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White House says order will ‘make America's showers great again' and ‘end the Obama-Biden war on water pressure'
A global trade war roller coaster was not enough to distract Donald Trump from fulfilling one of his longtime priorities Wednesday: changing the federal definition of “showerhead”, a move the White House said would “end the Obama-Biden war on water pressure”.
Trump has complained for years about inadequate water pressure in American showers, sinks and toilets, and has blamed federal water-conservation standards for the problem.
“In my case, I like to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair,” Trump said as he signed the executive order, which the White House said would apply to multiple household appliances, including toilets and sinks. “I have to stand under the shower for 15 minutes until it gets wet. It comes out drip, drip, drip. It's ridiculous.”
“By restoring shower freedom, President Trump is following through on his commitment to dismantle unnecessary regulations and put Americans first,” the White House said in a statement on the executive order.
Some appliance experts have found Trump's continued focus on American water pressure notable.
“It was very striking that the White House memo included toilets and shower heads as a presidential priority. It really was something,” Andrew deLaski, executive director at the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, told the Guardian in January. “But I think Donald Trump's concerns are somewhat out of date, to tell you the truth.”
Trump's comments on Wednesday echoed remarks he has made many times before. He claimed in 2019 that “people are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once” as a result of insufficient water pressure. “When you go into these new homes with showers, the water drips down slowly, slowly,” he said in 2023.
During his first term as president, Trump rolled back stricter energy-efficiency standards for light bulbs, again citing consumer choice as the reason for the change. At the time, Xavier Becerra, then attorney general of California, called it “another dim-witted move that will waste energy at the expense of our people and planet”. The first Trump White House also created loopholes for less efficient appliances such as dishwashers and showers, moves that were later reversed by Joe Biden.
“Biden undid this progress and the shower wars continued,” the White House said on Wednesday, claiming that Trump's new executive order would “make America's showers great again”.
Oliver Milman contributed reporting
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Former first lady Michelle Obama discussed stepping back and making time for herself on a podcast released Tuesday, addressing her recent absences from political events and rumors of marital troubles.
Speaking of her life eight years out of the White House with two adult children, Obama said on the “Work in Progress” podcast with actress Sophia Bush that she now has the opportunity to control her own calendar and can now make “a choice for myself.”
“I could have made a lot of these decisions years ago, but I didn't give myself that freedom,” Obama said, “Maybe even as much as I let my kids live their own lives, I use their lives as an excuse for why I couldn't do something.”
She continued: “And now that's gone. And so now I have to look at my — I get to look at my calendar, which I did this year, was a real big example of me, myself looking at something that I was supposed to do — you know, without naming names — and I chose to do what was best for me, not what I had to do, not what I thought other people wanted me to do.”
The former First Lady notably skipped President Donald Trump's second inauguration, as well as the state funeral of former President Jimmy Carter in January.
She went on to discuss the guilt of saying no and how her recent choices to step away from certain responsibilities raised rumors of a possible divorce from her husband, former President Barack Obama.
“I still find time to you know, give speeches, to be out there in the world, to work on projects. I still care about girls' education. We, you know, the library is opening in a year from now. Certain things I am and am not doing with the library,” Obama said.
She continued: “That's the thing that we as women, I think we struggle with like disappointing people. I mean so much so that this year people were, you know — they couldn't even fathom that I was making a choice for myself that they had to assume that my husband and I are divorcing.”
The Obamas have been together for 32 years, according to a post from the former president on X in October.
The former first lady has been open about how Barack Obama's political ambitions and time in the Oval Office was tough on their marriage, writing in her book “Becoming” that it resulted in loneliness and exhaustion.
Since leaving the White House, Obama has spoken out against Trump and campaigned for Vice President Kamala Harris last year.
During one campaign stop in Michigan just days before the 2024 election, Obama said: “Please, please do not hand our fates over to the likes of Trump, who knows nothing about us, who has shown deep contempt for us.”
She added: “Because a vote for him is a vote against us, against our health, against our worth.”
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Nasa cuts contract that convened USGCRP, which released assessments impacting environmental decision-making
The White House is ending funding for the body that produces the federal government's pre-eminent climate report, which summarizes the impacts of rising global temperatures on the United States.
Every four years, the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) is required by Congress to release a new national climate assessment to ensure leaders understand the drivers of – and threats posed by – global warming. It is the most comprehensive, far-reaching and up-to-date analysis of the climate crisis, playing a key role in local and national decision making about agriculture, energy production, and land and water use.
The next assessment is due by 2027. But now, Nasa has ended its contract with the consulting firm ICF International, which convened the USGCRP and coordinated the federal agencies that contribute to the quadrennial report.
“There's really no coming back from this, and it means we are all less informed about climate impacts, and won't have the most up-to-date information on risks and threats,” said one federal staffer who was engaged in USGCRP activities, and who requested anonymity to avoid retribution. “USGCRP helped me to leverage resources from other agencies for use in my own work. But without these networks, I'm left without a support system and the latest science on climate change.”
The end of the contract, first reported by Politico and confirmed by multiple sources to the Guardian, imperils the federal government's climate research, say experts.
“The firing of USGCRP staff guts the entire climate research and services ecosystem leaving teetering silos of climate teams, already reeling from federal cuts due to Doge,” the anonymous staffer said.
Another federal worker with knowledge of the program, who was also granted anonymity, said the contract's cancellation will mean “the Sixth National Climate Assessment is effectively destroyed.”
USGCRP staff who hailed from the 15 federal agencies had all been told to abandon the body; its only remaining staff were from ICF and have now been fired, the second worker said. “Climate research as a whole will be hobbled because USGCRP's interagency working groups are essential coordinating bodies across the entire government, including and beyond the 15 USGCRP member agencies.”
The move came one day after the rightwing outlet the Daily Wire published an article attacking ICF International saying the firm was “raking in millions to spread climate doom”. Since its publication, the second worker said they had had a “pit in their stomach”.
The attack on the USGCRP and national climate assessment did not come as a surprise. In the Heritage Foundation's far-right policy blueprint Project 2025, Russ Vought – now Trump's head of the office and management and budget – called to end the USGCRP or fill it with pro-oil industry members.
Since Trump's second term began in January, the monthly meetings of delegates to the body from federal agencies have been cancelled, the anonymous worker said. “We were waiting for new principles to be sent from each agency, which never happened, so that could have been a sign in retrospect,” they added.
Andrew Rosenberg, a former Noaa official who is now a fellow at the University of New Hampshire, called the end of the contract “very foolish” and “thoughtless”. National climate assessments provide an important synthesis of “science across fields” – and are not particularly expensive to produce because the authors are all volunteers, he said.
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In February, Trump officials also denied US scientists permission to attend a meeting of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world's leading climate science entity. The federal government also cancelled its contract with ICF International to maintain US support for and involvement in the body.
“Extreme weather disasters displaced millions of people and caused billions of dollars in damage in 2024 alone,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech University climate scientist who has served as lead author on three national climate assessments. “Given the accelerating pace and scale of climate impacts today, a sustained and more comprehensive national climate assessment process is so essential,” Hayhoe said. “We need it today, to build a better future tomorrow.”
The move is a sign of the Trump administration's fealty to the fossil fuel industry, said Michael Mann, an eminent US climate scientist. The sector donated in record levels to Trump's re-election campaign.
“It is pure villainy,” said Mann. “A crime against the planet – arguably, the most profound of all crimes.”
Since Trump's first trade war with China in 2018, Beijing has ramped up trade with other countries, making it less dependent on the US
The opening shots seem like a distant memory. Back in January, US president Donald Trump threatened to impose a tariff of 10% on Chinese imports. Less than three months later, the rate is now 125%.
China has condemned the tariffs. As well as applying its own reciprocal tariff of 84% on US imports, Beijing has been fighting a war of words.
“When challenged, we will never back down,” said China's foreign ministry spokesperson, Lin Jian. The commerce ministry said: “China will fight to the end if the US side is bent on going down the wrong path.” Further countermeasures have been promised by Beijing.
The tit-for-tat measures could spark fears of a race to the bottom, with ordinary people suffering as prices rise and a fears of a global recession grow.
But although China's economy has in recent years been beset by its own challenges, when it comes to tariffs specifically, Beijing is unlikely to blink first.
“For President Xi, there is only one politically viable response to Trump's latest threat: Bring it on! Having already surprised domestic audiences with a forceful 34% reciprocal tariff, any appearance of backing down would be politically untenable,” says Diana Choyleva, founder and chief economist at Enodo Economics, a forecasting firm.
One of the most helpful factors in Beijing's favour is the fact that the US is far more dependent on Chinese imports than China is on the US.
The main items that the US imports from China are consumer goods, such as smartphones, computers and toys. Last week, analysts at Rosenblatt Securities predicted that the cost of the cheapest iPhone available in the US could rise from $799 to $1,142 – and that was when Trump's China tariffs were just 54%. “Trump cannot credibly deflect blame on to China for these economic hardships,” Choyleva says.
In contrast, the goods that China imports from the US are industrial and manufacturing supplies, such as soya beans, fossil fuels and jet engines. It is much easier for price increases in these commodities to be absorbed before a consumer gets their wallet – or in the case of China, their smartphone – out to pay.
Plus, this is not China's first rodeo. Since Trump's first trade war with China in 2018, China has ramped up trade with other countries, making it less dependent on the US. Between 2018 and 2020, Brazil's soya bean exports to China increased by more than 45% compared to the 2015-2017 average, while US exports declined 38% over the same period. China is still the largest market for US agricultural goods, but the market is shrinking, hurting American farmers. In 2024, the US exported $29.25bn of agricultural products to China, down from $42.8bn in 2022.
China has other measures up its sleeve. On Tuesday, two influential nationalist bloggers published identical lists of possible Chinese retaliations, based on sources. China's foreign ministry declined to comment on the articles but did not deny their content either.
The suggestions included suspending cooperation on fentanyl control, investigating US companies' intellectual property gains in China, and banning Hollywood films from China. On the final point, a top-down embargo may not be necessary. China has in the past allowed online nationalists to whip up grassroots boycott campaigns. In 2017, Chinese consumers participated in a mass shunning of the South Korean supermarket chain Lotte, in response to the conglomerate's involvement in a deal that allowed a US missile defence system to be installed in South Korea, which China saw as a security threat. Nearly half of the company's more than 100 stores in mainland China were forced to close.
China's strategic advantages do not make it totally immune from a trade war. The stock markets in China and Hong Kong are falling. Beijing has not yet figured out a way to meaningfully boost domestic demand, something that economists say is essential to truly tariff-proof the economy.
The political impact of Trump's tariffs, coupled with the fear that the US is trying to turn other countries against China, is pushing US-China relations to an all time low. “I do not remember ever being this pessimistic about the trajectory of US-China relations,” wrote China analyst Bill Bishop in a newsletter. “The trade relationship is the linchpin between the two countries, and as it breaks we should probably expect other areas to see more stress.” But as the Trump administration talks of “Chinese peasants” and suggests that China is playing with a weak hand, Beijing is unlikely to back down anytime soon.
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As Tulsi Gabbard completed her transformation from a Hawaii Democratic politician to a MAGA surrogate last year, she put down stakes in a far redder state. Gabbard and her husband bought a home outside of Austin and declared under oath last June that they were “resident(s) of the State of Texas.”
But a few months later, Gabbard voted in the 2024 general election back in Hawaii.
Election law experts said Gabbard's vote, coupled with her claiming a homestead tax break on her Texas home, raises questions about whether she properly cast her ballot and illustrates the complexity of state voting laws.
Gabbard is now director of national intelligence under President Donald Trump. Trump has continued to press false claims of widespread voter fraud and demanded further actions by state and federal authorities to address it.
Representatives for Gabbard said she never intended to abandon her longtime Hawaii residency, despite signing the sworn declaration calling herself a Texas resident.
“Director Gabbard was, is, and intends to remain a Hawaii resident,” Gabbard's lawyers, Jesse Binnall and Jason Greaves, wrote in a cease-and-desist letter sent to CNN prior to this article's publication. “That is where she lives, pays taxes, and, of course, votes.”
Under Hawaii voting regulations, when voters have a homeowner's tax exemption, that home is presumed to be their residence for election purposes.
Gabbard's attorneys said she applied for a homestead tax exemption, which Texas law only allows on a principal residence, because she “took the advice of local officials” who told her it was required to shield her address from public view. Her office said she was facing a significant security threat.
Gabbard's representatives did not respond to questions about why she separately swore under oath that she was a Texas resident if she considered herself to still live in Hawaii, and did not provide a comment from her after repeated requests.
