Good morning. Representatives of President Trump’s family have held talks to take a financial stake in the U.S. arm of crypto exchange Binance, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that would put Trump in business with the firm that pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money-laundering requirements.

At the same time, Binance’s billionaire founder, Changpeng Zhao—who served four months in prison after pleading guilty to a related charge—has been pushing for the Trump administration to grant him a pardon, people familiar with the matter said. Zhao, widely known as CZ, remains Binance’s largest shareholder.

• Unprecedented: Pursuing a business deal involving a felon seeking a pardon from his administration would be an unprecedented overlap of Trump's business and the government. A stake in Binance.US would also be a striking expansion of the family’s cryptocurrency endeavors as Trump signs a series of executive orders that benefit the industry.
   
• Big fines: U.S. officials said the exchange facilitated transactions with sanctioned groups, including Hamas and Islamic State, and encouraged U.S. users to obscure their location so the firm could avoid complying with U.S. anti-money-laundering laws. In 2023, Binance agreed to pay fines totaling $4.3 billion to settle the allegations. 
   
• Back in business? Binance, whose U.S. arm saw business fall sharply after regulatory actions, began exploring a return to the U.S. market last year around the time of Trump’s election win. The company told people it was willing to make a deal with Trump’s company and wanted to eliminate its legal problems, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Belgian authorities arrest suspects in Huawei, European Parliament corruption probe.

Belgian authorities said they detained several people as part of an investigation into alleged corruption within the European Parliament that they say was committed for the benefit of China’s Huawei Technologies.

Prosecutors said the Belgian federal police conducted 21 searches across the country and took several suspects in for questioning over their alleged roles in corruption as well as forgery of documents. Searches were also carried out in Portugal, and a suspect was arrested in France, the authorities said.

She promised not to speak ill of Meta, then wrote a tell-all. Now, she can’t talk about it.

Meta's former public policy chief signed a nondisparagement agreement when she left the social-media company in 2017. Now, the company is using that agreement to prevent her from promoting her tell-all book.

The book, “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism,” by Sarah Wynn-Williams, details CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts to make inroads in China and levies harassment allegations against former and current executives, including Meta’s head of global policy Joel Kaplan. The book was published Tuesday by Flatiron Books, a Macmillan imprint. 

An arbitrator ruled Wednesday that Wynn-Williams had to temporarily stop making “disparaging, critical, or otherwise detrimental comments” about the Facebook owner or its employees, after Meta alleged she had violated terms of her 2017 severance agreement.

• The Trump administration is demoting the IRS’s top lawyer, according to people familiar with the decision, and the move could make it easier for the tax agency to share its trove of confidential taxpayer data with others in the government.
   
• Shares in European truck makers fell, with Daimler Truck Holding hit the hardest, after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said it would reconsider truck-emissions regulations that analysts saw as a source of demand for the industry.
   
• Federal regulators are taking a closer look at Omnicom Group’s proposed $13 billion acquisition of advertising giant Interpublic Group.

Taiwan cracks down on Chinese ‘gray zone’ espionage.

Taiwan’s president signaled a widening divide with Beijing in remarks in which he said the island would step up efforts to combat Chinese espionage and influence, including by reinstating military courts to handle spy cases and scrutinizing the activities of Chinese citizens.

“China is a foreign adversary to Taiwan,” President Lai Ching-te said Thursday, using sharp wording that emphasized his effort to prevent China from taking control of the self-ruled island democracy, which Beijing claims as its own territory.

Putin rejects immediate cease-fire in Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday he didn’t support an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine, calling for more discussion on a permanent end to the war as Moscow’s army made rapid gains toward expelling Kyiv’s forces from its Kursk region.

Putin said any pause in fighting at this point would be in Ukraine’s interest because Russia is gaining on the battlefield, and a host of issues would need to be resolved before a cease-fire could be reached.

• Trump’s Ukraine Peace Strategy Put to Test After Putin Balks at Cease-Fire

• President Trump on Thursday announced another salvo in a fast-escalating trade war with the European Union, saying he would impose a 200% tariff on U.S. imports of wine, Champagne and other alcoholic beverages from the 27-nation bloc. Here’s where things stand on Trump's tariffs.
   
• Tariffs, government layoffs, funding cuts, immigration restrictions—recession talk is in the air. Any one of these things would at least temporarily exert some drag on the economy. Put them together, and they have an everything-everywhere-all-at-once dynamic that could hurt it badly.
   
• Hugo Boss said subdued consumer sentiment and muted store traffic have hurt its performance in the year so far, warning that it expects market uncertainty to persist.
   
• The S&P 500 dropped 1.4% and suffered its first correction since October 2023, a decline of more than 10% from its Feb. 19 record high.
   
• The U.K. economy unexpectedly shrank in the first month of the year, the latest frustration for a relatively new government that has pledged to bring an end to a decade-and-a-half of stagnation.

• The stock-market rout will make IPOs difficult, a disappointing development for a venture market in dire need of liquidity.
   
• Private-credit firms are willing to pay anywhere from $500,000 to $1.5 million for restructuring professionals amid a spike in out-of-court restructurings.
   
• Logistics startups are in demand again, now helping companies facing new tariffs game out costs and find new suppliers, among other services.
   
• Holograms have been primarily used to create visual fireworks at rock concerts. Now a health system in Tennessee is using them for virtual doctor visits to patients in rural areas.

• A group of protesters flooded into Trump Tower demanding immigration officials release Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student and one of the leaders of last year’s pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
   
• A federal judge has ordered six federal agencies to reinstate thousands of probationary employees who were fired last month, dealing a blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to rapidly scale back the size of the federal workforce.
   
• To claw back their relevancy, online marketplaces are dropping the Amazon or Temu playbook and, instead, looking to copy social media.