OTTAWA — Canada plans to impose tariffs on a slew of Chinese products from as early as next year, the government’s fiscal update showed, as part of its wider investigation into imports from the country.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has already slapped a 100% tariff on all Chinese electric vehicles and a 25% tariff on imports of Chinese steel and aluminum products, with the finance ministry previously saying it was also exploring options to widen the duties.

The mid-year fiscal update presented on Monday showed that Ottawa has decided to apply tariffs to imports of certain solar products and critical minerals from China early in the new year, with levies on semiconductors, permanent magnets, and natural graphite following in 2026.

“These measures will prevent Chinese non-market trade practices from causing unfair and harmful market distortions in Canada and throughout the North American continent,” the update said.

Mr. Trudeau’s government has frequently criticized the Chinese government-funded policy of oversupply and over-capacity. He says Canada needs to protect local jobs from cheap Chinese products finding their way into the country.

The government has often used its stand against China as a lever to show US President-elect Donald J. Trump that Canada is aligned with its biggest trading partner in its stand against Beijing.

Mr. Trump has vowed to impose 25% tariffs on goods from Canada on his first day in office on Jan. 20 if it fails to stop the flow of drugs and illegal immigrants across its border with the US.

The fiscal update, also called the Fall Economic Statement, did not detail the extent of the duties to be imposed, nor on which specific products, but said further details on the measures would be announced soon. — Reuters

NEW YORK — Luigi Mangione sought to “sow terror” by shooting dead UnitedHealth Group executive Brian Thompson on a Manhattan street this month, a New York prosecutor said on Tuesday in announcing Mr. Mangione had been indicted for murder.

A grand jury indicted Mr. Mangione on 11 counts, including first-degree murder and murder as a crime of terrorism, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg told reporters. Mr. Mangione, 26, would face a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted on all counts.

“This was a frightening, well-planned, targeted murder that was intended to cause shock and attention and intimidation,” Mr. Bragg told reporters. “The intent was to sow terror.”

Mr. Mangione’s defense lawyer in New York, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, declined to comment.

Ivy League-educated Mr. Mangione was charged with murder on Dec. 9 for the killing of Mr. Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel before a company conference, following a five-day manhunt.

Mr. Mangione is currently being held on gun charges in Pennsylvania, where he was arrested last week at a McDonald’s restaurant in the city of Altoona.

Mr. Bragg said he had indications that Mr. Mangione may waive his right to contest his extradition to New York. A hearing over Mr. Mangione’s extradition is scheduled for Thursday in Pennsylvania.

‘NO HEROISM’
The killing of Mr. Thompson has ignited an outpouring of anger from Americans struggling to receive and pay for medical care.

Americans pay more for health care than any other country, with spending on insurance premiums, out-of-pocket co-payments, pharmaceuticals and hospital services on the rise in recent years, government data shows.

The words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” were written on shell casings found at the Thompson murder scene, several news outlets reported, evoking the title of a book critical of the insurance industry.

Mr. Mangione has been celebrated in some circles, and more than a thousand donations have poured into an online fundraiser for his legal defense.

New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said any attempt to rationalize Mangione’s alleged actions was “vile.”

“There is no heroism in what Mangione did,” Ms. Tisch told reporters. “We don’t celebrate murders and we don’t lionize the killing of anyone.”

The indictment accused Mr. Mangione of murdering Mr. Thompson with the intent to “influence the policy of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion.”

Mr. Mangione suffered from chronic back pain that affected his daily life, according to friends and social media posts, though it is unclear whether his own health played a role in the shooting.

UnitedHealth Group said last week Mr. Mangione was not a customer of the health insurer. — Reuters

QUTAYFAH, Syria — An international war crimes prosecutor said on Tuesday that evidence emerging from mass grave sites in Syria has exposed a state-run “machinery of death” under toppled leader Bashar al-Assad in which he estimated more than 100,000 people were tortured and murdered since 2013.

Speaking after visiting two mass grave sites in the towns of Qutayfah and Najha near Damascus, former US war crimes ambassador at large Stephen Rapp told Reuters: “We certainly have more than 100,000 people that were disappeared into and tortured to death in this machine.

“I don’t have much doubt about those kinds of numbers given what we’ve seen in these mass graves.”

“We really haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis,” said Mr. Rapp, who led prosecutions at the Rwanda and Sierra Leone war crimes tribunals and is working with Syrian civil society to document war crimes evidence and is helping to prepare for any eventual trials.