It's not clear whether Gabbard could have run afoul of voting laws in Hawaii or property tax laws in Texas with her actions. In their letter, her attorneys argued that “the definitions of residency for the purpose of voting in Hawaii and for claiming a homestead exemption in Texas are totally different, and on their face, not mutually exclusive.”
But Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University who studies election law, said Gabbard's vote raised “a bunch of questions.”
“If she voted in Hawaii without actually living up to Hawaii's eligibility standard, then that's a problem,” said Levitt, who served as a voting policy adviser in the Biden administration. “Alternatively, if she always meant to keep Hawaii as home, that could well be a problem for that Texas tax exemption.”
Hawaii law says that individuals can only have a single residence for election purposes, and defines a voter's residence as the “place in which the person's habitation is fixed, and to which, whenever the person is absent, the person has the intention to return.”
If a voter has more than one dwelling, there is a “presumption” that a voter's residence is the dwelling that is “subject to the homeowner's property tax exemption,” state voting regulations say. There is also a presumption that if a voter takes up a new dwelling in another state, that new dwelling is their residence. The regulations allow voters to present evidence that they should still be allowed to vote in Hawaii.
Lance Collins, a Hawaii lawyer who has worked on multiple cases in the state in which voters challenged an elected official's residency, said he thought Gabbard could face a challenge to her registration or an investigation into her vote in the 2024 election.
Under Hawaii law, voters keep their residency “until you take some affirmative action to abandon it,” Collins said. “Requesting a homestead exemption in another state is strong evidence of an intention to abandon.”
Gabbard, who grew up in Hawaii, has a long political history in the state. She became the youngest person ever elected to the state legislature at age 21, before being deployed to Iraq and Kuwait while serving in the state's Army National Guard. Gabbard represented Hawaii in Congress as a Democrat between 2013 and 2021, and ran for president in the 2020 Democratic primary, eventually dropping out and endorsing Joe Biden.
After leaving elected office, Gabbard made a hard turn to the right, working as a Fox News contributor and endorsing and campaigning for Trump last year at events around the US. On the campaign trail, she echoed some of Trump's rhetoric about election security, calling voting integrity “a serious concern and a serious issue” at one Trump campaign event in Las Vegas last fall.
In March 2024, Gabbard and her husband, Abraham Williams, bought a home in the Austin suburb of Leander, Texas, according to property records.
Several months later, in June, Gabbard and Williams declared under oath before a notary public that “we are resident(s) of the State of Texas,” and their Leander home was “designated as the family homestead,” according to a public document filed in Travis County, Texas, the following month.
Texas law allows some property owners, including public officials, servicemembers and veterans, to apply to have their address information made confidential in government appraisal records. Gabbard's office said she sought that protection because her Texas house had been doxxed online, and she was facing a security threat.
Information related to Gabbard's address has been blocked in Travis County records. A spokesperson for the Travis County appraisal district confirmed that only property owners who have applied and been approved for a homestead tax exemption are eligible for the protection.
“It is state law,” the spokesperson, Cynthia Martinez, said in an email. “A homestead exemption can only be claimed on a property that a person owns and occupies as their primary residence. The attorney general has clarified that the confidentiality protections under state law only apply to a homesteaded property.”
However, a “Designation of Homestead” – the type of document Gabbard signed swearing that she was a Texas resident – isn't required in order to get a homestead exemption or to be part of the confidentiality program, Martinez said. The designation document has “nothing to do with a homestead exemption,” she said. It's not clear why Gabbard filed it.
Making a false statement on a homestead exemption application, meanwhile, could lead to misdemeanor or lower-level felony charges, according to the state comptroller's office.
Thanks to a homestead exemption, the annual property taxes for Gabbard's house, which was assessed at a value of nearly $565,000, were reduced by about $1,200, according to a CNN analysis of a November bill from the Travis County Tax Office.
However, Gabbard likely would have benefited from the tax break in 2024 even if she hadn't claimed the homestead exemption herself. The previous property owner also had a homestead exemption, and property taxes are typically calculated based on exemptions that were on the books on January 1 of each year, Martinez said.
Theoretically, Gabbard could also substantially cut her taxes by claiming Texas residency because the Lone Star State doesn't tax income, while Hawaii has one of the highest income tax rates in the US. But Gabbard's lawyers said she pays her taxes in Hawaii and intends to remain a Hawaii resident.
Sean Bukowski, a real estate lawyer in Texas, said that only Texas residents who make the state their primary residence can receive the homestead tax exemption.
“It is supposed to be your main homestead – that's the whole point,” he said. If Gabbard considered herself a Hawaii resident, “she shouldn't be getting a homestead exemption with the county for her taxes (in Texas), because that's not her homestead.”
Gabbard's press interviews and social media increasingly showed her in Texas in the months before and after the election. About halfway through 2024, Gabbard's background on some of her frequent Fox News appearances changed from the slope of Oahu's Diamond Head crater to a view of the Texas State Capitol building in Austin. And her social media posts have shown glimpses of her spending time in the Lone Star State, like videos she posted of herself at a shooting range and gym outside Austin.
The financial disclosure that Gabbard filed in January after being nominated as intelligence director also lists a mortgage described as being for a “Personal Residence” that matches details of the couple's mortgage on the Leander home.
Gabbard has not registered to vote in Travis County, a spokesperson for the county said.
A spokesperson for the Honolulu Elections Division said last month that Gabbard was actively registered to vote in Honolulu County. She's rented a home on Oahu for about a decade, according to her landlord, who asked not to be named. While she has often been away from Hawaii in the mainland US in recent years, the landlord said, “she keeps paying me the rent.”
Another provision in the Hawaii voting regulations says that registered voters who are “employed in the service of the United States” can continue to vote in Hawaii while living out of state, even if their intent to return is “uncertain.” Gabbard is serving in the Army Reserve as a part-time commander of a battalion based in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
But Collins, the Hawaii voting lawyer, said he wasn't sure if there was any relationship between Gabbard “living in the state of Texas and her part-time service in the Army Reserves in some other state.”
Gabbard isn't the only member of Trump's Cabinet who's faced residency questions related to their vote in last year's election. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cast a ballot in New York State, even though a judge ruled last summer that he could not appear on the state's presidential ballot because he used a “sham” address to claim New York residency. Kennedy had listed his address as a New York home he rented from a friend, even though he admitted having slept there only once, and largely spent his time in California, the judge concluded. Kennedy's appeal of the ruling was not successful.
A liberal watchdog group, Accountable.US, filed a petition with the New York Division of Election Law Enforcement in January accusing Kennedy of violating state law. The division declined to comment about the status of the claim or whether it was investigating Kennedy.
Gabbard, meanwhile, could theoretically face a voter challenge to her Hawaii registration, or an investigation into her decision to vote in the state or her Texas homestead exemption.
Camron Hurt, the program director for Common Cause Hawaii, a non-partisan government watchdog group, said that while Gabbard's declaration of Texas residency wasn't “conclusive of wrongdoing,” it was “concerning.”
“As a public servant and high-profile figure, an explanation is owed,” Hurt said. “If circumstances warrant, Ms. Gabbard should be held accountable for her actions.”
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Public health experts argue he failed to give a full-throated endorsement of an extremely effective vaccine
The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, said on a press tour that his response to a large measles outbreak in west Texas should be a “model for the world”. The statement came after Kennedy attended the funeral of a third measles victim over the weekend.
Kennedy's response to the outbreak has been widely criticized by epidemiologists and public health experts, who argue he failed to give a full-throated endorsement of an extremely effective vaccine, that cases appear to be severely undercounted and that officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been deployed late.
“The numbers continue to grow by the day, but … the growth rate has diminished substantially,” Kennedy told reporters during a press conference, while promoting his health agenda through the American south-west.
Public health experts have said that, in fact, there is little evidence to support this claim.
“I would compare it to what's happening in Europe now,” Kennedy continued, according to Politico. “They've had 127,000 cases and 37 deaths. And so, what we're doing right here in the United States is a model for the rest of the world.”
Kennedy appeared to reference figures from the World Health Organization (WHO) released in March. In that instance, global health officials were referring to cases across 53 countries in Europe and central Asia, which make up the WHO's “European region”. Included in that tally are nations such as Romania and Kazakhstan, which together account for nearly 60,000 cases.
“Measles is the most contagious illness that we know of and it is preventable,” said Susan Polan, associate executive director of the American Public Health Association. “What we're seeing now… is a far, far undercount in terms of the actual number of cases.”
Before the current outbreak, the US had not had a measles death since 2015. Three people have now died as a result of the Texas outbreak, and nearly 500 people have gotten sick, according to Texas authorities. Because measles has an average death rate of one to three per 1,000, public health officials believe cases are undercounted. The measles vaccine is 97% effective at preventing the disease.
On Sunday, Kennedy said CDC staff would be redeployed to the outbreak in Texas. This week, Kennedy also said the best way to prevent measles is to get the vaccine. However, he also used his attendance at a measles victim's funeral to promote unproven therapies for measles in a social media post.
“We should have had more people on the ground – this should have been a priority for weeks and weeks,” said Polan.
Measles was eliminated in the US in 2000. However, anti-vaccine sentiment first stoked by a fraudulent scientific paper in the Lancet and then by non-profits, such as the one Kennedy led for nearly a decade, has stoked a dramatic increase in vaccine hesitancy.
The decline in trust in vaccines has been especially precipitous among Republicans and Republican-leaning adults. A Gallup poll from August 2024 found the percentage of Republicans who believe it is extremely important to vaccinate children fell from more than 60% in the early 2000s to 26% in 2024.
As trust in vaccines wanes among Republicans, and Kennedy himself voices lackluster support, Kennedy has enjoyed high trust ratings among Republicans – nearly as high as Donald Trump himself.
Kennedy made the comments as the department he oversees, Health and Human Services, undergoes a dramatic and largely opaque restructuring. A total of 20,000 positions have been eliminated between a cut of 10,000 made by Kennedy and an additional 10,000 employees cut by billionaire Elon Musk's unofficial “department of government efficiency”.
The CDC lost 2,400 employees in the restructuring. Overall, HHS will lose nearly a quarter of its workforce. Kennedy has also installed vaccine skeptics in important roles within the agency, including at least one who has paused approval of a Covid-19 vaccine.
Further, basic research into mRNA vaccines has been under threat during Kennedy's tenure. Before he took office, he tried to force the federal government to rescind authorization for Covid-19 vaccines.
Kennedy's statements also come as HHS has clawed back more than $11bn in funding to local and state health departments – including grants that had funded immunization clinics near the measles outbreak in Dallas.
In an interview with CBS News, Kennedy denied knowledge of the clawbacks, and said: “I'm not familiar with those cuts … The cuts were mainly [diversity, equity and inclusion] cuts.”
Two of the country's biggest parties freeze out rightwing AfD and prepare for impact of Trump's new tariffs
Germany's biggest mainstream parties have sealed an agreement to form a government keeping the far right out of power, as Europe's top economy struggles to reverse a downturn and gird itself for the potentially catastrophic impact of new US tariffs.
The prospective chancellor Friedrich Merz's conservative CDU/CSU announced the breakthrough deal with the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), which had led the ruling coalition since 2021.
The 146-page “Responsibility for Germany” roadmap “is a very strong and clear signal to the citizens of our country. And it is also a clear signal to our partners in the European Union,” said Merz during a news conference with his coalition partners.
“Germany is back on track,” he added.
The compromise package, which Merz had aimed to have completed by Easter, must still win majority approval among the SPD's 357,000 members via an online ballot as well as from the leadership of the CDU and CSU, known as the Union parties.
Assuming those hurdles are cleared by the end of April, Merz could be sworn in before the Bundestag in early May, realising a decades-long dream for the longtime rival of the veteran leader Angela Merkel.
The agreement includes tax breaks for low- and moderate-income households, phased-in tax reductions for corporations, subsidies for electric cars to help the ailing auto industry and further reform of the “debt brake” seen as hobbling public investment.
On border policy, a pivotal issue in the campaign after a series of attacks blamed on asylum seekers, Merz said Germany would “effectively put an end to irregular immigration” and aim to cooperate with neighbours to turn back people at the frontier.
But the SPD co-leader Lars Klingbeil, who is expected to become vice-chancellor, insisted the government would work on the principle that the “basic right to asylum remains inviolable” and that “Germany is a country of immigration” that benefits socially and economically from newcomers.
He said the coalition would lead a modernisation drive in a nation often criticised as slow to change. “The excavators have got to get to work and the fax machines must go,” Klingbeil said.
