New Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is heading to Paris and London on Monday to seek alliances as he deals with U.S. President Donald Trump’s attacks on Canada’s sovereignty and economy.

Carney is purposely making his first foreign trip to the capital cities of the two countries that shaped Canada’s early existence.

At his swearing-in ceremony on Friday, Carney noted the country was built on the bedrock of three peoples, French, English and Indigenous, and said Canada is fundamentally different from America and will “never, ever, in any way shape or form, be part of the United States.”

“The Trump factor is the reason for the trip. The Trump factor towers over everything else Carney must deal with,” said Nelson Wiseman, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.

Carney, a former central banker who turned 60 on Sunday, will meet with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Monday and later travel to London to sit down with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer in an effort to diversify trade and perhaps coordinate a response to Trump’s tariffs.

He will also meet with King Charles III, the head of state in Canada. The trip to England is a bit a homecoming, as Carney is a former governor of the Bank of England, the first noncitizen to be named to the role in the bank’s 300-plus-year history.

Carney then travels to the edge of Canada’s Arctic to “reaffirm Canada’s Arctic security and sovereignty” before returning to Ottawa where he’s expected to call an election within days.

Carney has said he’s ready to meet with Trump if he shows respect for Canadian sovereignty. He said he doesn’t plan to visit Washington at the moment but hopes to have a phone call with the president soon.

Sweeping tariffs of 25% and Trump’s talk of making Canada the 51st U.S. state have infuriated Canadians, and many are avoiding buying American goods when they can.

Carney’s government is reviewing the purchase of U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets in light of Trump’s trade war.

The governing Liberal Party had appeared poised for a historic election defeat this year until Trump declared economic war and repeatedly has said Canada should become the 51st state. Now the party and its new leader could come out on top.

Robert Bothwell, a professor of Canadian history and international relations at the University of Toronto, said Carney is wise not to visit Trump.

“There’s no point in going to Washington,” Bothwell said. “As (former Prime Minister Justin) Trudeau’s treatment shows, all that results in is a crude attempt by Trump to humiliate his guests. Nor can you have a rational conversation with someone who simply sits there and repeats disproven lies.”

Bothwell said that Trump demands respect, “but it’s often a one-way street, asking others to set aside their self-respect to bend to his will.”

Daniel Béland, a political science professor at McGill University in Montreal, said it is absolutely essential that Canada diversify trade amidst the ongoing trade war with the United States. More than 75% of Canada’s exports go to the U.S.

Béland said Arctic sovereignty is also a key issue for Canada.

“President Trump’s aggressive talk about both Canada and Greenland and the apparent rapprochement between Russia, a strong Arctic power, and the United States under Trump have increased anxieties about our control over this remote yet highly strategic region,” Béland said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

For parents of kids with disabilities, advocating for their child can be complicated, time-consuming — and expensive.

Changes at the Education Department are likely to make the process even more difficult, advocates for kids with disabilities say.

When a parent believes their child is not receiving proper services or school accommodations for a disability, they can seek remedies from their district. They can file complaints with their state, arguing the child’s rights have been taken away without due process of law, or even pursue litigation in state or federal courts.

Those processes often involve multiple sessions with hearing officers who are not required to be experts in disability law. Legal fees can cost tens of thousands of dollars for a single case. Legal aid and other advocacy organizations that can provide free assistance often have more demand for their services than they can meet.

But filing a complaint with the Education Department has long been an option for families who can’t afford a lawyer. They begin by filling out the Office for Civil Rights’ online form, documenting the alleged instances of discrimination. From there, the agency’s staff is supposed to investigate the complaint, often interviewing school district employees and examining district policies for broader possible violations.

“It’s known and has the weight of the federal government behind it,” said Dan Stewart, managing attorney for education and employment at the National Disability Rights Network. “The process, the complaint portal, as well as the processing manual are all in public, and it does not require or typically involve lawyers.”

That option seems increasingly out of reach, advocates say.

Under President Donald Trump, the Education Department’s staff has been cut approximately in half — including in the Office for Civil Rights, whose attorneys are charged with investigating complaints of discrimination against kids with disabilities. The staff has been directed to prioritize antisemitism cases. More than 20,000 pending cases — including those related to kids with disabilities, historically the largest share of the office’s work — largely sat idle for weeks after Trump took office. A freeze on processing the cases was lifted early this month, but advocates question whether the department can make progress on them with a smaller staff.

“The reduction in force is simply an evisceration of the Office for Civil Rights’ investigatory authority and responsibility,” Stewart said. “There’s no way that I can see that OCR can keep up with the backlog or with the incoming complaints.”

A federal lawsuit filed Friday challenges the layoffs at the Office for Civil Rights, saying they decimated the office’s ability to process and investigate complaints.

