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Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov, 24, set foot on the restricted territory of North Sentinel – part of India’s Andaman Islands – in an attempt to meet the Sentinelese people, who are believed to number only about 150.

“The American citizen was presented before the local court after his arrest and is now on a three-day remand for further interrogation,” the Andaman and Nicobar Islands police chief, HGS Dhaliwal, told AFP.

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Yesterday, the Trump administration announced a series of tariffs it characterized as “reciprocal,” ranging from 10 percent to 50 percent and calculated for every country on Earth. The country-specific rates were made public at the press conference announcing the tariffs, as well as on White House social media.

However, despite the characterization of the tariffs as “reciprocal,” and despite the accompanying graphics referring to foreign “tariffs charged to the USA including currency manipulation and trade barriers,” the White House did not actually measure tariffs, currency manipulation, or trade barrier policies employed by other countries. Instead, it drew its estimates from something else entirely: bilateral trade deficits in goods.

Specifically, the White House documents appear to allege the “tariffs charged to the USA” are the greater of two different quantities: (a) 10 percent, and (b) the 2024 US trade deficit in goods with a given country, divided by the total quantity of US imports from that country.

Set aside, for now, the damage to economic growth these tariffs will cause, or the distributional impact of one of the largest tax hikes in US history. Other Tax Foundation work will cover that. (We currently estimate the cumulative amount of Trump tariffs at $3.1 trillion over 10 years, amounting to a roughly $2,100 tax increase per household in 2025 alone.)

The method for calculating other countries’ so-called “tariffs” for reciprocal purposes is nonsense. Bilateral deficits are not tariffs, nor are they meaningful anyway; trade in services is relevant; and tariffs cannot be used to target overall trade deficits. The overall result is an extraordinary policy error that will severely damage the economy while failing to reduce the US trade deficit.

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Financial journalist James Surowiecki noted the tariff rate for other nations Trump showed off is not related to a tariff American manufactures pay, but a calculation using the trade deficit.

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Summary

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) warned of uncertainty over Trump’s sweeping new tariffs, saying, “In the long run, we’re all dead,” and slammed blind loyalty to the policy.

While Kennedy didn’t vote against Trump’s emergency tariff powers—unlike four GOP senators—he criticized the lack of clarity on economic impacts.

Trump imposed a 10% baseline tariff on all imports, falsely claiming foreign nations will bear the cost.

Kennedy told Newsmax that predictions on the tariffs’ effects are unreliable, adding anyone claiming certainty is “lying” or “selling deep stupid.”

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In recent days, several news outlets, including Politico, reported that Trump had told members of his cabinet that the tech billionaire, who holds the position of “special government employee”, would soon be stepping back from his role in the administration, and would take on a supporting role and return to the private sector.

As a special government employee, Musk’s current service is capped at 130 days, which, if counted from the day of the inauguration, is set to expire sometime in late May.

And then, on Thursday morning, in an interview with Fox News, Vance stated: “Doge has got a lot of work to do, and yeah, that work is going to continue after Elon leaves, but fundamentally, Elon is going to remain a friend and an adviser of both me and the president.

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Leaked Audio of Musk Crying to Trump Explains Tesla's Death Spiral

It's got the audio too...

Dean Blundell - Substack

Edit: Snopes says AI-detection tools suggested with high confidence that the clip was generated using artificial intelligence. Snopes

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Russia was not included in the countries hit by Trump's tariff. The press secretary say it's because previous sanction "preclude any meaningful trade," but other countries that do even less trade, such as Syria, were on the list.

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A study by researchers at the Brown University School of Public Health found that Americans have poorer survival rates than Europeans across all wealth levels and detailed factors driving the disparity.

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Mat Piscatella of Circana said this is an unprecedented and "chaotic" situation as it relates to tariffs and their impact on video games, so anyone claiming to know how things will shake out may be speaking out of turn.

"All anyone can do at this point is speculate. We are certainly in uncharted waters here, and no one really knows what will happen next," he told GameSpot. "Obviously, the announced tariffs are having an immediate impact on the financial markets. And given the haphazard nature of how the tariffs are being calculated and applied, uncertainty is really the only certain thing at the moment."

Piscatella said there is "absolutely the chance" that the new tariffs or any additional future tariffs might amount to changes for US consumer products, and not just for Nintendo but for all players.

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The acting Inspector General of the Defense Department will review Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s use of Signal in a group chat with other key national security officials to discuss military strikes against the Houthis in Yemen last month, the IG’s office announced on Thursday.

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As President Trump finally unveils his global tariff plan — setting a baseline 10% tariff on all imported goods, with additional hikes apparently based on individual countries’ trade balances with the United States — economists like our guest Richard Wolff warn it will have grave economic effects on American consumers and lead to a recession.

Wolff says the Trump administration’s tariff strategy is borne out of an ahistorical “notion of the United States as a victim” despite the fact that “we have been one of the greatest beneficiaries in the last 50 years of economic wealth, particularly for people at the top.”

In response to the growing economic fortunes of the rest of the world and the associated decline in U.S. hegemony, Trump and his allies are “striking out at other people” in desperation and denial of an end to U.S. imperial dominance. “[It’s] not going to work,” says Wolff.

AMY GOODMAN: ...Professor Wolff, it’s great to have you with us again. Well, start off by responding to, and were you surprised, shocked, or did you guess that, well, about 185 countries were going to see increased tariffs?