Germany has been in protracted political limbo since the chancellor, Olaf Scholz of the SPD, whose fractious three-way coalition was deeply unpopular, in November announced the collapse of the government and called for an early election.
In the 23 February poll the CDU/CSU came out on top with 28.5%, ahead of the anti-immigration, pro-Kremlin Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) on 20.8% – the strongest showing for a German far-right party since the second world war.
The SPD turned in a dismal 16.4% result but became Merz's only potential partner in a two-way coalition given a pledge by the centrist parties to lock out the AfD.
That do-or-die situation strengthened the Social Democrats' hand in the coalition negotiations, leading Merz to water down a number of campaign pledges including strict fiscal discipline, major tax breaks for corporations and wealthy individuals, and an uncompromising line on immigration.
The SPD extracted a pledge to keep pensions at the current rate until 2031, and will have control of powerful briefs including the finance and defence ministries.
The Union will take over the foreign and interior ministries. The latter steers immigration and domestic security policy – core issues for the conservatives as they scramble to fend off the far-right challenge.
Merz, a wealthy former corporate lawyer, largely stuck to a pledge during the month-long talks to avoid the spotlight despite a deluge of troubling economic news, leaving an opening for AfD leaders to hammer the mainstream parties as unfit to steer the ship through the storm.
The far right has only gained in support since the election, with one poll on Wednesday showing the AfD in first place with 25%, ahead of Merz's CDU/CSU on 24%.
“The AfD has become the strongest force in Germany for the first time in the polls!” the party co-leader Alice Weidel cheered on X. “Citizens want political change and not a more-of-the-same coalition between the Union and the SPD!”
Turmoil on global markets and fears for the postwar order of transatlantic cooperation have also taken a toll on Merz's personal popularity, with many Germans doubting his leadership abilities in a time of converging economic, diplomatic and security crises.
A Forsa institute poll released on Monday showed that only 32% thought Merz was the right person to be chancellor, down from 40% in early March, with 60% saying they disapproved of him.
Germany's lengthy political vacuum amid an extended economic slump has also frustrated allies looking to the European heavyweight to show leadership in the face of Donald Trump's erratic course on trade and defence and an emboldened Russia.
Merz has pledged to maintain Germany's strong backing for Ukraine while mending frayed ties with neighbours including France and Poland and fostering “independence” from Washington under Trump.
He has already encouraged many partners by agreeing last month to a historic pact to loosen rules on running up debt to allow for steeper defence spending and boost sorely needed investment in infrastructure.
The move to release the “debt brake” has, however, met with criticism from within his own conservative camp and drawn attacks from the AfD as breaking with German fiscal orthodoxy.
Merz on Wednesday acknowledged his centrist government must use its four-year term to address voters' growing disillusionment or risk the AfD coming out on top at the next general election.
“That is our mission: to show that problems can be solved by the political centre of our country,” he said.
Attitudes in France ‘barely evolving' amid ‘collective denial' years after the #MeToo movement began, according to parliamentary commission
Sexual violence and sexual harassment are “endemic” in France's entertainment industry, a damning report by French politicians has found, concluding that women and children are still being routinely preyed on, despite the country's #MeToo movement.
The Green MP Sandrine Rousseau and the centrist Erwan Balanant found that sexual violence, harassment and bullying were “systemic, endemic and persistent” in all sectors of the French culture and entertainment industry, from TV and cinema to theatre, radio, comedy, advertising, rock and classical music.
After a five-month inquiry, in which they described receiving “overwhelming” testimony from almost 400 people, including actors and industry workers, the politicians said attitudes in France were “barely evolving” many years after the #MeToo movement began.
The parliamentary inquiry had heard accounts of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment, with “numerous” alleged assaults happening recently. They said a decades-long culture of silencing victims was getting worse in France, amid a sense of “collective denial”. They described an “ambient sexism” as well as racism in the sector.
The lawmakers made almost 90 recommendations, including better protections for actors and models aged under 18, and improved regulation of actors' agents and casting procedures.
They also proposed banning the sexualisation of minors on screen and in fashion photos. They said compulsory intimacy coordinators should be present for any scene of intimacy involving minors, and that intimacy coordinators should be suggested as compulsory for cinema, TV and theatre.
Women working on film sets told how, in the course of their daily work, senior male crew members would make sexual comments such as demands for oral sex. Young women described being pushed up against a wall and sexually assaulted while at work. One assistant director described being summoned to see an actor and finding him waiting with his trousers down.
The report found that sexual assault was common during the casting process. Scenes of sex or nudity were also found to have been a place for sexual assaults and rape to occur. One film worker said she realised that a female actor had been raped during a bedroom scene, but the director took no action when it was reported to him.
The report found children were particularly vulnerable and subject to abuse in cinema and the performing arts.
One actor described how, aged 10, she had to appear in a rape scene, but was prevented from meeting the actor first and was taken by surprise when she was grabbed by him. “I was petrified,” she said. Another teenager was pushed and verbally abused during a romantic scene with an actor decades older. One young child had his trousers pulled down on set when he did not want to perform in only his underpants. One director reminded another child of his father's death just before a scene, to get the right look of emotion for a shot.
The politicians called for better regulation of music schools, acting schools and choirs after hearing allegations of a music teacher telling a young girl “to look more like a whore” while playing the flute. They also heard allegations of a choir master kissing girls on the neck.
Rousseau said what struck her in testimony from the film industry was how young some actors were when sexual harassment began. She said: “For some, it started in childhood, in school, at castings and went on all the way through their careers.”
The actor Sara Forestier, who started working in film aged 13, told the inquiry that at her first casting she was asked to take off her underwear and throw it on to someone's plate. Throughout her career she repeatedly had to say “no” to directors who wanted to have sex with her and who threatened to take roles away if she refused.
“In our country, there's a cult of talent and creative genius,” Balanant said, adding that some star directors and actors felt they could act how they pleased.
The report comes weeks after the Paris trial for sexual assault of the French film star, Gérard Depardieu. He denies the charges against him, and the verdict will be announced next month.
The actor and director Judith Godrèche, who became a leading voice in France's #MeToo movement and called for the inquiry, said Wednesday's report was “terrifying”. She has filed complaints against the directors Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon for sexually assaulting her while she was a teenager. Both have denied the allegations.
Basketball great LeBron James has become the first professional male athlete to have his likeness depicted in a Ken doll.
Mattel Inc. unveiled the LeBron Ken doll on Wednesday to kick off the toy manufacturer's “Kenbassador” series. Last year, nine female athlete Barbies, including tennis star Venus Williams, were introduced.
“As a young kid, I was fortunate to have role models who not only inspired me but also showed me what's possible through hard work and dedication,” James said. “Now, as an adult, I understand how vital it is for young people to have positive figures to look up to. That's why partnering with Barbie to release the LeBron James Kenbassadors doll is such an honor. It's an opportunity to recognize the powerful impact of role models who instill confidence, inspire dreams, and show kids that they, too, can achieve greatness.”
The LeBron doll wears sunglasses, headphones and an unzipped blue-and-white letterman's jacket with “LJ” on the left breast, his number 23 on the right sleeve and Ohio and crown patches on the other. His first name is on the back with “Just a kid from Akron” underneath. His T-shirt says “We Are Family,” a nod to the LeBron James Family Foundation. His blue shoes, of course, are Nikes.
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The doll costs $75 and goes on sale Monday.
In an Associated Press-produced video of James seeing the doll for the first time, the “King” expressed his approval, repeatedly calling the doll “dope,” another word for “cool.”
While looking it over, he put an “I Promise” wristband on the doll's wrist and adjusted the strap on its fanny pack.
“OK, now we ready,” James said. “I mean, he might need to do a little lifting. Legs look a little skinny. Little fraily little fellow. Nah, that's dope.”
Mattel senior vice president Krista Berger noted that Ken is Barbie's longtime best friend and supporter.
“We are excited to bring fans a new presentation of Ken that celebrates LeBron as a role model, his icon status, lasting impact on culture, and dedication to setting a positive example for the next generation to reach their limitless potential,” Berger said.
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President Donald Trump's top trade official said he wasn't informed of the 90-day pause on most new tariffs until after it was announced.
At the same moment that US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer was defending Trump's stiff tariffs during a House hearing, Trump said on his social media platform that the administration will delay the additional tariff hike on dozens of countries by 90 days — which went into effect for mere hours on Wednesday — with the exception of China.
Trump's tariff hike, albeit short-lived, was the sharpest ever according to data going back 200 years, Fitch Ratings told CNN, which would have likely resulted in higher inflation and weaker economic growth if they were kept in place, according to most economists.
When Democratic Rep. Steven Horsford of Nevada asked Greer when he learned of Trump's latest tariff move, he said, “Well, I understood the decision was made a few minutes ago.”
“It looks like your boss just pulled out the rug from under you and paused the tariffs,” Horsford said.
Greer then said he was aware the policy change was a possibility Wednesday morning. But when asked directly if he knew the policy was going into effect, he replied that the administration discusses “all kinds of options.”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in a post on X that he and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent were with Trump “while he wrote one of the most extraordinary Truth posts of his Presidency.”
“We don't really know who's running things over there,” said Rep. Jimmy Gomez of California, a Democrat, referring to Lutnick's post.
During the hearing, Greer reiterated that the US trade deficit is an “emergency” that warrants Trump's historic overhaul of US trade policy, but he said the president is still open to negotiating with countries. He said he recently spoke with his counterparts from the European Union, South Korea, Ecuador and Mexico.
Greer told Senate lawmakers on Tuesday that Trump's blanket tariffs were necessary to combat the overall US trade deficit, even if the stock market languishes and long-time allies are caught in the crossfire. He said Trump's trade goal is to address foreign countries' so-called non-trade barriers, which includes regulations that don't favor US companies.
Meanwhile, US and China are deep in a tit-for-tat trade war. Tariffs on China were hiked to 125% on Wednesday, effective immediately. Before Trump's announcement, Beijing had retaliated with 84% tariffs on US imports.
“Almost all countries have announced that they're not going to retaliate against the United States, obviously we have China that has made its own choice,” Greer said. “They've always given us a hard time, they've always limited our access over there and they're doubling down on that path, that's an issue of Chinese agency.”
The European Union also fought back against Trump's tariffs on Wednesday, backing its first countermeasures against the 25% duties Trump imposed on steel and aluminum imports. The European Commission in a statement said it has a “clear preference to find negotiated outcomes with the US, which would be balanced and mutually beneficial.”
Republican Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri, chair of the House Ways And Means Committee, claimed that there is “a serious trade problem when it comes to agriculture and the European Union.”
Greer said in response: “It's fundamentally unfair, it's structurally unfair, it has been for decades and I've been very clear with them that any kind of agreement or negotiation or anything, it has to have an (agriculture) component.”
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Advocacy groups condemn action as an ‘excuse to move a cruel, anti-immigrant, authoritarian agenda'
The US Citizenship and Immigration Services has announced that it will begin monitoring immigrants' social media accounts for antisemitism, prompting some advocacy groups to push back and condemn the news as an “excuse to move a cruel, anti-immigrant, authoritarian agenda”.
In a statement on Wednesday, USCIS said that it will start “considering aliens' antisemitic activity on social media and the physical harassment of Jewish individuals as grounds for denying immigration benefit requests”.
The new guidelines will apply to individuals applying for permanent resident status, international students and aliens affiliated with “educational institutions linked to antisemitic activity”.
“There is no room in the United States for the rest of the world's terrorist sympathizers, and we are under no obligation to admit them or let them stay here,” said Tricia McLaughlin, the Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary for public affairs.
“Secretary [Kristi] Noem has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can come to America and hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for anti-Semitic violence and terrorism – think again. You are not welcome here,” McLaughlin added.
The latest announcement – which comes amid the Donald Trump administration's growing crackdown on protesters demonstrating against Israel's deadly war on Gaza – has prompted criticism from several advocacy organizations and progressive Jewish groups viewing the news as part of a campaign to repress legitimate speech under the guise of fighting hate.
In a statement on BlueSky, the Nexus Project, which fights antisemitism and defends free speech, condemned the announcement, saying: “Treating antisemitism as an imported problem does not fight antisemitism. Using politically malleable language like ‘terrorist sympathizer' to go after immigrants does not fight antisemitism. Doing this while elevating antisemitism, as this administration is doing, does not fight antisemitism.”
Similarly, Bend the Arc, a progressive Jewish organization, said: “The Trump administration will begin screening immigrants' social media for “antisemitism. This will NOT fight antisemitism. This is simply using Jews as an excuse to move a cruel, anti-immigrant, authoritarian agenda. We refuse to be used this way.”
