“Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) traveled to El Salvador this week to get answers about the status of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man Donald Trump’s administration illegally sent to a mega-prison in the Central American nation and is now refusing to bring back to the U.S. despite a Supreme Court order to ‘facilitate’ his return. Van Hollen was able to meet with Abrego Garcia on Thursday. ‘I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar,’ he wrote on X, attaching a photo of himself sitting with Abrego Garcia. ‘Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return.’ Trump and his administration, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, and MAGA commentators online have been mocking Van Hollen for checking on Abrego Garcia’s welfare. ‘Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention from the Fake News Media, or anyone,’ Trump wrote Friday on Truth Social. ‘GRANDSTANDER!!!’” (Ryan Bort/Rolling Stone)
“We have been through ruinous periods before, but never when the president was the one actively and knowingly causing the ruin. During past upheaval, there ‘wasn’t this sense that the White House, the president, is directing the destruction of 250-year-old American values,’ (David) Greenberg says. He also notes that, because of the expansion of the executive powers over the past century, particularly during the New Deal and the Cold War, Trump has more ability to cause destruction than his predecessors did. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever had the combination of such a vast and extensive executive apparatus and at the same time an attempt to eliminate the built-in safeguards,’ he says. Some executive orders have a proud place in our history because they had noble aims or produced lofty accomplishments: the Emancipation Proclamation. The Manhattan Project. Enforcing school desegregation in Little Rock. But Trump’s orders are more likely to be remembered alongside those establishing Japanese internment and Operation Wetback because they are based in cruelty and in his insatiable lust for vengeance. ‘It’s not hyperbole to say this is the weirdest 100 days of any president in American history,’ says (Douglas) Brinkley, ‘because, at its root, it is pathological narcissism.’ In the end, Trump’s 100 days, and his presidency generally, will be judged harshly for what they were not. ‘We remember great civilizations for their great achievements,’ Greenberg says. Scientific advancement. Contributions to arts and letters. Human progress. Trump is reversing them all.” (Dana Millbank/WashPo)
“Trump is poised, on April 20, to announce the Department of Justice’s findings on whether to invoke the Insurrection Act to address the alleged national emergency at the country’s southern border. (Border crossings now stand at their lowest rate in decades, but for an administration that came very close to crashing the world economy on phony and overhyped numbers purporting to document fentanyl and trade emergencies, that’s not much of a challenge.) Since US Attorney General Pam Bondi is a duly certified Trump sycophant, there’s not much drama attached to the finding itself: An emergency will almost certainly be declared, and the Trump administration will move into a whole new front of authoritarian impunity.” (Chris Lehmann/The Nation)
“A common feature/bug of any Maga convention nowadays is that you can count on Liz Truss to show up. Though I am no admirer, I feel cringing sympathy for Britain’s former prime minister whenever she tries to channel her inner Churchill. It is one thing to warn an audience there are only ten years to save the west; quite another to issue a call to arms to a row of empty chairs. But Truss should be better briefed. Maga hates the ‘west’, which ranks up there with ‘ESG’ and ‘Latinx’ as something liberal and therefore alien. Why on earth would they save it? It plays nearly the same hobgoblin role in Maga minds as Brussels does in Brexiteers’. America must exit the west so that it can become itself again. Truss’s next talk should be entitled: The West Must Die! There, I’ve fixed it. But Truss could perform a real public service. At the end of Shekhar Kapoor’s wonderfully melodramatic Elizabeth, Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth says that her treasonous former amour Robert Dudley will be kept alive ‘to remind me how close I came to danger’. Truss serves the same purpose. Unlike that viral lettuce, which outlasted her 44-day premiership, the educational value of Truss’s cautionary tale is timeless. British Swampians will be interested to hear that Truss has been surfacing regularly in the US media recently. That is because Donald Trump is doing his best to duplicate Truss’s folly. Recall that Truss was defenestrated by the bond markets, which were unimpressed by her idea of financing tax cuts with borrowing at a time of constraint. Trump’s magical thinking is far grander.” (Ed Luce/FT)
“According to a news release issued by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, an international research team used advanced photographic technology to decipher inscriptions on the walls of a medieval hall in Jerusalem that has shed new light on the identities and origins of pilgrims during the Middle Ages. The site is purportedly the location where Jesus held the Last Supper and has been visited by devout Christians for centuries, many of whom left graffiti and drawings on the walls that were not visible until now. The researchers identified the family crest of an Austrian noble who traveled to Jerusalem with the future Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Habsburg, in 1436. They also revealed an Arabic inscription left by a female Christian pilgrim from the Syrian city of Aleppo, making it a rare material trace of pre-modern female pilgrimage. Overall, they found evidence of travelers from Armenia, Syria, Serbia, and Germanic-speaking lands who visited the site between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. However, the largest single group of graffiti was left by Arabic-speaking Christians from the East. ‘When put together, the inscriptions provide a unique insight into the geographical origins of the pilgrims,’ said researcher Ilya Berkovich. “This was far more diverse than current Western-dominated research perspective led us to believe.’” (Archaeology Magazine)