RICHARD WOLFF: On the one hand, we knew something like this was coming. On the other hand, the sweep and the scope of it does make you stop. Mr. Trump is right: It is a changing moment in American history and world history. But I think his representation of what’s going on is completely fantastical and has only to do with the self-promotion that he has engaged in most of the time. It was never foreigners who did it to us, this notion of the United States as a victim. We have been one of the greatest beneficiaries in the last 50 years of economic wealth, particularly for people at the top, just like him. It has nothing to do with foreigners taking advantage of us. This attempt to make himself strong and powerful relative to others, to blame the foreigner, these are cheap shots that a real president wouldn’t do.

And there’s the most important point. The American economy is in trouble. The American empire is in decline. We don’t want to discuss it in this country. We engage in denial. And instead, we are striking out at other people — a sad way of handling a decline. The British Empire declined before. So did all the others. We are now at that point. We had a great 20th century. The 21st century is different. You have to face those problems. That’s not being done. What’s being done is to say we have difficulties, but they’re all somebody else’s fault, and we’re going to solve it by punishing them.

I would like to point out, as you suggest, quite rightly, Amy, that the rest of the world is not going to sit by. The United States does not have the power it had in the 20th century. It is not in the position it seems to imagine itself. When the secretary of the Treasury added to Mr. Trump’s comments that he warned the rest of the world not to retaliate, that would imply that if they do, there would be escalation. Yes, he said, there will be escalation. Well, nothing will guarantee more escalation than if they do nothing, because then it’s an invitation for Mr. Trump to keep doing it as each of these efforts doesn’t work.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can put this in a bigger picture? Talk about the tax cuts and how they fit into the tariffs, the — what is it? — something like $4 trillion in tax cuts, and who benefits. And then talk about the other issues that President Trump keeps saying that they’re not going to touch, even though what many call his co-president, Elon Musk, whether he steps back from being — you know, giving speeches or not, going after Social Security, issues like Medicaid.

RICHARD WOLFF: Let me start with the tax issue. The biggest single thing that Trump did in his first presidency was the tax cut of December 2017. And when that tax cut was written into law, it had a sunset. It expires this year, 2025. If that expiration is allowed to happen, corporations and the rich, who were the big beneficiaries back then, will face a big tax [increase]. He doesn’t want to do that, because that’s his base, that’s his donor support. He doesn’t want to have those taxes go back up.

Well, then, what is he going to have to do? If he keeps on spending and he doesn’t let those taxes go back up, he’s going to have to borrow trillions, as we have been doing. He doesn’t want to be the president who keeps borrowing trillions, in part because the rest of the world is a major creditor of the United States, and they’re not going to continue to do it the way they have. So he’s in a jam. He has to do something.

So his hope is to savage the expenditures in this country. Look what he’s doing. Mr. Musk stands there with a chainsaw to give us the clear implication, “I’m going to solve the problem on the backs of the working class. I’m firing them all. I don’t care what the rest of the working class suffers. I’m going to fire all these people, without notice, without a plan.” Calling this efficient is a silly joke. An efficient process takes time, takes experts. You’re not doing that. You’re just wholesale firing. Calling that efficiency is an attempt to fool people, that shouldn’t make any difference.

Mr. Trump is now in a jam. He can’t get out of this without in some way solving the problem that has been built up. And there is no way other than the one he’s doing, because it’s the last gasp of how to take away from the mass of the people the ability to borrow. I mean, let’s be honest. If you put a tariff, you make everything coming in from abroad more expensive. That means people will buy less of it. They’ll shrink their standard of living. If American companies take advantage of the tariff, which they always do, by raising their prices, that will also hurt the working class. You are immiserating your workers in order to try to solve the problem you haven’t solved before.

But here’s the irony that may in the end come back to haunt us. Europe has been unable to unify under the umbrella of American alliances. The enmity of the United States is bringing Europe together better than the alliance was able to do. And as you pointed out, very important, China, Japan and South Korea, with long histories of animosity and tension, are getting together to cope with this. Wow! We are unifying the whole world.

If you want the big picture in my judgment, after World War II, George Kennan taught us about containment: “We’re going to contain the Soviet Union.” The irony, which the philosopher Hegel would enjoy, we are becoming contained. We are isolating ourselves — the votes in the U.N. of the United States alone or the United States and Israel and two or three other countries, the isolation politically, the isolation now economically. We are the rogue nation for the rest of the world. We may not want it. We may not agree. But it doesn’t really matter, if that’s how they perceive us. And that’s what’s happening.

AMY GOODMAN: Thirty seconds, as you often talk about, are you seeing this as the beginning of the end of American empire?

RICHARD WOLFF: Yes, I think we are already in 10 or 12 years of that decline. It can’t — here’s the single best statistic. If you add up the GDP, you know, the total output of goods and services in a year for a country, of the United States and its major allies, the G7, it’s about 28% of global output. If you do the same thing for China and the BRICS, it’s about 35%. They are already a bigger bloc of economic power than we are. Every country in the world thinking about building a railroad or expanding its health program, they used to send their people to Washington or London to get help. They still do. But when they’re done, they send the same team to Beijing, New Delhi, São Paulo, and they often get a better deal. The world is changing. And the United States could cope. But as with alcoholism, you have to admit you have a problem, before you’re in a position to solve it. We have a nation that does not yet want to face what this all adds up to.

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