Live from NPR News, I'm Dale Wilman.

Ukrainian president, Vlodemir Zelensky, is on his way to the U.S., where he meets Sunday with President Trump in Florida.

But first, he stopped off in Halifax, where he met with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Carney announced Canada is providing $1.8 billion in economic assistance for Ukraine.

Looking toward his talks with Trump tomorrow, Zelensky says he's hoping for a constructive

meeting.

We need two things, pressure on Russia and sufficient strong support for Ukraine.

We will speak about air defense.

And last weeks, we had good steps in diplomacy.

But we can't live in illusion that it gives us possibility to have less defense with Russia does work.

As the year draws to a close, political observers are starting to offer grades for the first year performance of the Trump administration, NPR's Ron Elving.

This term has featured serious policy shifts like the Trump tariffs and the deportation

drive and the military strikes without congressional approval.

We also see a lot of personal retribution against Trump's political enemies and provocative

displays of will such as the partial demolition of the White House and the Trump rebranding of the Kennedy Cultural Arts Center and the Institute of Peace.

In all of this, we see a willingness to test the boundaries, try the locks on the doors, see what's open, see what happens, and ultimately to see who will step up to enforce the law.

In the year to come, we can expect these confrontations to continue and quite possibly escalate.

That's NPR's Ron Elving.

China has passed amendments to a foreign trade law that would make it easier for the state to retaliate in the event of a trade war.

But it also opens up its economy to certain kinds of investment.

Amper's Emily Feng has more in that story.

The law takes effect in March, and the amendments were designed with the CPPP in mind.

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