While the OCR process was not perfect, reducing the office’s investigative staff will only worsen the challenges families face when seeking support for their kids, said Nikki Carter, an advocate for kids with disabilities and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

“It makes them feel hopeless and helpless,” Carter said. “By reducing the number of employees to handle cases, by putting stipulations on certain cases, it only makes it feel intensified.”

Education Department officials insist the staff reductions will not affect civil rights investigations and the layoffs were “strategic decisions.”

In her state of Alabama, Carter said families face an uphill battle to finding legal representation.

“They don’t have the money for an attorney,” she said. “Or the representation they’re getting is not the representation they feel like will be best for their child.”

Even if families can afford the high costs, a limited number of attorneys have the expertise to take on disability discrimination cases. Programs that offer free representation often have limited capacity.

If the backlog of cases increases at the federal Office for Civil Rights, families may lose faith in how quickly the department will investigate their complaints, Stewart said. That may drive them to alternate pathways, such as filing state complaints.

But state and local agencies haven’t always had the capacity or understanding to handle education disability complaints, Stewart said, since those cases so often went to the U.S. Education Department.

“They might not have the infrastructure or the knowledge or the staffing to take on the influx of cases,” Stewart said.

In a separate federal lawsuit filed Thursday, Democratic attorneys general argued the staff reductions at the Education Department may embolden school districts to ignore complaints of discrimination or harassment.

“Students with current complaints will likely see no meaningful resolution, with cases backlogged due to the shortage of employees to resolve them,” the lawsuit said. “Students facing discrimination, sexual harassment or sexual assault will lose a critical avenue to report their case.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

• When Steve Jobs was just 12 years old, he called up HP cofounder Bill Hewlett to ask for spare parts to build a frequency counter. That phone call got him the tools, and a job. His philosophy remained invaluable to his growth in founding Apple. 

At the age of 12, most people are worrying about their school crush or a science project that’s due next week. But Steve Jobs had his mind on something else as a tween: spare parts needed to build a frequency counter. So he found Hewlett Packard (HP) cofounder Bill Hewlett’s phone number in the yellow pages and called him up for a favor. 

“I never found anybody that didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help. I always call them up,” Jobs said in a 1994 interview, archived by the Silicon Valley Historical Association. 

Jobs recalled that Hewlett laughed when Jobs introduced himself as a 12-year-old highschooler in need of the parts. But ultimately, he offered him the components—and a job. The HP cofounder was so impressed by his drive that he set him up with a summer job at the company, putting nuts and bolts together on frequency counters. 

“He got me a job in the place they built them, and I was in heaven,” Jobs said. “I’ve never found anyone who says ‘no,’ or hung up the phone when I called. I just asked.” 

That opportunity was the launchpad for Jobs’ wider career success, eventually cofounding $3.5 trillion company Apple with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976. And Jobs has carried that learning experience with him, saying he had tried to repay that debt of gratitude by helping others when they were in need of an opportunity. 

The hardest part for many might be plucking up the courage to reach out—it can be daunting to hit up a company and hope that a leader is able to give an opportunity. And it could seem like the late 1960’s, when Jobs reached out to Hewlett about the spare parts, could have been an easier time to get that support. After all, most Fortune 500 CEOs’ phone numbers are extremely tricky to find now. But Jobs contends that leaders are more willing to help than people may expect. 

“Most people never pick up the phone and call, most people never ask. And that’s what separates sometimes the people that do things from the people that just dream about them,” Jobs said. “You gotta act. And you’ve got to be willing to fail.”

Billionaires taking a chance, and finding early success

Jobs wasn’t the only billionaire CEO who jump-started their career as a teenager chasing their dreams of success.

Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates used to sneak out of the house when he was 13 to practice coding at a local company, Computer Center Corp., across town. At the time, computers weren’t a household staple yet. So he’d be at the Seattle-based business until the wee hours of the morning, sometimes as late as 2 a.m., testing out his own bespoke code in exchange for his services fixing programming bugs for Computer Center Corp. 

Without that access and early on-hands experience, Gates said he might not have advanced forward in his career and launched a $3.1 billion tech company.  

“We were kids…none of us had any real computer experience,” Gates wrote in his memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings. “Without that lucky break of free computer time—call it my first 500 hours—the next 9,500 hours might not have happened at all.”

Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, also discovered his entrepreneurial passion early on in life. At the age of six he started selling gum in his neighborhood; when Buffett was 13, he got his first job as a paperboy—and even deducted the bike from his taxes. He got the itch to start his own company, so he launched a pinball business as a teenager for just $25. It later sold for over $1,000 after just one year. It may pale in comparison to Berkshire Hathaway’s $989 billion market cap—but it laid the foundation for him to be the worshipped entrepreneur he is today. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com