Trump Delayed Most New Tariffs on Canada and Mexico

Just two days after President Trump upended North American trade by imposing 25 percent fees on all goods imported from Canada and Mexico, he announced a temporary reversal.

The president signed executive orders today offering a monthlong exemption, until April 2, for all goods covered under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, which includes most U.S. imports from those countries. About 10 percent of Mexico’s exports to the U.S. fall outside the U.S.M.C.A. trade agreement, according to one economist.

The president announced the decision after speaking with President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico. She said Trump began their call with the intention to keep tariffs in place, but changed his mind after she showed him examples of how Mexico limited the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. It’s not yet clear why he decided to pause the tariffs on Canada.

Still, the president has said that he expects to impose more tariffs on Canada and Mexico next month, when he announces what he is calling “reciprocal” tariff measures. The uncertainty led to another unsteady day on Wall Street.

Fearing retribution, Trump critics have muzzled themselves

There is a chill spreading over political debate in Washington and beyond.

Fired federal workers ask journalists not to be quoted by name. University presidents fearing that millions in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs are on mute. Even longtime Republican hawks on Capitol Hill, stunned by Trump’s comments on Ukraine, have remained quiet or changed their positions.

The U.S. scheduled talks with Ukraine

Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s special envoy to the Middle East, said today that U.S. and Ukrainian officials plan to meet in Saudi Arabia next week to discuss an end to the war.

The talks were scheduled after Trump suspended U.S. military aid to Ukraine and held an explosive meeting with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, at the White House last week. U.S. negotiators met with their Russian counterparts last month.

European leaders met today in Brussels to discuss a $160 billion plan to bolster their defenses and proposals to send troops to Ukraine to support a future peace plan.

In related news, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, said he was willing to discuss extending the protection afforded by his country’s nuclear arsenal to its European allies.

A moon lander’s fate is uncertain

Athena, a 15-foot-tall robotic spacecraft, tried this afternoon to land on the moon. The mission, funded by NASA but operated by a private company called Intuitive Machines, was to bring a drill and a few small rovers near the moon’s south pole.

The spacecraft is communicating with the ground but may have fallen over, just as one the company sent to the moon did last year, or otherwise not landed upright.

For more: NASA is following Trump’s lead to the moon.

A dystopian romp from the director of “Parasite”

The director Bong Joon Ho’s new film, “Mickey 17,” is a scarily familiar and enjoyably loony tunes story about class and greed. The main character, played by Robert Pattinson, is used to test viruses and other threats on an alien planet. He dies repeatedly, only for his employers to reprint a copy of him to get right back to work.

Do we age steadily or in bursts?

For many people, aging feels as if it happens in stops and starts. Or, as one scientist put it: “You wake up in the morning and you suddenly feel old.”

There may be a scientific basis for this experience. By analyzing age-related markers, researchers are coming to understand that aging in adulthood is not a linear process, but perhaps one that jumps dramatically at certain points. Here’s what that could mean for your health and life span.

ONE LAST THING

Ready for a few comma jokes?

What do you get when hundreds of grammar aficionados gather to watch a film in New York? T-shirts with jokes about commas, discussion about the appropriate usage of “lie” and “lay,” and thundering applause for the movie star’s professed love of diagraming sentences.

That was the scene this week at the screening of “Rebel With a Clause,” a film about the cross-country journey of Ellen Jovin, who gently imparts grammar rules to strangers. Attendees were even given a quiz before the show. (Sample question: “What is the square root of the number of letters in the part of speech that ‘punctiliousness’ is?” The answer is at the bottom of the newsletter.)

Have an error-free evening.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back tomorrow. — Matthew

Sean Kawasaki-Culligan was our photo editor today.

We welcome your feedback. Write to us at evening@nytimes.com.

The answer to the grammar question is 2.