Hey, I'm Robert Vinlo and I'm from New York Times Games and I'm here talking to people about Wordle and the Wordle Archive. Do you all play Wordle? I play it every day. Alright, I have something exciting to show you. It's the Wordle Archive. Okay, that's awesome. So now you can play every Wordle that has ever existed. There's like a thousand puzzles. What? Wordle Archive. Oh, cool. Now you can do yesterday's Wordle if you missed it. Yeah.
New York Times game subscribers can now access the entire Wordle archive. Find out more at nytimes.com slash games. From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Friday, March 7th. Here's what we're covering. President Trump has made a whiplash reversal on tariffs against Canada and Mexico. They're now off again, at least kind of.
He suspended many of the 25% surcharges just two days after they kicked in. This decision came after pushback from business leaders and Canadian and Mexican officials. According to orders the White House released last night, some of the tariffs are permanently suspended, others are merely paused.
Most everyone involved is unsure of what could come next. For the stock market, that head spinning back and forth is weighing on investors. The S&P 500 is on course for its worst week since two years ago when there was a banking crisis. The economy is in this really sort of strange, uncertain moment. My colleague Ben Castleman says coming into the year, the economy looked quite strong by a number of measures.
We had hiring going up, incomes going up, profits going up, unemployment low. But now all of a sudden there's... a lot of sort of storm clouds on the horizon. Consumer confidence has really taken a hit. Business confidence, too. And really, practically all of this is tied to the new administration.
You know, right now it's very hard for a business to decide whether to invest or to hire if they don't know what the tariff situation is going to be, what the tax situation is going to be, what the labor situation is going to be. And that kind of ripples through the economy. As the tariff drama has played out, the US and Canada have increasingly found themselves at odds.
They used to be the closest of allies, but their relationship has taken a hit, not just because of the tariffs, but also because Trump has been calling Canada's sovereignty into question. So I think Canada is going to be a very serious contender to be our 51st state. Trump has repeatedly talked about Canada becoming a state and referred to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a governor.
And while the remarks could all be bluster or a negotiating tactic, it's increasingly clear that Canada is taking them seriously. What he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that'll make it easier to annex us. The Times has learned that Canada is on guard because of several recent phone calls between American and Canadian officials.
According to people with firsthand knowledge of the calls, Trump told Trudeau that he did not believe the treaty that demarcates the border between the U.S. and Canada is valid and that he wants to revise the boundary. He didn't elaborate. In another call, Trump's commerce secretary told Canada's finance minister basically the same thing, that Trump is interested in potentially abandoning the agreements and treaties that govern the U.S. relationship with Canada.
When asked about the phone calls and the U.S.'s stance towards Canada, the White House did not respond. And now, three other updates on the Trump administration. The State Department is finalizing a plan to bring back the controversial travel bans Trump put in place during his first term in office.
Those bans initially blocked travel for people from several Muslim-majority countries and were later expanded to include other low-income or non-white countries. The new ban is expected to expand that list. Also. The idea is to get down a framework for a peace agreement and an initial ceasefire as well. Senior U.S. and Ukrainian officials are set to meet for talks next week about a plan to end the war in Ukraine.
In the past few days, the White House has cut off military assistance and intelligence sharing to the country as a way to pressure it into negotiating. But for the moment, there are few details about what a viable peace plan could look like, and Russia has not said publicly that it would accept any kind of agreement to end the war.
And the National Park Service is telling its employees to keep quiet about a remarkable milestone. A record number of Americans visited the country's national parks last year. But an internal memo sent to staff this week. told them not to publicize the news. The agency seems to be trying not to draw attention to the high visitor numbers amid recent staff cuts. Under the Trump administration, the Park Service has lost more than 1,700 employees.
raising fears that there will be a breakdown in services and safety at the parks, right as visitor numbers are peaking. Last night, SpaceX launched a test of its massive rocket, Starship, the most powerful spacecraft ever built. The 400-foot-tall rocket system lifted off successfully from South Texas. But less than 10 minutes into the flight, I just saw that starship blew up. There it is. The unmanned craft spun out of control and exploded.
sending flaming debris streaking through the sky. The debris rained down, causing flight delays from Florida to Pennsylvania. And the Federal Aviation Administration said it was grounding future Starship launches until SpaceX completes a full investigation into what went wrong. The last Starship test launch also ended in an explosion when a rocket blew up in midair and fell in pieces over Turks and Caicos.
The company's founder, Elon Musk, says he hopes to eventually use the Starship rockets to carry people to the moon or even to Mars. And finally, a few years ago in Texas, someone cashed in a winning lottery ticket for $95 million. The jackpot had been building for months without a winner, until that lucky draw. But now the state of Texas says it was not luck. So they bought $25 million of $1 tickets and they won, right? Correct.
At a recent state hearing into potential lottery fraud, the director of the Texas lottery explained that the winner spent $25 million to buy nearly every possible number combination. And it worked. They had the winning ticket for the third largest jackpot in Texas lotto history. Normal consumers don't go buy $25 million of $1 tickets.
One of the senators at the hearing said he thought the big ticket buy might be part of a money laundering scheme. Texas law allows winners to remain anonymous if the prize is over a million. So for the moment... This winner has only been identified as a business entity out of New Jersey called Rook TX. In terms of whether buying up every possible lottery ticket is against the law, the director of the Texas lottery says it's not necessarily illegal.
But he did admit that if someone does that, the perception of fairness definitely takes a hit. Those are the headlines today on The Daily. Netflix paid millions of dollars to make a documentary about the musician Prince. A look at why the public will probably never see it. That's next in the New York Times audio app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts.
This show is made by Will Jarvis, Jessica Metzger, Jan Stewart, and me, Tracy Mumford. Original theme by Dan Powell. Special thanks to Isabella Anderson, Larissa Anderson, Jake Lucas, Zoe Murphy, Paula Schumann, and Chris Wood. The headlines will be back on Monday.