Since taking office in January, federal immigration authorities have detained numerous students – including green card holders – as well as abruptly revoked the visas of dozens of international students who secretary of state Marco Rubio have described as “lunatics”.
Among the anti-war students who have been detained is Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder who was arrested in front of his pregnant wife, Noor Abdalla, in early March.
Another scholar detained by immigration officials was Badar Khan Suri, an Indian postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University. The Department of Homeland Security accused him of having ties to Hamas, which he denies.
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Meanwhile, Elon Musk, who has been given the designation of a “special government employee” by the Trump administration, made back-to-back apparent fascist salutes during Trump's inauguration rally earlier this year.
A few weeks later, during the Munich Security Conference, JD Vance, the vice-president, broke a taboo in German politics by meeting with Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany's far-right political party Alternative for Germany, or AfD.
Then earlier this month, during a Capitol Hill hearing that sought to explore supposed government censorship under Joe Biden, Republican representative Keith Self quoted Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister under Adolf Hitler.
“A direct quote from Joseph Goebbels [the Nazi propaganda minister]: ‘It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion,' and I think that may be what we're discussing here,” he said.
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Federal judges in New York and Texas on Wednesday issued orders to temporarily halt the deportation of Venezuelan plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's use of the Alien Enemies Act – a wartime authority the administration has invoked to deport alleged gang members without due process.
The rulings come in emergency lawsuits the American Civil Liberties Union filed following the Supreme Court's decision to lift a temporary restraining order challenging President Donald Trump's use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. In its ruling Monday, it also held that people targeted for removal under the act are entitled to challenge their removals and must have meaningful notice and opportunity to do so, spurring the new lawsuits.
In the Texas case, Southern District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr., a Trump appointee, instructed the government to not transfer, relocate or remove the plaintiffs or “any other person that Respondents claim are subject to removal from the proclamation.”
The order is set to expire on April 23, and the judge will consider a possible extension following a hearing on Friday.
The plaintiffs in that suit are described in court documents as “Venezuelan men in immigration custody threatened with imminent removal un the President's Proclamation.” One of the petitioners, identified in court papers by the initials J.A.V. is currently in custody at the El Valle Detention Facility in Texas after being “nearly removed” on March 15.
Attorneys for J.A.V. filed a habeas motion detailing his background, disclosing his HIV-positive status and denying he is a member of a gang. His attorneys say he was seeking asylum when he arrived in the United States.
“J.A.V. is seeking asylum on the basis of his political views and fear of harm and mistreatment from multiple criminal groups – including the Tren de Aragua, on account of his sexual orientation,” the attorneys wrote.
The ACLU's Texas lawsuit and habeas petition asks the court to review the legality of the petitioners' detention and potentially order their release if the detention is found to be unlawful.
The order in New York was issued by Judge Alvin Hellerstein, a Bill Clinton appointee.
“To preserve the Court's jurisdiction, Petitioners shall neither be removed from the United States, nor transferred out of this District, unless and until the court orders otherwise,” Hellerstein wrote.
The New York plaintiffs, which have not been publicly named and were also part of the DC lawsuit against the administration, are seeking class action certification from the court.
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President orders justice department to stop enforcement of critical policies holding fossil fuel companies accountable
Donald Trump is taking aim and city- and state-led fossil fuel accountability efforts, which have been hailed as a last source of hope for the climate amid the president's ferociously anti-environment agenda.
In a Tuesday executive order, Trump instructed the Department of Justice to “stop the enforcement” of state climate laws, which his administration has suggested are unconstitutional or otherwise unenforceable.
The president called out New York and Vermont, both of which have passed “climate superfund” laws requiring major fossil fuel companies to help pay for damages from extreme weather.
“These State laws and policies are fundamentally irreconcilable with my Administration's objective to unleash American energy,” the executive order says. “They should not stand.”
He also targeted the dozens of lawsuits brought by states, cities and counties against big oil in recent years, accusing the industry of intentionally covering up the climate risks of their products and seeking compensation for climate impacts.
The move left advocates outraged.
“This order is an illegal, disgusting attempt to force everyday people to pay for the rising toll of climate disasters, while shielding the richest people in the world from accountability,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, the executive director of the youth-led environmental justice group the Sunrise Movement.
The new order came as Trump touted new moves to revive the coal, the dirtiest and most expensive fossil fuel.
It also followed a March meeting at the White House where fossil fuel executives reportedly lobbied Trump to give them immunity from climate litigation. Days earlier, 200 environmental, consumer advocacy and social justice groups had urged top congressional Democrats to block attempts from big oil to gain legal immunity, the Guardian reported.
Oil interests applauded the new move from the president. “Directing the Department of Justice to address this state overreach will help restore the rule of law and ensure activist-driven campaigns do not stand in the way of ensuring the nation has access to an affordable and reliable energy supply,” Ryan Meyers, the senior vice-president of top US fossil fuel lobby group American Petroleum Institute, said in a statement.
But advocates say the order is an an anti-democratic attack on municipalities' climate action, which serve a crucial role in counterbalancing Trump's anti-environmental agenda.
“Make no mistake: this executive order isn't about energy independence or economic security – it's about ensuring billionaire polluters never have to face a jury of ordinary Americans,” said Cassidy DiPaola, the communications director of Make Polluters Pay, which backs the climate superfund laws. “The American people deserve better than a government that protects polluters' profits over people's lives.”
Fossil fuel companies poured $96m into Trump's re-election campaign and affiliated political action committees, as he pledged to roll back environmental regulations and loosen regulations on the industry. This was slightly less than the $1bn Trump requested from the sector in an infamous meeting at his Mar-a-Lago club last spring, but still constituted record levels of spending.
Trump pledged to attack climate lawsuits, which he has called “frivolous”, on the campaign trail. And during his first term, his administration filed influential briefs in the cases supporting the oil companies.
But environmental lawyers question the validity of the new executive order.
“This illegal and unconstitutional order panders to the biggest polluters on the planet and shows Trump's utter hypocrisy on states' rights,” said Jason Rylander, the legal director of the climate law institute at the conservation organization Center for Biological Diversity. “Trying to sic the justice department on state officials who are protecting their people from pollution will fail because the US attorney general has no power to declare state laws illegal.”
In recent months, rightwing groups have launched campaigns attempting to shield oil companies from city and state climate accountability. Some have ties to Leonard Leo, who is known as a force behind the Federalist Society, which orchestrated the ultraconservative takeover of the American judiciary and helped select Trump's supreme court justice picks.
A truck parked outside a major fossil fuel conference last month in Houston warned that city and state policies and lawsuits “are threatening America's pro-consumer energy dominance”, linking to an op-ed from a group with links to Leo. The new executive order echoes this sentiment, saying the litigation and laws “threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security”.
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Israeli forces raided six United Nations schools in East Jerusalem, ordering them to close within 30 days, according to UNRWA, the UN agency for the Palestinian refugees, and the Israeli Ministry of Education.
Approximately 800 students will be directly impacted by the closure orders and may not be able to finish the school year, UNRWA's Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said on social media. Schools run by the agency serve Palestinians in areas occupied by Israel, including East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.
“UNRWA schools are protected by the privileges and immunities of the United Nations,” Lazzarini said. “Today's unauthorized entries and issuance of closure orders are a violation of these protections.”
Israel's Ministry of Education said in a statement that parents were directed to register their students at other schools. “The professional staff at the Ministry of Education continue to support the educational framework for each student.”
In October, Israel's parliament passed a law banning UNRWA from activity within Israel and revoking the 1967 treaty that allowed the agency to carry out its mission.
Yulia Malinovsky, a member of the Israeli parliament who sponsored the bill to ban UNRWA, confirmed the closure orders. The schools will have until May 8, she said.
“We're also working very hard to close the water and electricity to all of UNRWA's facilities (in areas occupied by Israel),” Malinovsky said. “We're doing everything we can to implement the UNRWA bills fully in all institutions and in all aspects.”
Israel has long sought to dismantle the UN agency, arguing that some of its employees are members of Hamas and that UNRWA's education system teaches students to hate Israel.
A UN-commissioned inquiry found that examples in textbooks of anti-Israel bias were “marginal” but nonetheless constituted “a grave violation of neutrality.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have alleged that a handful of UNRWA's 13,000 employees in Gaza participated in the October 7 massacre. UNRWA has repeatedly denied these accusations, saying there is “absolutely no ground for a blanket description of ‘the institution as a whole' being ‘totally infiltrated.'”
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Israel has long wanted to dismantle the UN's Palestinian refugee agency. The consequences could be disastrous for all
UNRWA was founded by the United Nations a year after the 1948 creation of Israel that led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in an event known by Palestinians as the “Nakba” (catastrophe).
The agency, which began by assisting about 750,000 Palestinian refugees in 1950, now serves some 5.9 million across the Middle East, many of whom live in refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria.
In the Gaza Strip, which has been ravaged by a devastating Israeli war for more than a year, UNRWA serves some 1.7 million Palestinian refugees. In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, it assists around 871,500 refugees.
On Wednesday, an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City killed at least 23 Palestinians, including eight children, according to Gaza's Civil Defense, as the Israeli military said it targeted a senior Hamas militant.
The strike destroyed a four-story residential building in the Al-Shujaiya neighborhood in Gaza City and wounded at least 60 others, the Civil Defense said. More than 30 Palestinians are also missing under the rubble, the organization said, including 19 members from one family.
“I was heading out to fill water and, on my return back, all of a sudden an entire block was targeted with women and children,” said Hatem Jundyeh, who lives nearby. “What have we done? Are we Hamas so they strike us?”
In the aftermath of the strike, rescue crews searched under the debris for any signs of life. One group pulled the body of young boy from the rubble, his body limp and his face bloodied. Another crew nearby tried to jackhammer through enormous slabs of destroyed concrete in a race to save anyone who might still be trapped.
“What tools do we have? The entire world is fighting us,” said one volunteer with the Civil Defense. “We recovered a body of a child, but next to him there – his brothers and parents and siblings. The entire world is watching with silence.”
Ambulances quickly filled with the wounded in a rush for medical treatment. At the hospital, Palestinians killed in the strike were wrapped in white cloths or rugs.
Dr. Fadel Naim, director of Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza, said on social media that one of “the most harrowing cases I've witnessed during this war” was a 20-year-old woman who had both breasts and an arm amputated. “What crime did she commit to deserve such brutal disfigurement and the shattering of her future?” Naim asked.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they struck a “senior Hamas terrorist” who planned and carried out attacks from northern Gaza. “Prior to the strike, numerous steps were taken to mitigate harm to civilians including the use of precise weapons, aerial surveillance, and additional intelligence,” the IDF said in a statement after the strike. The IDF did not identify the target of the strike.
The strike in northern Gaza comes as the IDF expands its operations in Rafah in the southern portion of the coastal enclave, as a source familiar with the matter tells CNN Israel is planning to hold a significant portion of Gaza for an “indefinite” period of time.
Last week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced a major expansion of the military's operation in Gaza involving the seizure of large areas of land that would be “incorporated into Israel's security zones.”
The operation would also involve “large-scale evacuation of Gaza's population from combat zones,” his statement said without specifying details. Katz said the military operation would expand to “crush and clear the area of terrorists and terror infrastructure, while seizing large areas that will be incorporated into Israel's security zone.”
CNN's Abeer Salman and Kareem Khadder contributed reporting from Jerusalem, while Ibrahim Dahman contributed from Cairo, Egypt. Khader Al-Za'anoun of Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency, contributed reporting from Gaza.
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"Shark Tank" star and investor Kevin O'Leary says President Trump's tariffs on China aren't high enough and calls for a 400% tariff on the country.
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President Donald Trump tried again Tuesday to rewrite the history of US relations with South Korea.
Trump has repeatedly delivered false assertions about the payments South Korea has made for decades to help cover the cost of the major US military presence in the country (more than 26,000 personnel as of the end of 2024). On Tuesday, he wrote on social media that he had just spoken with South Korean acting President Han Duck-soo about economic issues and about “payment for the big time Military Protection we provide to South Korea.”
Trump then added this: “They began these Military payments during my first term, Billions of Dollars, but Sleepy Joe Biden, for reasons unknown, terminated the deal. That was a shocker to all!”
Trump's claim is false in two big ways.
First, South Korea's payments did not begin during Trump's first term. The cost-sharing deals known as Special Measures Agreements began in 1991, more than 25 years before Trump took office in 2017.
