Key events
China marks record trade surplus in face of US tariffs
Back to tariffs and the headline story around this morning is China marking a record trillion-dollar trade surplus despite Trump tariffs.
Beijing recorded a strong export run in 2025, even as its producers are bracing for three more years of Washington attempting to slow the manufacturing powerhouse by shifting US orders to other markets.
Beijing’s resilience to renewed tariff tensions has emboldened Chinese firms to shift their focus to south-east Asia, Africa and Latin America to offset US duties.
17% of Americans back Trump’s plans to acquire Greenland
A Reuters/Ipsos poll shows just 17% of Americans approve of Trump’s efforts to acquire Greenland, and substantial majorities of Democrats and Republicans oppose military force to annex the island.
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47% of respondents to the Reuters/Ipsos poll disapproved of US efforts to acquire Greenland, while 35% said they were unsure.
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Only 4% of Americans – including just one in 10 Republicans and almost no Democrats – said it would be a “good idea” for the US to use military force to take possession of Greenland from Denmark.
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66% of respondents, including 91% of Democrats and 40% of Republicans, were worried US efforts to acquire Greenland would damage the Nato alliance and relationships with European allies.
Anything less’ than US control of Greenland is ‘unacceptable,’ Trump says
Jakub Krupa
US president Donald Trump has delivered his first morning social media post on Greenland, with Vance and Rubio set to meet Danish and Greenland officials today.
He’s doubled down on his rhetoric on getting control of Greenland, insisting that the US “needs Greenland for the purpose of national security.”
In a social media post, Trump claimed that “Nato should be leading the way for us to get it,” and “if we don’t, Russia or China will, and that is not going to happen!”
“Militarily, without the vast power of the United States, much of which I built during my first term, and am now bringing to a new and even higher level, Nato would not be an effective force or deterrent – not even close! They know that, and so do I.”
“Nato becomes far more formidable and effective with Greenland in the hands of the United States. Anything less than that is unacceptable,” he said.
ICE pulling protesters from cars in arrests
Yesterday, crowds gathered in protest outside a federal building in Minneapolis against the continued presence and violent tactics of federal immigration officers in the city.
They were hit with teargas, pepper balls and flash bangs. Demonstrators have amassed in the city and across the country after Minneapolis mother Renee Nicole Good was shot dead by an ICE officer.
The clashes came as Washington geared up to deploy even more officers to the Minneapolis area, in the midst of what the administration called “its largest operation in DHS history”.
An official told CBS News there were 800 Customs and Border Protection agents and 2,000 ICE officials in the Minneapolis area as tensions have risen in the wake of Good’s killing.
The Pentagon is also poised to dispatch military lawyers to the area to aid in an expected surge in federal persecutions, CNN reported.
Minnesota, Minneapolis, and St Paul have sued the Trump administration seeking an end to the surge of ICE officers deployed to the region. Local officials have characterized it as a “federal invasion” according to the suit filed on Monday.
What the tariff legal case is about
A Supreme Court ruling is due at 10:00 ET (15:00 GMT) but it might not be on the tariffs case – because the court does not reveal ahead of time which case rulings it is issuing.
Lower courts have already ruled that the president last year overstepped his authority in imposing so-called “reciprocal” tariffs on imports from most of the US’s foreign trading partners.
They sided with the case brought by tariff-hit businesses from 12 US states, that Trump didn’t have the power to use a 1977 law, meant only for emergency use, to impose such levies on individual countries.
His administration has appealed against those lower court rulings in the Supreme Court.
Justices heard the case in November – how they rule will be widely seen as a marker of whether they will be a curb on the president.
Welcome to our US politics live blog.
The Supreme Court could issue a ruling today on the legal challenge to President Trump’s global tariffs, which if upheld by the court, would upend one of the US president’s key policies and further disrupt the world economy.
During hearings for the case last year, judges had appeared to question the legality of the tariffs, which Trump had imposed through a law meant for national emergencies.
Meanwhile Minneapolis remains on edge one week after an ICE agent shot dead Renee Good in her car.
Yesterday saw more aggressive arrests by federal officers, who have been sent in their hundreds to the city this week to both carry out Trump’s immigration deportation scheme and subdue protesters.
Videos from Tuesday showed armed officers dragging one woman out of her car as she yelled she was disabled, and smashing the windows of another man’s car to seize him.
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