“From the secret police who disappeared people from their streets and homes, to the jailers and interrogators who starved and tortured them to death, to the truck drivers and bulldozer drivers who hid their bodies, thousands of people were working in this system of killing,” Mr. Rapp said.

“We are talking about a system of state terror, which became a machinery of death.”

Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are estimated to have been killed since 2011, when Mr. Assad’s crackdown on protests against him spiraled into a full-scale war.

Both Mr. Assad and his father Hafez, who preceded him as president and died in 2000, have long been accused by rights groups and governments of widespread extrajudicial killings, including mass executions within the country’s prison system and using chemical weapons against the Syrian people.

Mr. Assad, who fled to Moscow, had repeatedly denied that his government committed human rights violations and painted his detractors as extremists.

The head of US-based Syrian advocacy organization the Syrian Emergency Task Force, Mouaz Moustafa, who also visited Qutayfah, 25 miles (40 km) north of Damascus, has estimated at least 100,000 bodies were buried there alone.

‘PLACE OF HORRORS’
The International Commission on Missing Persons in The Hague separately said it had received data indicating there may be as many as 66, as yet unverified, mass grave sites in Syria. More than 157,000 people have been reported missing to the commission.

Commission head Kathryne Bomberger told Reuters its portal for reporting the missing was now “exploding” with new contacts from families.

By comparison, roughly 40,000 people went missing during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

For the families, the search for the truth in Syria could be long and difficult. A DNA match will require at least three relatives providing DNA reference samples and taking a DNA sample from each one of these skeletal remains found in the graves, Ms. Bomberger said.

The commission called for sites to be protected so that evidence was preserved for potential trials, but the mass grave sites were easily accessible on Tuesday.

The United States is engaged with a number of United Nations bodies to ensure the Syrian people get answers and accountability, the State Department said on Tuesday.

Syrian residents living near Qutayfah, a former military base where one of the sites was located, and a cemetery in Najha used to hide bodies from detention sites described seeing a steady stream of refrigeration trucks delivering bodies which were dumped into long trenches dug with bulldozers.

“The graves were prepared in an organized manner — the truck would come, unload the cargo it had, and leave. There were security vehicles with them, and no one was allowed to approach, anyone who got close used to go down with them,” Abb Khalid, who works as a farmer next to Najha cemetery, said.

In Qutayfah, residents declined to speak on camera or use their names for fear of the retribution, saying they were not yet sure the area was safe after Mr. Assad’s fall.

“This is the place of horrors,” one said on Tuesday.

Inside a site enclosed with cement walls, three children played near a Russian-made military satellite vehicle. The soil was flat and leveled, with straight long marks where the bodies were believed buried.

SATELLITE IMAGERY
Satellite imagery analyzed by Reuters showed large-scale digging began at the location between 2012 and 2014 and continued up until 2022. Multiple satellite images taken by Maxar during that time showed a digger and large trenches visible at the site, along with three or four large trucks.

Omar Hujeirati, a former anti-Assad protest leader who lives near the Najha cemetery, which was used until the larger Qutayfah site was created because it was full, said he suspected several of his missing family members may be in the grave.

He believes at least some of those taken, including two sons and four brothers, were detained for protesting against Mr. Assad’s government.

“That was my sin, what made them take my family,” he said, a long, exposed trench behind him where the bodies were apparently buried.

Details of Syria’s mass graves first emerged during German court hearings and US congressional testimony in 2021 and 2023. A man identified only as “the grave digger” testified repeatedly as a witness about his work at the Najha and Qutayfah sites during the German trial of Syrian government officials.

While working in cemeteries around Damascus at the end of 2011, two intelligence officers showed up at his office and ordered him and his colleagues to transport and bury corpses. He testified that he rode in a van adorned with pictures of Mr. Assad and drove to the sites several times a week between 2011 and 2018, followed by large refrigeration trucks filled with bodies.

The trucks carried several hundred corpses from Tishreen, Mezzeh and Harasta military hospitals to Najha and Qutayfah, he said in the trial. At the sites deep trenches were already dug and the grave digger and his colleagues would unload the corpses into the trenches, which would be covered with dirt by excavators as soon as a section of the trench was full, he said.

“Every week, twice a week, three trailer trucks arrived, packed with 300 to 600 bodies of victims of torture, starvation, and execution from military hospitals and intelligence branches around Damascus,” he told Congress in a written statement.

The grave digger escaped from Syria to Europe in 2018 and has repeatedly testified about the mass graves, but always with his identity shielded from the public and the media. — Reuters