Second, former President Joe Biden did not terminate a Trump cost-sharing agreement with South Korea. The only Special Measures Agreement signed by the Trump administration had expired by the time Biden took office in 2021 – and Biden's administration then signed two such agreements, one in 2021 and one in 2024, that both included South Korean spending increases.
“There was no deal that was ‘terminated,'” Andrew Yeo, a politics professor and Korea expert at The Catholic University of America and The Brookings Institution think tank, said in a Tuesday email.
“Trump's characterization of Biden's deal with South Korea is inaccurate,” Yonho Kim, an international affairs professor and associate director of the Institute for Korean Studies at The George Washington University, said in a Tuesday email.
Here's the truth about what happened under Trump and Biden.
Trump inherited a South Korea cost-sharing deal negotiated by the Obama administration, which ran from 2014 through 2018. Trump then agreed to a one-year deal for 2019, which secured an 8.2% increase in the South Korean contribution.
That one-year Trump deal was the 10th in the series of Special Measures Agreements that started in 1991, so “it wasn't as if South Korea began its VERY FIRST cost-sharing payments in 2019,” Jiun Bang, a Colorado College international relations professor, said in a Tuesday email. And Trump was unable to get South Korea to agree to the standard multi-year agreement; South Korea rejected his demands for a giant spending increase in the vicinity of 400%, from less than $1 billion per year to $5 billion per year or close.
South Korea did come to a smaller deal with the Trump administration in mid-2020 to spend $200 million that year to pay the South Korean employees of US forces, who had been put on leave because Trump's one-year Special Measures Agreement had lapsed at the end of 2019. But negotiations on a new Special Measures Agreement were still unresolved when Trump left the White House in January 2021.
The Biden administration completed the talks in March 2021, agreeing to an 11th Special Measures Agreement to retroactively cover 2020 and continue through 2025. Then, with the possibility of a second Trump term looming, the Biden administration and South Korea signed a 12th agreement in late 2024, to run from 2026 through 2030.
Trump claimed during his 2024 presidential campaign that Biden had allowed South Korea's payments to go “way, way down” to “almost nothing,” but that's not true, either. South Korea agreed to substantial spending hikes in both of its Biden-era deals.
The agreement signed in 2021 included a 2021 increase of 13.9% – meaning South Korea's payment that year would be about $1 billion – and then additional increases in 2022 through 2025 tied to increases in South Korea's defense budget. The agreement signed in 2024 is scheduled to begin with an 8.3% increase in 2026 and then additional increases tied to South Korean inflation.
Trump baselessly claimed in October 2024, as a presidential candidate, that “if I were there now, they'd be paying us $10 billion a year. And you know what? They'd be happy to do it.”
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"White Lotus" actor Jason Isaacs describes how he got into the mindset of his character, Timothy Ratliff, for the finale that shocked fans of the show.
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President says at National Republican Congressional Committee dinner that world leaders are ‘kissing my ass'
Donald Trump has insisted “I know what the hell I'm doing” by imposing sweeping tariffs and bragged that world leaders are “kissing my ass” as they try to negotiate trade deals.
The US president was speaking to political donors at the National Republican Congressional Committee's annual fundraising dinner in Washington on Tuesday night.
His rambling 90-minute address came just hours before his latest tariffs went into effect. “I know what the hell I'm doing,” the president said. “I know what I'm doing. And you know what I'm doing too. That's why you vote for me.”
The administration has given conflicting signals over whether the tariffs are open to negotiation. Trump claimed: “I'm telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are. They are dying to make a deal.”
Mocking the pleas of foreign leaders, he parodied: “Please, please, sir, make a deal. I'll do anything. I'll do anything, sir!”
Less than a day later, Trump shelved plans to hike tariffs on most countries except China, unveiling a 90-day pause and pulling back from his global trade war after days of market turmoil and warnings of recession.
After insisting for days that he would hold firm on his aggressive trade strategy, Trump announced that all countries that had not retaliated against US tariffs would receive a reprieve – and only face a blanket US tariff of 10% – until July.
It is unclear where that leaves earlier threats of more tariffs to come. On Tuesday, Trump had said: “We're going to tariff our pharmaceuticals and once we do that they're going to come rushing back into our country because we're the big market … So we're going to be announcing very shortly a major tariff on pharmaceuticals.”
The tariffs, announced last week on what Trump billed as “liberation day”, have wiped trillions of dollars off the US stock market and raised fears of a global recession; on Wednesday China slapped 84% retaliatory tariffs on US goods. Larry Summers, a former treasury secretary, described it as “the biggest self-inflicted wound we've put on our economy in history”.
Even Republicans, unswervingly loyal on other issues, are increasingly uneasy. Several senators have signed on to a bipartisan bill that would require presidents to justify new tariffs to Congress. Don Bacon of Nebraska has said he will introduce a House version of the bill, saying that Congress needs to restore its powers over tariffs.
But Trump lashed out at the dissenters on Tuesday night. The author of The Art of the Deal said: “I see some rebel Republican, some guy who wants to grandstand, say, ‘I think that Congress should take over negotiations.' Let me tell you, you don't negotiate like I negotiate.
“I just saw it today, a couple of your congressmen, sir. ‘I think we should get involved in the negotiation of the tariffs.' Oh that's what I need, I need some guy telling me how to negotiate.”
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Despite the turmoil, he claimed that he had the “most successful 100 days in the history of this country” and the stage was now “set for a monumental victory for the Republicans in the midterms” next year.
Turning to his signature issues, border security and immigration, the president revived a popular culture reference from his election campaign last year: Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer from The Silence of the Lambs.
“They used to go crazy when I talked about … the late, great Hannibal Lecter. Right? ‘Why does he talk about that? He's a fictional character.' He's not. We have many of them that came across the border. He's actually not.
“But when the people went to the voting booth, then we understood why he talked about that because they voted for us. They say, ‘We don't want Hannibal Lecter in our country.'”
The dinner was also notable for a slip of the tongue by Tom Emmer, a Republican congressman from Minnesota. He told the audience: “President cunt – Trump is counting on us!”, hastily correcting himself.
The error was caught with glee by social media users. The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, tweeted: “Had it right the first time.”
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Frenchman David Pereira grew up watching dubbed versions of American TV shows like “The A-Team,” “Happy Days” and “The Dukes of Hazzard” in France.
He was obsessed with American culture: he used to collect vintage Mustangs, owns a GMC pick-up truck from the '70s, and has visited the US nearly a dozen times. This summer, he was looking forward to fulfilling a lifelong dream and visiting Yellowstone National Park with his family, after having completed a successful circuit of national parks on the West Coast two years ago.
But after following Donald Trump's aggressive rhetoric for months, the 53-year-old business owner said he couldn't, in good conscience, go through with it and has canceled the trip.
“Like many French people, we are immersed in American culture. So we love it. But it's just unbelievable now,” Pereira, who lives about an hour north of Paris, told CNN Travel.
“I kept watching the news and thinking, ‘this can't be happening.' It was getting worse and worse. It was just fake news on fake news on fake news.”
Similar feelings of disbelief, anger, anxiety and fear that beset America's neighbors, Canada and Mexico, have spread across the Atlantic, where European travelers are canceling planned visits or rethinking their US travel plans amid the Trump administration's hostile anti-European rhetoric and tariff war.
Safety concerns following a string of plane crashes and cuts affecting the Federal Aviation Administration, as well as stories about tourists being thrown into detention centers without due process or being denied entry possibly because of anti-Trump views, have also heightened travel anxiety.
In response, countries like Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, UK, Germany, Finland and Canada have issued new travel updates warning citizens that travelers can be denied entry even with the appropriate visas and approvals, or that transgender travelers must indicate their biological sex at birth in their passports and could face added difficulties entering the US.
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‘It feels terrifying:' Why some Americans are anxious about traveling abroad under Trump
As cautionary tales of travel to the US began to pile up, British writer Farah Mendlesohn knew that she had to forfeit the month-long trip that would have taken her from Scotland to Oregon, Seattle and Vancouver this summer. Three years in the making, her plan was to conduct research at a public university for a book on a science fiction writer that she was working on, and to volunteer at the sci-fi Seattle WorldCon convention and visit friends.
But after reading about a Welsh woman who was detained for 19 days in the US and sent home in chains after being accused of working illegally while on a tourist visa, Mendlesohn canceled her trip and lost £800 (about $1,050) in travel bookings.
She also feared that her left-leaning political stance (she edited a deliberately provocative 2007 sci-fi anthology titled “Glorifying Terrorism” to challenge sweeping British anti-terror laws in 2006) would have gotten her into trouble at the border.
“As well as my own political views, I don't think I want to go to America in those circumstances and put money into the American economy,” Mendlesohn said.
On Friday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio sought to minimize concerns international travelers may have of coming to the US and being detained, saying those who are flagged at the border are flagged “for a reason.”
“If you're not coming to the United States to join a Hamas protest, or to come here and tell us about how right Hamas is, or … stir up conflict on our campuses and create riots in our streets and vandalize our universities, then you have nothing to worry about,” he told reporters in Brussels.
But the chilling effect among international travelers is starting to bear out in the numbers.
New figures from the National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO) show that overseas international arrivals for the month of March dropped 12% compared to the same period last year. That figure excludes arrivals from Canada and Mexico.
After forecasting a 5% dip for inbound travel to the US this year in February, travel forecasting group Tourism Economics has revised its projections, telling CNN Travel that it now expects that figure to almost double to 9.4%.
Summer hotel bookings from European travelers for Accor properties in the US are also down a whopping 25%, CEO Sébastien Bazin said in a recent interview with Bloomberg TV. Accor hotel brands include Fairmont, Ibis, Novotel, Mercure and Raffles.
Jean-François Rial, CEO of France's leading luxury tour operator Voyageurs du Monde, said that ever since Trump's inauguration in late January, bookings for US travel among his wealthy French clients have dropped a “colossal” 20%.
“In the 30 years I've been in this business, I've never seen anything like this for any destination. It's huge,” he told CNN Travel.
Rial also criticized the US government for downplaying the impact of Trump's policies on international travel, and said that colleagues in the industry in France are reporting similar trends.
The NTTO's 2025-2029 forecast, published in March, projects that total international arrivals will increase nearly 7% this year to 77.1 million, spike another 10% in 2026 for the World Cup, and then dip down to a 6% increase in 2027 — numbers that seem overly optimistic, Rial said.
“When the US says there's no impact on travel sales from the Europeans to the US, they're wrong. There you go. They're talking nonsense.”
CNN Travel reached out to NTTO for comment on the forecast but didn't hear back. The NTTO forecast is based on travel and economic trends through the end of 2024.
Didier Arino, general director of travel consulting firm Protourisme in France, also said that anti-Trump sentiment has led to an “unprecedented” drop in interest for travel to the US, which is the leading long-haul destination among French tourists.
“It's unheard of. It's happened before in a country at war, in a county where there was a security risk, or risk of health crisis, but in a normal situation, we've never seen this kind of turnaround,” Arino said.
British long-haul carrier Virgin Atlantic has recently warned that demand for transatlantic travel to the US has slowed.
The NTTO's 2025-2029 forecast of a nearly 3% increase in Canadian tourist arrivals in 2025 is also at odds with recent stats showing a decline in Canadian travel to the US.
According to figures from US Customs and Border Protection, the average number of daily travelers crossing the Canada-US land border by car fell 15% in February from 92,983 to 79,407 this year compared to the same period last year. Likewise, transborder air travel from Canada to the US was down 2% in February, marking the first month to record a year-over-year decrease since the start of the pandemic.
And flight bookings between Canada and the US for travel between April to September show a precipitous drop of more than 70% compared to the same period last year, according to aviation analytics company OAG.
But while Canada's largest airlines Air Canada and WestJet have axed seats in response to plummeting demand, OAG chief analyst John Grant said there have been no significant adjustments from Europe or other international markets so far, mostly due to the logistical challenges that presents. And while airlines may try to stimulate demand by lowering prices, he pointed out that the days of post-pandemic revenge spending are over.
“Let's not forget that the vast majority of tourism in the United States is still domestic tourism,” he added. “And if that holds, the loss of a few million people from Europe could be absorbed.”
A grassroots boycott movement that started in Canada is also gaining momentum in Europe, with “boycott USA” groups on Facebook from countries like Denmark, which leads the charge at 95,000 members, Germany, Italy, France, UK, Norway and Sweden attracting new members daily.
For Swede Johan Björnsson, canceling his 2026 cruise out of Miami is an important gesture, even if it means losing a $500 deposit. He's never been particularly political, Björnsson said. But the moment he saw clips of Trump and Vice President JD Vance berating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, the 43-year-old said he knew he had to take a stand.
