Tariffs, court battles, research limbo and agritourism
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Today, new tariffs are expected on steel and aluminum. The federal courts blocking Trump administration policies. How a directive recognizing just two sexes has scientific papers in limbo. The U.S. farms milking the agritourism boom. And the Philadelphia Eagles' sort of victory in the Super Bowl.

It's Monday, February 10th. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes every weekday. I'm Tara Oakes in Liverpool.

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Any steel coming into the United States is going to have a 25% tariff. What about aluminum, sir? Aluminum, too. Trump announcing his new plan to slap 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports into the U.S. on board Air Force One, en route to the Super Bowl and sitting next to a map labeled Gulf of America.

The top sources of U.S. steel imports are Canada, Brazil, and Mexico. And the fate of prior metals tariffs exemptions for the U.S.'s neighbors to the north and south is now unclear. Full details of his reciprocal tariffs are due later in the week. He says they'll apply to all countries and matching the rates levied by each country. Very simply, it's if they charge us, we charge them. That's all.

Investors are weighing up Trump's latest trade intervention. Carmel Crimmins has more. So within the metal sector, Trump's comments had an immediate impact. Shares of producers in Europe and Asia fell and the dollar jumped. But overall, global stocks are mixed. European shares are rising and US equity futures are up. Some investors are clearly looking through Trump's tariff threats, seeing them as a negotiating tactic.

We take a deep dive into Trump's tariff strategy in the latest episode of Reuters Econ World. You can catch that pod on the Reuters app or wherever you listen to your podcasts. At Super Bowl 59 in New Orleans, the Philadelphia Eagles ruthlessly crushed the Kansas City Chiefs bid for a third title in a row, winning 40 points to 22. Jalen Hurts was voted MVP as he guided the Eagles to a second Super Bowl championship in the franchise's history.

In China, the number of marriages has plummeted by a fifth, the biggest drop on record. Last year's fall is despite efforts by authorities to encourage young couples to marry and have children to boost the country's declining population. Ecuador's presidential election will head to an April runoff after incumbent center-right Daniel Neboa and left-wing challenger Luisa Gonzalez finish Sunday's vote in what authorities call a technical tie.

Trump's furious pace of orders slashing foreign aid, sending troops to the border, and pardoning violent criminals has met little resistance in Congress. Federal judges are delivering the strongest signal yet of a looming showdown with the rule of law. Over the weekend, a federal judge in Manhattan temporarily blocked Elon Musk and his Doge government efficiency team from Treasury Department systems to process trillions of dollars of payments.

Judges have also temporarily prevented administration policies from dismantling America's foreign aid agency, altering transgender rules, and adopting a plan to buy out thousands of federal workers. Vice President J.D. Vance appears to have suggested on X that the courts were overstepping, writing, Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power. Tom Hulse is our legal reporter.

What opponents are doing is they're going to court hoping that federal judges will step in and put a stop to this. And to some degree, that's starting to emerge. But we're going to start to see in the next few weeks—

more thorough action taken by courts, we're going to really start to see the limit of Trump's power. But that just means that some of these questions will eventually come before the Supreme Court. Then what? When he came to power eight years ago, it was a different Supreme Court. Now the Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Three of those members were appointed by Donald Trump in his first term.

The courts are seen as much more conservative. They're seen as much more amenable to more conservative views of the laws. And a lot of conservative scholars have really wanted to get some of these issues before the Supreme Court. But one way to do that is for Donald Trump to issue these executive orders that sort of

gets a case moving that might wind up before the Supreme Court. One of those is going to be the birthright citizenship that clearly seems bound for the Supreme Court. It asks the most fundamental question about the United States, which is who is an American?

But other ones that are likely include questions about the president's ability to remove members of independent boards. These cases that he's setting up to get to the Supreme Court may, you know, drastically enhance and create a much more muscular sort of presidency that can wield the power of the pen in a way that really wasn't accepted even in his first term.

Scientists are struggling to respond to a Trump administration order recognizing only two sexes, male and female. The directive applies to all research that features work from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientists and includes a review of their work that has already been submitted for publication for content now banned by the federal government. Nancy Lapid has been looking into how this could affect studies about specific populations and diseases.

The directive issued by the federal government says that CDC publications

can no longer mention several words, including transgender, LGBT, biologically male, biologically female. So if a paper was written entirely by CDC researchers, that would mean that that research cannot be published. Basically, this means that the government is limiting what doctors will eventually be able to learn about certain

diseases and how to treat them. One area that this new regulation will impact particularly strongly are in the areas of sexually transmitted diseases where not being able to talk about genders will be very limiting. HIV, for example, the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS,

is a particular problem in transgender and LGBT communities. And if that can't be discussed, it's going to severely limit what researchers can learn and how we can prevent it and treat it. What's been the reaction among researchers? I spoke a few days ago with the editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Public Health, Dr. Alfred Morelia, who said that this is censorship.

and it goes against the First Amendment, he believes. Many researchers have said that their fear is that their grants and funding won't be renewed. So I'm Britt Thompson and I own Pink River Ranch. We focus on agritourism and we raise livestock and do farm dinners and are really focused on bringing people out and having them a connection to agriculture. The farm sits on a dead-end road in rural Wisconsin.

It's dotted with fluffy Icelandic sheep and shaggy-coated highland cattle. A picture-perfect retreat for the explosion of urbanites who want to spend time in the countryside. And it's become an extra source of income for farmers like Thompson, who face an agricultural recession. Heather Schlitz has been digging into the $4 billion agritourism industry. The agricultural economy is incredibly unstable.

It could get worse if tariffs go into place, but farming in general, it's extremely volatile. You're completely at the mercy of the weather. You're at the mercy of futures markets and what they are doing. So a lot of people see agritourism as this way to get a steady flow of income every year. You can have your visitors in.

you know, come to your Airbnb or whatever, you know, spring, summer and fall, and you know how kind of how much income you're going to be getting from them. I mean, you have farmers who run Airbnbs,

who also sell homemade pickles that are grown on their farm and they sell cuts of meat from their own livestock. So once you get people to the farm, there are a lot of opportunities for consumers to buy other things. And what do experts think the potential future looks like for agritourism?

It is a huge industry. It's grown by, I think, 77% over the past five years. Some farms can make between $25,000 and some can make over a million dollars. It kind of started during the pandemic when people couldn't go to cities to vacation, so they choose to go to the countryside where things are more isolated and more safe from COVID. And it seems like the growth hasn't necessarily slowed down since then.

Oh, it's such a clutch off-season pickup, Dave. I was worried we'd bring back the same team. I meant those blackout motorized shades. Blinds.com made it crazy affordable to replace our old blinds. Hard to install? No, it's easy. I installed these and then got some from my mom. She talked to a design consultant for free and scheduled a professional measure and install. Hall of Fame's son? They're the number one online retailer of

Our recommended read today takes us to South Africa, where gaping land inequalities persist between black and white communities. But a new law seeking to address that is seen as an assault on property rights by some, including Trump, who weighed into the discussion last week.

A link to our article looking at how the laws impacted relations between white and black communities is in the pod description. For more on any of the stories from today, check out Reuters.com or the Reuters app. Don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast player, and we'll be back tomorrow with our daily headline show.