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The United States imposes—and later partially delays—tariffs on Canada and Mexico and increases tariffs on China, incurring retaliatory tariffs from Canada and China.
- A trade war involving the United States, Canada, and Mexico began on February 1, 2025, when U.S. president Donald Trump signed orders imposing near-universal tariffs on goods from the two countries entering the United States. The order called for 25 percent tariffs on all imports from Mexico and all imports from Canada except for oil and energy, which would be taxed at 10 percent.
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Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost soft-lands on the Moon as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.
- Blue Ghost Mission 1 is a robotic Moon landing mission conducted by Firefly Aerospace that launched on January 15, 2025, and landed on the Moon on March 2, 2025, at 08:34 UTC. Firefly Aerospace thus became the first commercial company to fully successfully soft-land a spacecraft on the Moon. As part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, the mission delivered ten scientific investigations and technology demonstrations to support future human exploration of the Moon under the broader Artemis program.
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A wildfire in Japan's Iwate Prefecture becomes the largest in the country in at least five decades.
- On 26 February 2025, a wildfire began in the southeast of Ōfunato, a city in the Iwate Prefecture of Japan. As of 3 March 2025, the fire has grown to cover 2,900 ha (7,200 acres), so far destroying 84 structures, killing one person, and forcing over 4,500 people to evacuate.
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Chinese architect Liu Jiakun is awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
- Liu Jiakun (born 1956) is a Chinese architect known for his focus on minimalism, humanism, and locally contextual design. In 2025, he won the Pritzker Prize, becoming the second Chinese national architect to receive this honor after Wang Shu, and the third Chinese-born overall to receive it, after I. M. Pei.
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A roadmap towards providing developing countries with US$200 billion a year by 2030 is agreed to at an extended session of the 2024 United Nations Biodiversity Conference.
- The 2024 United Nations Biodiversity Conference of the Parties (COP16) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was a conference that was held from 21 October to 1 November 2024, in Cali, Colombia. The monitoring framework agreed at the previous conference should allow the progress of the countries towards national goals and targets under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to be evaluated.
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Mahamoud Ali Youssouf is elected chairman of the African Union Commission.
- An African Union (AU) Commission Chairperson election was held in February 2025 to choose the fifth Commission Chair to succeed incumbent Chairperson Moussa Faki. On 15 February 2025, Djibouti's Mahamoud Ali Youssouf was elected with 33 votes in the seventh round of voting. He is scheduled to be sworn in during March 2025.
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M23 campaign (ongoing)
- The M23 campaign is an ongoing series of military offensives launched by the March 23 Movement (M23), a Rwandan-backed rebel paramilitary group in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, since March 2022. In November 2021, the M23 first launched attacks against the Congolese military (FARDC) and MONUSCO, seizing military positions in Ndiza, Cyanzu, and Runyoni in North Kivu Province. This coincided with the deployment of Uganda People's Defence Force (UPDF) to the region to combat the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a Ugandan rebel group operating in the Congo's North Kivu and Ituri provinces.
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Russian invasion of Ukraine (ongoing)
- On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which had started in 2014. The invasion, the largest and deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II, has caused hundreds of thousands of military casualties and tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilian casualties. As of 2025, Russian troops occupy about 20% of Ukraine. From a population of 41 million, about 8 million Ukrainians had been internally displaced and more than 8.2 million had fled the country by April 2023, creating Europe's largest refugee crisis since World War II.
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Sudanese civil war (ongoing)
- A civil war between two major rival factions of the military government of Sudan began during Ramadan on 15 April 2023. The two opponent factions consist of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) under Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and its allies (collectively the Janjaweed coalition) under the Janjaweed leader Hemedti. Minor factions have also participated in the fighting, allying with either major combatant or remaining opposed to both; these include the Darfur Joint Protection Force; the SLM (al-Nur) under Abdul Wahid al-Nur; and the SPLM-N under Abdelaziz al-Hilu. Fighting has been concentrated around the capital city of Khartoum (the largest and initial battle of the war) and the Darfur region.
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