“It had nothing to do with politics, it was just a crude assault. It was disrespectful and wrong on so many levels. It got personal,” he said. “That was probably the drop that made everything go over for me.”
For Europeans living close to the war in Ukraine, the threat of Russian aggression across the continent looms in the background. Last month, the EU Commission urged its 450 million citizens to stockpile enough food, water and essentials for 72 hours in the event of emergencies like cyberattacks, climate disasters, disease and also geopolitical conflicts.
“Peace and stability are intrinsic to the European project. Yet, Europe faces a new reality, marked by growing risks and deep uncertainty,” read the first lines of the EU's 18-page European Preparedness Union Strategy.
Trump's alignment with Putin, suspension of aid to Ukraine and the administration's general anti-Europe rhetoric are seen as deep betrayals across the continent. In a leaked Signal thread published by The Atlantic, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote: “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It's PATHETIC.”
And during a visit to Greenland, a semiautonomous territory in the kingdom of Denmark, last week Vance upbraided Denmark, saying they have “not done a good job” for the people of Greenland, in a speech that was largely viewed as hostile and insulting.
“We consider the US to be our best friend,” said Jacob Bøll, a consultant who lives in Copenhagen. “Now, we're not only not friends anymore, it's like our friend started a fist fight with us.”
The turn of events has driven Bøll, 52, to cancel travel plans to Cincinnati where he was to visit close family friends this summer, and then travel to Nashville. He was also planning to attend the World Cup soccer tournament next year, but now will only go on the condition Denmark plays in Canada if they qualify.
“I just can't imagine a scenario where I would go back,” he said. “You vote with your feet when you're a consumer.”
After much deliberation, fellow Dane Robert Christiansen has also canceled plans to fly to Texas this summer and surprise his teenage daughter, who is studying in Dallas. But Christiansen said fears of flight safety and his own activity on social media, where he shares the latest news stories as his small act of resistance, would have made him anxious about his travels.
“I cannot trust the government of the United States,” Christiansen said.
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Only a few days after Ja Morant was fined by the NBA for a contentious celebration, the Memphis Grizzlies star was at it again.
Having apparently retired the finger-gun gesture which saw him fined $75,000 by the league, Morant celebrated a three-pointer against the Charlotte Hornets by pretending to throw a grenade into the Spectrum Center crowd.
This came in the first quarter of Tuesday's road game as Morant feigned the pulling of a pin with his teeth before covering his ears with his hands.
Memphis went on to win 124-100 with Morant recording a game-high 28 points along with eight assists and five rebounds.
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Neither Morant nor Grizzlies interim head coach Tuomas Iisalo commented on the celebration after the game.
The NBA fined the 25-year-old point guard last week for “twice making an inappropriate gesture on the playing court” – against the Golden State Warriors, which led to a warning from the league, and then again against the Miami Heat.
Morant has previously said that he is “well aware” of the criticism he has received for the finger-gun celebration, adding that he is “kind of used to it” and “pretty much a villain for two years now.”
The NBA has already handed him two lengthy suspensions in 2023 after Morant appeared to flash a gun in Instagram live streams on two separate occasions.
The victory against the Hornets marked the Grizzlies third-straight win having fired Taylor Jenkins – the most successful coach in the team's history – at the end of last month.
However, the win was overshadowed by a serious-looking injury to rookie Jaylen Wells, who was stretchered off the court in the second quarter after being undercut by Hornets guard KJ Simpson during a dunk attempt.
Wells appeared to land on his head and was immediately tended to by medical staff. Simpson seemed distressed by the fall and went to check on his opponent, before later being called for a flagrant 2 foul, leading to an automatic ejection.
The game was resumed after a delay of more than 20 minutes, and Iisalo later confirmed that Wells had suffered a broken wrist but was moving all of his extremities.
“Puts everything into perspective, seeing that situation and seeing Jalen there,” he told reporters. “Tough situation for everybody, he's an incredibly tough kid, had a great season and he's in all of our thoughts.”
Desmond Bane scored 19 points for Memphis, while Zach Edey had 17 points and 19 rebounds. The Grizzlies are seventh in the Western Conference with a 47-32 record and next face the Minnesota Timberwolves on Thursday.
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Falling demand suggests loss of financial confidence in US as Donald Trump escalates trade standoff with China
US government bonds, traditionally seen as one of the world's safest financial assets, are suffering a dramatic sell-off as Donald Trump's escalation of his tariff war with China sends panic through all sectors of the financial markets.
The falls suggest that as Trump's fresh wave of tariffs on dozens of economies came into force, including 104% levies against Chinese goods, investors are beginning to lose confidence in the US as a cornerstone of the global economy.
UK bonds also came under pressure from investors, who sent the cost of financing government borrowing to its highest level since 1998, heaping further pain on Rachel Reeves as the chancellor struggles to prevent her budget plans from being wrecked by a panic on global markets.
The yield – or interest rate – on the benchmark 10-year US Treasury bond rose to 4.516% on Wednesday before slipping back to 4.451%, up 0.14 percentage points on the day. This week it has undergone the three biggest intraday moves since Trump was elected in November. Yields move inversely to prices, so surging yields mean falling prices as demand drops.
The move in the 30-year bond was more dramatic. The yield briefly jumped above 5% to its highest since late 2023 and was last trading at 4.899%, or 0.12 percentage points higher than Tuesday.
Both yields came down from their highest levels, however, after a much-anticipated $39bn (£31bn) US bond auction later in the day met market expectations.
“This is a fire sale of Treasuries,” said Calvin Yeoh, a portfolio manager at the hedge fund Blue Edge Advisors. “I haven't seen moves or volatility of this size since the chaos of the pandemic in 2020,” he told Bloomberg.
Analysts believe the US Federal Reserve may need to step in. Jim Reid, at Deutsche Bank, said: “Markets are pricing a growing probability of an emergency [interest rate] cut, just as we saw during the Covid turmoil and the height of the GFC [global financial crisis] in 2008.”
UK bonds came under severe pressure after the US moves. The yield on a 30-year UK gilt hit 5.65%, surpassing a previous 27-year high of 5.472% set in January.
Shorter-dated 10-year gilt yields were slightly higher at 4.78%, while two-year yields ticked down to 4%.
Higher yields on gilts – UK government bonds – will make things even more difficult for Downing Street, as it will raise the cost of borrowing to fund investment.
China's intransigence in the face of escalating US tariffs appeared to indicate that the world's two largest economies were heading for a showdown, with an outcome that analysts said was difficult to predict.
“When challenged, we will never back down,” said China's foreign ministry spokesperson, Lin Jian. The commerce ministry said: “China will fight to the end if the US side is bent on going down the wrong path.” Beijing has promised further countermeasures.
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It was not clear whether China, which is one of the world's largest holders of Treasuries, included among its policy changes the sale of those bonds, accelerating the sell-off and the US administration's financial pain.
Global stock markets suffered another tumultuous day as the tariffs took effect.
Japan's Nikkei benchmark index fell almost 4%, while Taiwan's benchmark stock index was 5.8% lower. Hong Kong's Hang Seng index recouped some earlier falls to close 0.4% down, and South Korea's Kospi 200 index dropped by 1.8%.
However, China's stock markets rose, appearing to weather the storm after government interventions. The SSE composite index in Shanghai ended the day 1.1% higher, while the Shenzhen SE composite rose 2.2%.
In Europe, the major markets also fell back. In London, the FTSE 100 dropped by 3% on Wednesday, immediately undoing the gains on Tuesday. Germany's Dax index dropped by about 2.3%, leading to a 16% drop since 18 March, while France's Cac 40 fell by 3.3%. Spain's Ibex index was down by 2.2%.
Oleksandr Syrskyi risking lives with ‘borderline criminal' orders, says Bohdan Krotevych, former Azov brigade leader
A high-profile former Ukrainian commander has called for the head of the country's military to step aside, accusing him of a lack of strategic imagination and putting Ukrainian soldiers' lives at risk with “borderline criminal” orders.
Bohdan Krotevych, who quit as the chief of staff of the Azov brigade in February partly so he could speak out, said he believed that armed forces commander, Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, “must go” and Ukraine's military leadership must be shaken up.
The veteran complained in an interview that Syrskyi and the existing leadership were engaged in “manual micro-management of the whole army” and highlighted orders given to soldiers and units forcing them to rest and base too close to the front.
“I started receiving from the high army command, from the commander-in-chief HQ, orders that became more and more borderline criminal, which I, in my good conscience, was unable to fulfil and follow,” Krotevych said.
One of Ukraine's best-known soldiers, Krotevych, 32, served in Azov from 2014 and survived the last stand at the Azovstal steelworks in spring 2022. Captured by Russian forces, he endured a short period of captivity before being exchanged.
Krotevych then chose to return to the front, and became increasingly outspoken during his final period of military service, openly criticising other commanders who he believed had been careless with soldiers' lives.
But the veteran told the Guardian that he had “70% decided to quit” the Ukrainian military because commanders were still “asking of soldiers things which they wouldn't ask of themselves”. As a former prisoner of war, he is one of the relatively few serving soldiers who has the right to leave.
“The general staff ordered that when a soldier's shift [on he frontline] is over, they can't rest in the rear, they have to rest 50 metres from the front,” Krotevych said, which he added was typically at a platoon forward observation base.
Forcing soldiers to recover so close to the front put “all these people in grave danger”, he argued. He accused the army command of being “criminally guilty of not understanding the principles of war right now” and in particular “how FPV drones work, how glide bombs work”.
The dramatic expansion of the use of FPV drones – which could operate at a range of up to 22km, Krotevych said – and Russian glide bombs, which until recently Ukraine had struggled to stop, have dramatically expanded the depth of the frontline. But Krotevych said Ukraine's commanders had failed to react accordingly.
“They still have the mentality of fighting in the second world war,” he said. “They still refuse to acknowledge the new means of hitting targets.” He said the army commander was relying on regulations issued in 2016 to justify forcing soldiers to be based so far forward, a time when “war was completely different”.
He said similar thinking affected the positioning of larger headquarters. At one point, Krotevych said, Azov's brigade headquarters was itself struck, after the unit had been “asking, insisting” that it be moved back because Russian forces were advancing. “They specifically told us no, and we got a direct hit.”
Krotevych said: “Syrskyi must go,” arguing that the military commander-in-chief, appointed in February 2024, had failed to break the Russian lines except into Kursk in August, where he had found “the weakest spot” and executed a simple “linear strike”.
Though Krotevych said the attack into Russia had made sense at the time, he accused Syrskyi of being overly focused on the attack “when we had huge issues” defending Pokrovsk in southern Donbas and “remaining there too long” as Moscow has gradually rolled up the salient, with Ukrainian forces incurring significant losses.
Ukraine had failed to find a way of prosecuting manoeuvre warfare while “the enemy somehow manages to break through our lines every month”, Krotevych complained.
“Syrskyi is not trying to apply a high science and an art of war,” Krotevych said, accusing him of having “just two functions: if the enemy is attacking, you just throw more people in there. And if the enemy is overwhelming, withdraw the people and say that you're concerned about the lives of the people.”
Ukraine has been gradually losing territory throughout 2024 and 2025 as Russian forces first advanced from Avdiivka in the east towards Donbas, before Moscow's main effort switched to eliminating the Kursk incursion.
Many observers have put Russia's modest but persistent success down to its greater personnel numbers and a pause in US weapons shipments in the early part of 2024, but Krotevych's comments are notable because they try to shift the focus on to Ukraine's commanders and their direction of the war effort.
The former soldier now intends to set up a private company, Strategic Operational and Intelligence Agency (Soia), obtaining intelligence on Russia, Belarus, North Korea and other countries unfriendly to Ukraine and acting as an expert liaison with the west.
As part of that work, Krotevych said he hoped to spend time in London, though he stressed he was not aligned with Ukraine's ambassador to the UK, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, a predecessor to Syrskyi, who is considered a potential future candidate for Ukraine's presidency.
Krotevych said he had no intention of entering politics himself. “I just want to destabilise Russia so it could not make war again,” he said.
Ukraine's general staff was approached for comment but did not respond prior to publication.
Women with disabilities are the biggest minority group in the world, but are still shut out of society. In an extract from her new book, the writer reveals how that is changing – and what more needs to be done
I would like to be able to start this story with a stellar anecdote about how exactly my life imploded. “I was walking down Sunset Boulevard and Harry Styles ran me down in a Ferrari.” “I was dancing on a podium in Ibiza when a falling speaker semi- decapitated me.” In reality, it was much more mundane, as these things inevitably tend to be. I went to the pub and I caught the flu. That was it.
