• Trump tariffs: President Donald Trump announced 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada starting Tuesday, following a one-month delay. He also placed another 10% tariff on goods from China. – The Associated Press
• Austria forms government: Austria’s new government, with the country’s first three-party coalition, took office Monday after the longest negotiations in post-World War II Austria. The efforts were complicated by the strength of the far-right Freedom Party. – AP
  • Related Monitor story: German centrists hold the line against right-wing populists – barely.
• Tesla sales down: Tesla sales plunged 45% in Europe in January, according to research firm Jato Dynamics, even as overall electric vehicle sales rose. That comes after a report of falling sales in California, Tesla’s biggest U.S. market, and the company’s first annual drop globally last year. – AP
  • Related Monitor story: In Musk, an unprecedented blend of political and financial power
• Wildfires threaten Myrtle Beach: Crews battled wildfires in North and South Carolina on Sunday amid dry conditions and gusty winds as residents were forced to evacuate in some areas. – AP

Europe has faced many recent “wake up” moments that suggest the world has changed and it needs to strengthen from within. But few were more visceral than the public confrontation last Friday between the Ukrainian and American presidents. It is becoming increasingly clear that this is a crossroads moment for the continent. It had already been clear that the United States was pulling back from its long history as a bulwark of European security. What’s new is a sense of how massive and immediate the shift might be.

Not surprisingly, President Donald Trump’s open rebuke of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been met with a keen sense of shock on the streets of Ukraine. The result has been both a rallying around Mr. Zelenskyy and a sense of loss – that their Cold War ally for freedom now seems to have switched sides. Yet Ukrainians still take hope from other signs of support in the United States, and many recognize that the relationship is too important to abandon. It must be mended.

The caste system is outlawed in India, but the hereditary hierarchy has continued to shape society in overt and subtle ways. Now, calls for a full nationwide caste census have been met with resistance, sparking debate over India’s path to equality. Is it vital to account for and understand the scope of the challenge, or does that only set the practice deeper? India’s most recent data on caste comes from 1931. “The things which you wish to abolish you must monitor and measure,” says one expert.

“Raising Hare” is in many ways a story we all know well. A busy city person with a demanding job is forced to stop and commune with nature – in this case, care for a newborn hare – in a life-changing way. But in times of great stress, such stories can bring comfort, and “Raising Hare” is no exception. Hares are not rabbits, we learn, and living with one happily involves keeping the lights off at dusk and, yes, installing a hare-sized door to the garden.

In our weekly roundup of progress around the world, we look at how “news deserts” – communities that lack local news coverage – can help funders act more effectively. In another kind of desert in Colombia, two bare-bones museums hold a mother lode of 10 million-year-old fossils for study. And in South Korea, one study finds that replacing a highway with a tree-lined stream made the area 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than nearby streets.

In war-torn Sudan, a key to peace may be in a child’s fingertips.

After nearly two years of civil war, an estimated 25 million people in the predominantly Arab country in northeast Africa face acute hunger and 15 million have been forced from their homes. Roughly 90% of schools have closed, leaving 19 million children without a classroom.

Yet along Sudan’s relatively calm Red Sea coast, thousands of displaced children have space in more than 600 schools that remain open. One, a third grader who fled fighting in the south with her family, sat sketching in a notebook with colored pencils. “The war is very bad,” she told the United Nations last week from a classroom in Port Sudan. “I will share the colours with my siblings.”

“In times of crisis,” UN News reported, “education is critical, not just for academic learning, but also for providing a sense of normalcy, stability and safety.”

In war zones around the world, a yearning for normalcy – expressed in a child’s innocent love of learning or a farmer’s spring planting – is as common as it is persistent. The determination to live uninterrupted by the disruption of conflict reflects what the late Czech dissident and president Václav Havel called “living within the truth ... humanity’s revolt against an enforced position ... an attempt to regain control over one’s own sense of responsibility.”

In the conflict in Gaza, that sense of agency has endured on both sides.

“The truth is we just want to live,” said Donniel Hartman, a modern Orthodox rabbi and president of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, in a recent podcast. 

“Gaza, a neglected place, visible or concealed,” wrote Tala Shurrab, a Palestinian mental health professional, on the news site Mondoweiss last year, “surprises people with its normalcy – the life it manages to sustain amidst death.”

In Sudan’s capital of Khartoum, neighborhood “resistance committees” that once formed the foundation of a vibrant pro-democracy movement, now provide food and health services to sustain communities shattered by the war. In Port Sudan, at least one school works to help adults resume schooling that was interrupted by poverty or conflict.

The school attracted Maria Adam, a displaced Sudanese woman. “I want to finish my education so I can help my children,” she told Agence France-Presse on Sunday.

Sitting in the Oval Office with President Donald Trump last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reminded his host that “We have very good cities” even three years after Russia’s military invasion. “People work and children go to school. Sometimes it’s very difficult. ... We live. Ukraine is fighting and Ukraine lives. This is very important.”

For societies caught in conflict, simple acts of normalcy – as simple as a schoolchild’s drawings in colored pencils – amount to what Mr. Havel called “the power of the powerless.” They set future peace on foundations of dignity.