljunggren; writing by Stephen Eisenhammer, Reuters
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Officials in the Western U.S. who warn the public about avalanches are sounding a different type of alarm. They say they’re worried that the Trump administration firing hundreds of meteorologists and other environmental scientists could hinder life-saving forecasts that skiers and mountain drivers rely on. The forecasting work is crucial for skiers and climbers who flirt with danger when they travel through mountain gullies that are prone to slide. Recovery efforts for three victims of a large avalanche near Anchorage, Alaska, were ongoing Thursday, two days after the accident in mountains where forecasters had warned it would be easy to trigger a slide that day because of a weak layer in the deep snow. The forecasts also are used to protect the general public. Transportation officials use them to gauge the risk on well-traveled roads like one in Colorado where a vehicle got pushed off the highway by a slide earlier this month. We save lives and there are people alive today because of the work we do,” said Doug Chabot, who directed the Gallatin National Forest Avalanche Center in Montana for almost 24 years. “To take funding and to just randomly cut programs, it will affect our ability to save lives. There’s a lot of pieces that will fall apart’ Avalanches kill about two dozen people annually in the U.S. Predicting their likelihood, potential severity and location depends heavily on information provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The information comes in two forms: data-driven models and conversations between avalanche forecasters and National Weather Service meteorologists who can help assess the data. We have our own numerical model, but we cant run that without the work that NOAA is doing, said Ethan Greene, director of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, which publishes avalanche forecasts. Without that work, theres a lot of pieces that will fall apart. So far this winter 18 people had been killed by avalanches, most of them in remote areas in Western states. Weather models from NOAA are used by 14 avalanche centers run by the U.S. Forest Service. The Colorado center is largely state funded. Chabot said employees at the federal avalanche centers have so far been exempt from cuts, but officials worry that could change. Shrinking the federal workforce The Trump administration has not disclosed what positions are being lost at NOAA. Former leaders of the agency have said the firings will have wide-ranging negative impacts on flight safety, shipping safety and warning networks for tornados and hurricanes. NOAA has about 13,000 employees. The firings come as billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency shrink a federal workforce that President Donald Trump has called bloated and sloppy. A NOAA spokesperson declined to answer questions from The Associated Press about the potential for the cuts to degrade avalanche forecasting quality. We are not discussing internal personnel and management matters, spokesperson Susan Buchanan wrote in an email. We continue to provide weather information, forecasts and warnings pursuant to our public safety mission. Greene and Chabot said they dont anticipate immediate effects. But if NOAA’s data is weaker, Greene said his center’s forecasts will be more uncertain. We will probably look at the same things that were looking at and see that theyre not working as well as they were, he said. Dangerous layers of snow On a mountainside near Leadville, Colorado, this week, Greene dug a pit into the snow and scooped out snow crystals that he scattered across a plastic blue card. It’s so beautiful, he said, referring to a layer of snow turned to ice crystals, which under certain conditions can create weak layers prone to avalanche. Such surveys are an essential part of forecasting and so is data on weather, which impacts snow and helps drive avalanche risk. In nearby Frisco, Colorado, light snow fell in the parking lot at the Mayflower Gulch trailhead, where college students Joseph Burgoyne and his friend Michael Otenbaker from Michigan donned snow shoes and strapped skis to a backpack before heading up a mountain trail. Burgoyne said its scary to see headlines on social media sites about skiers who were carried and buried by avalanches Its serious terrain, and those reports, they can save lives,” Burgyone said of the avalanche forecasts. “Everybody just wants to have a good time. Going fast is fun. Finding deep snow is fun, but theres serious dangers behind that. Brittany Peterson and Matthew Brown, Associated Press
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WASHINGTON (AP) A federal judge ruled Thursday that President Donald Trump acted illegally when he fired a member of an independent labor agency, and the judge ordered that she be allowed to remain on the job. U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell in Washington, D.C., found Trump did not have the authority to remove Gwynne Wilcox from the National Labor Relations Board. An American president is not a kingnot even an elected oneand his power to remove federal officers and honest civil servants like plaintiff is not absolute, Howell wrote. She acknowledged the administrations argument that the Supreme Court may be inclined to overturn a 90-year-old decision restricting the presidents power to remove members of independent agencies. But the judge said that until and unless the high court acts, current law clearly supports keeping Wilcox in her role. Wilcox sued Trump after he fired her and the agencys general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, on Jan. 27. Wilcox’s attorneys said no president previously had tried to remove an NLRB member. They argued that board members can only be fired for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office and only after giving notice and holding a hearing. Trump’s only path to victory in Wilcox’s case would be to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to adopt a new, more aggressive vision of presidential power that would effectively abolish independent agencies in the U.S., her lawyers wrote. During a hearing Wednesday, Howell jokingly referred to herself as a speed bump for the case on its way to the Supreme Court. Government attorneys argued that NLRB members should be removable at will to ensure democratic accountability. Reinstating Wilcox to the board would be an extraordinary intrusion on the executive branch, they added. The President cannot be compelled to retain the services of a principal officer whom the President no longer believes should be entrusted with the exercise of executive power, Justice Department lawyers wrote. Wilcox was the first Black woman to serve on the five-member board in its 90-year history. The Senate confirmed Wilcox for a second five-year term in September 2023. Congress created the board in 1935. Its primary purpose is to resolve disputes over unfair labor practices. It adjudicated hundreds of cases in the last fiscal year. Michael Kunzelman, Associated Press Associated Press writer Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this story.
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