“More than 1,400 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) workers were terminated from their positions on Thursday amid a broader Trump administration shakeup at the independent government agency, sources tell WIRED. There were around 1,700 employees in total at the CFPB. The mass reduction in force, or RIF, comes nearly a month after a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order barring the Trump administration from removing probationary employees at the CFPB and other agencies. On Friday, an appeals court ruled that the CFPB could begin terminations again so long as ‘individual assessments’ were conducted for each terminated employee. Around 200 employees will be left at the CFPB, effectively gutting the agency Elon Musk has previously said should be ‘deleted.’ In an email sent to CFPB staff on Wednesday, CFPB chief legal officer Mark Paoletta announced that the agency would be shifting its focus away from its supervisory roles and towards ‘tangible harm to consumers.’ Medical debt, student loans, consumer data, and digital payments have all been identified as topics the CFPB will ‘deprioritize,’ according to the document.” (McKenna Kelly/WIRED)
“Brent Neiman is a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and recently served as the assistant secretary for international finance in the US Treasury department. Earlier this month, he made headlines when the White House’s ‘reciprocal tariff calculations misleadingly cited research done by Neiman and his colleagues. Unhedged spoke with him about that calculation, the price effects of tariffs and the future of the dollar. Unhedged: Could you walk us through the research cited by the White House? Neiman: The paper was written to measure the pass-through of the first Trump administration’s 2018 tariffs into prices. At the time, there was a lot of discussion of how much foreign countries would pay for the tariffs, rather than the US. Theoretically, there’s nothing incoherent about that — it was possible that foreign exporters would reduce their prices to offset any imposed tariff. But it was also possible that there’d be very little change in pricing, forcing US importers or consumers to cover the tariff. We decided to do an empirical analysis on this question, using data meant to represent the full basket of US imports. We found that US importers paid around 95 per cent of the 2018-19 tariff. For example, if there were a 20 per cent tariff, there would be a one percentage point reduction in the price charged by foreign exporters, and a 19 per cent increase in the prices faced by US importers. We also looked at the price effects of Chinese retaliatory tariffs against the US. Interestingly, there was not the same effect. We found that US exporters dropped prices by more in response to China’s tariffs than Chinese exporters did in response to US tariffs. So in some sense, US exporters paid a greater share of Chinese tariffs than the Chinese exporters paid of the US tariff. Finally, we traced it through as best we could to retail prices, using information from two large US retailers. Our research showed that pass-through was actually much lower for the retailers. One of the reasons may have been tariff front-running by retailers and suppliers, or because there was a shift in supply away from China’s goods towards countries without US tariffs placed upon them.” (Aiden Reiter/FT)
“Some of the best journalism right now comes in two distinct sizes. There are skinny must-read scoops about President Trump and his government's norm-shattering actions in very specific ways. (Examples: Recent stories about the IRS by CNN, The AP and The New York Times.) Then there are XXL-sized stories, columns and segments that connect all the dots. ‘The tariffs, the treatment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the DOGE moves — they're all fundamentally about the same thing,’ Trump's ‘thirst for one-man rule,’ veteran columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. writes. In a new piece for the FT this morning, Yuval Noah Harari says Trump's vision of the world is a ‘zero-sum game in which every transaction involves winners and losers.’ These XXL-sized columns help people see the broader pattern at work. This is being done on TV too, with the benefit of then-versus-now video clips. ‘The president who complained about the government being weaponized against him’ is turning the government ‘into ammo to help his allies and punish his perceived enemies,’ CNN's Abby Phillip said at the top of last night's NewsNight. Her segment connected the dots between Trump's pardons, his demands for DOJ investigations of critics, his administration's targeting of Harvard, and the looming funding threats against PBS and NPR, to name a few.” (Brian Stelter/Reliable Sources)
“How did European bombs get to a Sudanese battlefield, despite an EU embargo on shipping weapons there? After identifying the Bulgarian company that manufactured the mortar shells, Dunarit, the FRANCE 24 Observers team tried to trace the history of these weapons. We questioned the Interministerial Commission on Export Control, the Bulgarian authority that oversees arms exportations. Initially, the commission did not disclose where the mortar bombs shown in the video filmed on November 21, 2024 in Sudan had been exported. All they said was that they ‘had not issued an export permit to Sudan’ … But the FRANCE 24 Observers team was able to obtain a copy of this delivery certificate from a source who asked to remain anonymous. The document, issued on August 16, 2020 by the ‘United Arab Emirates G.H.Q. [General Headquarters] Armed Forces’, provides a lot of information about the transaction. We learned that the ‘final destination’ or end user of the Bulgarian mortar bombs was supposed to be the armed forces of the UAE. This document shows just how large the shipment of mortar bombs was: 15,000 bombs measuring 81 mm (like those seen in the videos from November 21, 2024 filmed in Sudan) but also 2,780 bombs measuring 60 mm, 30,000 measuring 82 mm and 11,464 bombs measuring 120 mm, a much more powerful calibre. The arms were delivered to the Emirati Army in two shipments, in January and February 2020. Moreover, the document lists two companies, as well as the General Headquarters of the Army: a Bulgarian ‘supplier’, ARM-BG Ltd., and an Emirati ‘importer’, International Golden Group PJSC. The manufacturer, Dunarit, isn’t mentioned. Our team was able to corroborate this information with a second document, which we obtained from a separate source with access to information supplied by the Emirati Army on the arms sale. This subsequent document, called an end-user certificate, is a guarantee to the manufacturer and regulators in the country where the armaments came from that the final user of the weapons has been verified.” (France24)