I spent Christmas 2017 with what I thought was a regular illness. By February, I was unable to breathe or move. Flu had become flu complications and I was strapped to a ventilator mask. My energy had all but disappeared to the extent that even breathing was a high-end task. In my bedroom, alone, plastic casing enveloped my skin. I looked like Darth Vader, if Darth Vader spent a lot of time in Primark pyjamas. The cliche for this sort of thing is to say that the months that followed were a blur. But as anyone who has ever been through anything knows, really, it is the opposite. You wish it was a blur. You would pay good money for a haze, to black out for as long as it takes to get through the worst and re-emerge fabulous, like a contestant in a Netflix makeover show.
The days did not blur. Each minute was sharpened, as if I was living in a new reality that had been cut out with lasers. I couldn't leave my house, I could barely get out of bed, and I didn't understand any part of that.
Fatigue is hard to comprehend until you have it. I learned abruptly that it was not being tired from a big night out or burnout after a stressful spell at work. It was all-consuming, as if my body were wearing a weighted blanket that I couldn't shake off. Getting up from the toilet was enough to make my knees buckle, pills and dignity draining down the bottom of the sink. For a while, I was surviving off cookies; my narrowed oesophagus refusing to swallow anything else, every muscle now apparently a toddler in a tantrum.
Born with a muscle weakness, I was familiar with my body falling short of society's standards. I had used a wheelchair since I was old enough to reach the wheels and had grown up happy and accomplished. I always thought that meant I had a pretty good handle on my health but it turns out I was merely a novice. If my body was a domestic appliance, I would have been asking to speak to the manager at this point.
As the months went on, I waited for “recovery” – that thing that is meant to follow falling ill. I looked out the window each day, twitching the curtain when recovery began to run late. It never came. Instead, the fatigue and pain hung around, like a noxious smell. There was some improvement – my legs no longer buckled when asked to stand – and yet not enough. In bed, I looked through photographs on my camera-roll for evidence of my former life. Just a few months earlier I had been out at midnight singing at a gig with an old friend. Now, I had a “pill basket” and knew the weights of gateway opioids. In the four walls of my bedroom, my days had shrunk to fit inside. Seasons passed, the sun crept through the blinds, and I blinked into tomorrow. I'd barely hit 30 and it felt as if my life had ended.
When your entire world feels like it has fallen in on itself, you tend to cling to any hint of normality. For me, it was my job. Working as a journalist became something to focus on, a lost part of myself I could still find in the dark. I don't want to call it delusion but there was probably a fair hint of that. Besides, I needed to feel something other than sickness. I needed to believe there was going to be more to the rest of my life than simply being ill. I made a plan. I would try writing for 10 minutes in a morning. Then 20. If I got dizzy, I would stop.
Two years after falling ill, I had an award-winning column in this newspaper, my first book was published to critical acclaim and I was named one of Britain's most influential disabled people. It had also been so long since I had washed my hair that my scalp was forming its own paste. Perhaps I was a fraud. Perhaps I was in denial. Or perhaps – go with me here – life is much more complicated than they tell you. Perhaps boxes such as “normal” and “success” are tricks to trap us and a day can be meaningful, hard and funny all at once. Perhaps it is possible to have a body that is unruly, broken, bruised and to actually be OK. To be bloody spectacular. To pick the shards of the broken vase off the floor and superglue life back together, marvelling at the scent of the flowers (and then find a plaster for the blood).
No one really talks about it. No one really talks about what it is to be a disabled woman, especially a young one. To go through something transformative before you can drink legally. To experience pain or exhaustion or to feel 92. To navigate all the standard parts of life – exams, careers, relationships – but with a body that is different from everyone else's. If we do ever share this, we are expected to sanitise it, to dress up disability and sickness in a palatable bow. Even as I write this I am reticent to share the details of my own experience, not simply because it is private but because it runs against how disabled women are told to speak. We learn early on which parts of ourselves can be shared with the world and which parts we must hide, lest we be pitied, rejected or shamed. We are allowed to talk about our disabled bodies only if and when we have managed to make them appear like “normal” ones. Everyone wants to share the TikTok of the girl rising from her wheelchair to dance at the school prom, not when she feels the music pinprick her skin as she sits. I think it's time that changed.
When I grew up as a disabled teenager in the late 1990s, I knew no other disabled women like me. I'd seen barely a handful on television and next to none in films. Women's mags portrayed perfection, and sickness and disability seemingly had no part in that. In some ways, it doesn't feel much better now. It's estimated that disabled people make up only 2.5% of people on our TV screens and 3.4% of children's books have a disabled main character.
The exclusion of disabled women is not simply representational – disabled women are, quite literally, physically shut out of everyday life. Despite the UK having anti-discrimination laws that give rights to disabled people, society is still too often designed for non-disabled bodies. Nearly a third of disabled people say they find using public spaces difficult “all the time” or “often”, according to the UK Disability Survey in 2021. Only 9% of English housing provides the most basic features for people with physical disabilities. In the last 30 years, not a single friend or family member's home has been accessible to me.
It is not as if life outside the home for disabled people is more welcoming. Just 15% of restaurants and shops in the UK have hearing loops while only 1% of space at sporting venues is made available for disabled fans. I have regularly sat for seven hours sipping one drink in a pub because there is no accessible toilet. I have missed a friend's wedding because the venue had no lift. I have sat outside restaurants eating in the cold because the website falsely said a wheelchair user could get inside. I would like to say there is outrage each time but, as I think we all know, nothing happens. The lesson for disabled women comes early and it comes often: the problem is not how society is built – the problem is your body.
It isn't only infrastructure that we're shut out of – it's a decent income too. Nearly half the people in poverty in the UK are disabled or live with a disabled person. We are, on average, paid less than non-disabled people, more likely to be turned down for a job and less likely to be given senior roles at work, all while shouldering the extra costs of disability with often insufficient or no support from government. Even a Labour government cuts disability benefits.
On top of this, disabled people routinely face negative attitudes from the public. Research by the disability charity Scope in 2022 showed that a quarter of disabled people had been accused of faking their condition or not really being disabled, while a third had experienced people making assumptions about them or judging their capabilities based on their disability. This idea that disabled people are inherently different to “normal people” is startlingly common: separate research by Scope shows more than one in 10 non-disabled people “hardly ever” or “never” think of disabled people as the same as everyone else.
Growing up, I surveyed a world around me that was not made for people like me, and worse, actively kept us out. I had no idea what it was to be a disabled woman, or that it was possible to be happy, to have a career or relationships. This only increased when I got sick. It's no wonder. Women are routinely fed the message that we must be perfect; any hint of fallibility or difference – a career misstep, an anxious mind, a diet that includes gluten – means we are somehow failing. Every open-mouthed stare at a club when you laugh from your wheelchair, every comment from a stranger that they would rather die than be like you, sends a painfully clear message about how life with a disability is “meant” to be. We are taught from an early age that good health is the precursor to a positive existence, even more than wealth or social prestige. “At least you've got your health!” the adage goes. But what if you haven't? It is hard to imagine the world has wonderful things to offer you when it routinely tells you it doesn't.
This is not because there aren't many of us. Almost a quarter of people in the UK have some sort of disability – be it a physical impairment, mental health condition or chronic illness. Look at the global picture and the scale is even more vast: the World Health Organization estimates there are 1.3 billion people globally who have “significant disabilities”. What is more, the “disabled club” is not an exclusive one: any one of us can develop a long-term health condition at any point in our lives and find ourselves part of this community. That's even more the case if you're a woman: the World Health Survey estimates that the prevalence of disability among women is 60% higher than our male counterparts. Disabled women are by far the biggest minority group in the world but we are still the least visible. Where are our voices? Why aren't we part of the conversation?
This doesn't mean we aren't contributing. Far from it. Disabled women are making waves like never before, ushering in societal change through politics, business, acting, science, sport, music, journalism and more. Some of the most famous and influential women in the world today have a long-term health condition, from Greta Thunberg (autism), Billie Eilish (Tourette syndrome), Greta Gerwig (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), Selena Gomez (lupus and bipolar disorder), to Lady Gaga (fibromyalgia). We are winning Oscars, leading communities and legislating in parliaments. We are topping the charts, campaigning for equality and winning gold medals. Imagine what it would be like if these stories were put front and centre of mainstream culture. Imagine what it would feel like if women's disabilities were not just acknowledged, but celebrated. This is in many ways why I wrote a book about life for disabled women in Britain today, including interviewing more than 70 well-known women and experts with physical and mental health conditions. I wanted to take a subject – and a section of society – that is still shrouded in stereotypes and shame to shine a light on it, in all its glory, nuance and pain.
Years on from that night in the pub, I'm still sick. I'm still disabled. But I'm proud of my body, achieving, and laughing. Also occasionally, weeping. This is not the narrative society is used to. They don't make Hallmark movies about someone never learning to walk again. But I think it is a much more important story. It is easy to be celebratory when you have made it to the top of the mountain, much harder when you're stuck halfway, freezing your tits off. One thing makes that mountain easier, though: knowing it's not just you on it. If there is any crumb that I hope you take away from my experience – and those I collected – it is the feeling that there are many women in the world who are experiencing the same things you are.
On my more philosophical days, I think of bad health as something that happens naturally to living things. The pink peonies that brown at the edges. The honey bee that stings only to fall, depleted, through the air. Human beings are no different, really. The difference is that, for us, it is not the end. The clocks don't stop. The music still plays. We go on. In a society that greets disability with low expectations or outright prejudice, and demands perfection from the mess of modern existence, I will share a secret: it is entirely possible to be happy and fulfilled and disabled or sick, and to proudly carve out your own path. Who wants normal anyway?
Who Wants Normal? by Frances Ryan is published on 17 April (Penguin Books, £18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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An estimated 300,000 Canadians visit Palm Springs each year and Trump's levies threaten tourism in the region
Worried that Donald Trump's policies are scaring away Canadians, a key segment of its tourist industry, a California resort city has put up “Palm Springs Loves Canada” signs across its downtown.
“It was a gesture to let our Canadian visitors know that what happens in Washington DC, is not the way that Palm Springs is looking at Canada,” Ron deHarte, the city's mayor, said of the signs, which were installed on Friday.
An estimated 300,000 Canadians each year visit the Palm Springs region, DeHarte said, some of them staying for months at a time as they trade Canada's harsh winters for southern California's reliable warmth. But the mayor said he had been hearing from some Canadians that the US government's tariffs, and its rhetoric about Canada, were unacceptable to them, and that they were responding by cancelling their annual trips, pledging they were “not spending a dime in Palm Springs”.
DeHarte said he understood that perspective, but he and other local officials were sending a “positive message” and hoping Canadians would reconsider.
Canadian visitors spend an estimated $300m annually in the region, and “represent about 2,000 jobs in the hospitality industry”, deHarte said. “So when we have a group of visitors who are leaving early, or deciding not to come next year, that's significant. That's our restaurants, our stores, theater, arts, it's all of our businesses. The maids, the janitors, everyone is touched by the economic impact, or the loss of those dollars coming in.”
Canadians choosing not to come back to Palm Springs next winter would have more than just a financial impact, the mayor added.
“They volunteer. You see Canadians at our functions and events. They're getting involved any way they possibly can,” deHarte said. “It's not just a visitor coming to sit and hang out by the pool. These are really people who are part of our community.”
The new pro-Canada signs were first reported by the Palm Springs Post, which noted that a local carwash, Desert Hand Wash, had installed a large “We Love Canada” sign even before city officials had taken action.
“The Canadian business is 30% of my business in the winter. It's essential we do something significant,” Bob Smiland, the car wash's owner, told the Palm Springs Post.
Palm Springs, a desert oasis two hours outside of Los Angeles, is known for its vacation homes and large gay community. In 2018, it elected the US's first all-LGBTQ+ city council, a milestone that came as an afterthought in a city where inclusion had long been taken for granted. A recent Palm Springs protest against Trump and Elon Musk drew thousands of people, a local newspaper reported, and demonstrators have also been picketing outside a local Tesla showroom for weeks.
But what some locals describe as the Palm Springs “liberal bubble” has not been enough to insulate it from the effects of Trump's trade, immigration and anti-LGBTQ+ polices – as well as Trump's repeated claims that Canada should become the “51st state” in the US, while mockingly referring to the then prime minister Justin Trudeau as a “governor”.
In early April, the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, announced a 25% tax on US cars, calling Trump's tariffs on Canadian steel and automobiles “unjustified”.
As Canadian sports fans have started booing the US national anthem and some Canadians have adopted the phrase “elbows up” to show their combative attitude towards US aggression, there are some signs that the political conflict may also be influencing Canadian tourism to the US.