“In 2013, Marco Rubio gave a towering foreign policy speech designed to signal his seriousness to the world. In soaring rhetoric, he chastised his isolationist colleagues succumbing to the ‘false allure of protectionist policies’ and touted America’s use of hard and soft power to deliver a more stable world. ‘Consider the countless lives we’ve saved from the scourge of AIDS in Africa through the PEPFAR program. Or consider the economic mobility created by American trade and investment,’ Rubio wrote in prepared remarks. He spoke of the country’s legacy spreading ‘liberty, free enterprise, and respect for human rights’ around the world and warned that ‘a lack of American engagement comes with an even higher price’ than the cost of getting involved. ‘If America stops leading,’ he asked, ‘who will fill the vacuum we leave behind?’ Anyone know what happened to that guy? … The same person who, in that 2013 speech, celebrated PEPFAR’s accomplishments and warned about American abandonment spilling over into humanitarian crises, has now overseen the systematic dismantling of USAID, the very agency that runs the program. The same person who, in 2013, called for stapling green cards to foreign students’ diplomas is now defending his decision to rip them away by the hundreds. The same person who said back then that we must ‘find ways to make the visa application process less burdensome for those wishing to travel and do business in the United States’ argued last week that ‘visiting America is not an entitlement. It is a privilege.’ The same person who, in 2013, said that America must stay true to its ‘guiding principles of liberty and human rights’ is now doubling down on the president’s supposed authority to send people who have neither been charged nor convicted of any crimes to a gulag in El Salvador.” (Issye Lapowsky/Vanity Fair)
“As the number of new podcasts created each year continues to skyrocket, with competition for listeners, sponsorships and in-app promotion growing ever more fierce, many podcasters see winning awards as a way to stand out. A new crop of competitions — including the iHearts, the Ambie Awards and the Signal Awards — is catering specifically to the industry, with some rolling out red carpets and dispensing gold statues for a price. But how much should it cost to compete for bragging rights in the podcast world? And, for independent creators, is the potential payoff worth the expense? ‘If you want to grow your brand, you’ve got to do these things and participate,’ Hoch said. ‘But it’s tricky. Are we all here celebrating? Or are they trying to make money?’” (Reggie Ugwu/NYT)
“An American citizen was held in a Florida jail cell on ICE’s orders after he was charged under a new, restrictive immigration law criminalizing ‘unauthorized alien’ entry into the state. He was kept imprisoned even after presenting his birth certificate. According to a report from the Florida Phoenix, 20-year-old Juan Carlos Gomez-Lopez was arrested on Wednesday during a traffic stop. The arresting officer claimed in his report that Gomez-Lopez was in the country illegally and took him into custody. He was charged under a Florida law that went into effect in February, making it a misdemeanor for undocumented immigrants to enter the state knowingly. Gomez-Lopez's charge came despite a federal judge ruling the law unconstitutional earlier this month. Lopez -Gomez's mother brought his birth certificate and Social Security card to a Leon County courthouse, and the charge was dropped. Judge LaShawn Riggans agreed that Lopez-Gomez had sufficient proof of citizenship to drop the charges, but said she did not have the authority to release him from an ICE hold. ‘He hasn’t committed a crime for them to hold him, that’s what I don’t understand,’ Gomez-Lopez’s mother, Sebastiana Gomez-Perez, told the Phoenix. She was in court for her son’s hearing on Thursday, but was reportedly denied access to visit him in Leon County Jail. ‘I felt immense helplessness because I couldn’t do anything, and I am desperate to get my son out of there.’” (Griffin Eckstein/Salon)
“On November 9, 1965, when the power cut off in a massive Northeast blackout, Bruce had to walk to 107th Street from NYU on Eighth Street, where he was going to law school. In those days (and still, honestly) it wasn’t a big deal to walk five miles in the city, except the streets were dark, and there was a magical feeling of carnival reversal, misrule, and anything goes. That night, we hung out with Trudy and Dave in their apartment. They had candles, and we sat around talking. Maybe Dave played and sang. Maybe Trudy sang harmony. What I remember is they had sex. Did Bruce and I have sex, too, in the same room? I think so. I think we would have thought it was rude to refrain or leave. During this period and in the many days to come before AIDS, this sort of thing happened. I didn’t smoke pot often or drink hardly at all, so I was someone awake enough to take notes, and the notes I took are what, right now, look like a memory. When you are nineteen (and still, honestly) you are casting around for ways your life can go. The man-and-wife-like arrangement of Trudy and Dave wasn’t something I wanted, although, at the time, it seemed the only item on the shelves.” (Laurie Stone/The Paris Review)