Two Canadian budget airlines, WestJet and Flair, have reduced their flights between western Canada and Palm Springs in recent weeks, citing reduced demand.
“As a result of the current political environment, we have seen a downward shift in demand for trans-border bookings between Canada and the US,” Josh Yates, a spokesperson for WestJet, said. “Notably, we are seeing increased demand for sun destinations across Mexico and the Caribbean, and to Europe.”
Multiple local real estate agents in the Palm Springs area have spoken out about Canadians contacting them about selling their California vacation homes in response to Trump's agenda.
“Within the first two weeks of tariffs talks, I had sellers calling and saying, ‘We're out of here, Trump has irrevocably damaged the relationship between Canada and the United States,” the Palm Springs realtor Sherri Dettman told Fast Company.
Another Palm Springs realtor, Paul Kaplan, published a blog post outlining the financial factors Canadians should consider when selling a US vacation home.
A Canadian-American who lives in Palm Springs told the Los Angeles Times that a group of his gay Canadian friends had cancelled their spring trip to Coachella to see Lady Gaga because of Trump's policies.
Local officials are paying close attention to these indicators, though they said the full impact of Canadians cancelling trips to Palm Springs was not likely to be felt until the coming winter season.
“The economic impact, it's going to make a difference this year, for sure, but where we're really going to feel it is if this turmoil continues into next year,” said deHarte.
A 2021 study found that Canadians owned 7% of vacation properties in the area, a higher proportion than residents of any other foreign country. Compared with the average Palm Springs visitor, Canadians tended to stay longer and spend more, a 2017 economic analysis found.
“We do have to hope that this turmoil in DC is going to be short-lived, and that everybody can get back to their daily lives, and not be in fear of how our pocketbooks and livelihoods are going to be affected,” the mayor said.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration building behind FDA logos at a bus stop on the agency's campus in Silver Spring, Md, Thursday, Aug. 2, 2018. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Weeks after ordering Food and Drug Administration employees back into the office, the agency is reversing course, allowing some of its most prized staffers to work remotely amid worries that recent layoffs and resignations could jeopardize basic functions, like approving new medicines.
An internal email obtained by The Associated Press states that FDA leadership are “allowing review staff and supervisors to resume telework” at least two days a week. The policy shift was confirmed by three FDA staffers who spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal agency matters.
The message was sent Tuesday to some of FDA's hundreds of drug reviewers. Staffers said a similar policy was communicated to reviewers who handle vaccines, biotech drugs and medical devices, although not necessarily in writing.
It's the latest example of the Trump administration's chaotic approach to overhauling the federal health workforce, which has included firings, a scramble to rehire some employees, and then additional layoffs last week of an estimated 3,400 staffers, or more than 15% of the agency's workforce.
Last week's cuts included entire offices focusing on FDA policy and regulations, most of the agency's communication staff and teams that support food inspectors and investigators. Senior officials overseeing tobacco, new drugs, vaccines and other products have also been dismissed or forced to resign. Staffers have described lower level employees as “pouring” out of the agency.
Former FDA Commissioner Dr. David Kessler called the cuts “devastating, haphazard, thoughtless and chaotic” during a House hearing on Wednesday.
When Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced plans to eliminate 10,000 staffers across the federal health workforce, he noted out that FDA medical reviewers and safety inspectors wouldn't be impacted. HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday evening.
In February, HHS was forced to recall some probationary employees who were fired, including hundreds of medical reviewers at FDA, who are largely funded by industry fees, not federal dollars.
But last week's cuts combined with resignations and retirements have raised a new threat: that FDA funding could fall so low that it short circuits a long-standing system in which companies help fund much of the agency's operations.
Nearly half the FDA's $7 billion budget comes from fees collected from drug, device and tobacco companies. The agency uses the money to hire thousands of staffers to quickly and efficiently review new products. For example, about 70% of the FDA's drug program is financed by user-fee agreements, which must be reauthorized by Congress every five years.
But the agreements stipulate that if FDA's federal funding falls below set levels, companies are no longer required to pay and, in some cases, can claw back their money. The threshold requirements are designed to ensure Congress continues funding FDA, rather than relying entirely on the private sector.
FDA and industry groups are supposed to begin negotiations later this year to renew several user-fee agreements, including those for drugs and devices.
“I don't think the agency nor regulated industry can afford for ‘user fees' not to be reauthorized,” said Michael Gaba, an attorney who advises FDA-regulated companies.
Whatever the reasoning behind the telework shift, former federal officials say it's a sign that recently confirmed FDA Commissioner Marty Makary is trying to retain and rebuild agency staffing. Makary made his first appearance at FDA's headquarters last Wednesday, one day after the mass layoffs. According to the memo obtained by the AP, Makary signed off on the return to telework for some employees.
“Dr. Makary needs to rebuild teams and restart the engine of productivity lost to weeks of job insecurity, uncertainty and shortages of team members,” said Steven Grossman, a former HHS official. “Turning commuting time back into work time is a great first step in achieving both.”
___
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Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
President Donald Trump speaks during an event with auto racing champions at the South Portico of the White House Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Washington, (Pool via AP)
President Donald Trump is displayed on a television on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
NEW YORK (AP) — When Donald Trump offered some financial advice Wednesday morning, stocks were wavering between gains and losses.
But that was about to change.
“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT,” he wrote on his social media platform Truth Social at 9:37 a.m.
Less than four hours later, Trump announced a 90-day pause on nearly all his tariffs. Stocks soared on the news, closing up 9.5% by the end of trading. The market, measured by the S&P 500, gained back about $4 trillion, or 70%, of the value it had lost over the previous four trading days.
It was a prescient call by the president. Maybe too prescient.
“He's loving this, this control over markets, but he better be careful,” said Trump critic and former White House ethics lawyer, Richard Painter, noting that securities law prohibits trading on insider information or helping others do so. “The people who bought when they saw that post made a lot of money.”
The question is, Was Trump already contemplating the tariff pause when he made that post?
Asked about when he arrived at his decision, Trump gave a muddled answer.
“I would say this morning,” he said. “Over the last few days, I've been thinking about it.”
He then added, “Fairly early this morning.”
Asked for clarification on the timing in an email to the White House later, a spokesperson didn't answer directly but defended Trump's post as part of his job.
“It is the responsibility of the President of the United States to reassure the markets and Americans about their economic security in the face of nonstop media fearmongering,” wrote White House spokesman Kush Desai.
Another curiosity of the posting was Trump's signoff with his initials.
DJT is also the stock symbol for Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of the president's social media platform Truth Social.
It's not clear if Trump was saying buying stocks in general, or Trump Media in particular. The White House was asked, but didn't address that either. Trump includes “DJT” on his posts intermittently, typically to emphasize that he has personally written the message.
The ambiguity about what Trump meant didn't stop people from pouring money into that stock.
Trump Media closed up 22.67%, soaring twice as much as the broader market, a stunning performance by a company that lost $400 million last year and is seemingly unaffected by whether tariffs would be imposed or paused.
Trump's 53% ownership stake in the company, now in a trust controlled by his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., rose by $415 million on the day.
Trump Media was bested, albeit by only two-hundreds of a percentage point, by another Trump administration stock pick — Elon Musk's Tesla.
Last month, Trump held an extraordinary news conference outside the White House praising the company and its cars. That was followed by a Fox TV appearance by his commerce secretary urging viewers to buy the stock.
Tesla's surge Wednesday added $20 billion to Musk's fortunes.
Kathleen Clark, a government ethics law expert at Washington University School of Law, says Trump's post in other administrations would have been investigated, but is not likely not to trigger any reaction, save for maybe more Truth Social viewers.
“He's sending the message that he can effectively and with impunity manipulate the market,” she said, “As in: Watch this space for future stock tips.”
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
In this unknown location and date image released by the U.S. Dept. of Justice, Christian Malanga, left, and Marcel Malanga can be seen wearing military-style uniforms which was posted to social media on Jan. 6, 2024. (U.S. Dept. of Justice via AP)
Benjamin Reuben Zalman-Polun, left, Marcel Malanga and Tyler Thompson, all American citizens, attend a court verdict in Congo, Kinshasa, Friday, Sept. 13, 2024, on charges of taking part in a coup attempt in May 2024. (AP Photo/Samy Ntumba Shambuyi, file)
Christian Malanga, president of the United Congolese Party, attends seminars discussing Africa's future in the global economy at the Spencer Fox Eccles Business building at the University of Utah on Oct. 20, 2014 in Salt Lake City, Utah. (Scott G Winterton/The Deseret News via AP, File)
American Marcel Malanga arrives for a court verdict in Congo, Kinshasa, Friday Sept .13, 2024, on charges of taking part in a coup attempt in May 2024. (AP Photo/Samy Ntumba Shambuyi, File)
From left Tyler Thompson Jr., Marcel Malanga and Benjamin Reuben Zalman-Polun, right, all American citizens, face the court in Kinshasa with 52 other defendants on June 7, 2024, accused of a role in last month's attempted coup in Congo led by little-known opposition figure Christian Malanga in which six people were killed. (AP Photo/Samy Ntumba Shambuyi, File)
Rebecca Higbee the mother of Tyler Thompson, points to her son and his friend Marcel during his 21st birthday with his family on May 30, 2024, in West Jordan, Utah. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)
Tyler Thompson Jr, addresses the court in Kinshasa with 52 other defendants Friday June 7, 2024, accused of a role in last month's attempted coup in Congo, led by little-known opposition figure Christian Malanga, in which six people were killed. (AP Photo/Samy Ntumba Shambuyi, file)
Benjamin Reuben Zalman-Polun sits in court in Kinshasa with 52 other defendants Friday June 7, 2024, accused of a role in last month's attempted coup in Congo led by little-known opposition figure Christian Malanga in which six people were killed. (AP Photo/Samy Ntumba Shambuyi, File)
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Three Americans repatriated to the United States from Congo this week have been charged with participating in an elaborate coup attempt aimed at overthrowing the African nation's government last year, the U.S. Justice Department said Wednesday.
A fourth man alleged by prosecutors to be an expert in explosives was also charged with aiding the plot.
The criminal charges arise from the same set of allegations that led to three of the defendants being detained in Congo and receiving death sentences. The sentences were later commuted to punishments of life imprisonment before the men were ultimately transferred Tuesday into U.S. custody to face charges in an American court. Their repatriation came amid efforts by Congolese authorities to reach a minerals deal with the U.S. in exchange for security support to fight rebels in the country's conflict-hit east.
Tyler Thompson Jr, addresses the court in Kinshasa with 52 other defendants Friday June 7, 2024, accused of a role in last month's attempted coup in Congo, led by little-known opposition figure Christian Malanga, in which six people were killed. (AP Photo/Samy Ntumba Shambuyi, file)
A criminal complaint unsealed by prosecutors Wednesday follows a long-running FBI investigation and accuses the men of conspiring to provide weapons, explosives and other support to a rebel army that was formed to try to overthrow the government.
Among the three Americans is 22-year-old Marcel Malanga, son of opposition figure Christian Malanga, who led the coup attempt that targeted the presidential palace in Kinshasa. The elder Malanga livestreamed from the palace during the attempt and was later killed while resisting arrest, Congolese authorities said.
Prosecutors say the goal of the plot was to establish a new government known as New Zaire and install Christian Malanga as its president. The younger Malanga identified himself as the “Chief of Staff of the Zaire army” and acted as a leader of the rebel forces, court documents say.
Christian Malanga, who was born in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa, had described himself on his website as a refugee who settled in the U.S. with his family in the 1990s. The self-proclaimed leader of a shadow government in exile sold used cars and dabbled in gold mining before persuading his Utah-born son to join in the foiled coup. Christian Malanga was convicted in Utah of assault with a firearm in 2001 and had charges dismissed in several other criminal cases.
Marcel Malanga, Tyler Thompson Jr., 22, and Benjamin Zalman-Polun, 37, were returned to the U.S. Tuesday. They are expected to make their first court appearance in Brooklyn.
The alleged explosives expert, Joseph Peter Moesser, 67, is set to appear in court in Salt Lake City on Thursday. Prosecutors say that as part of the plot, he provided explosives training and instructions at his Utah home and contributed weapons.
Thompson's attorney, Skye Lazaro, said Wednesday she did not yet have information to share. No attorneys were listed in court documents for the other three defendants.
The men are charged with crimes including conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, conspiracy to bomb government facilities and conspiracy to kill or kidnap persons in a foreign country. Those charges, which taken together could result in lengthy prison sentences in the event of a conviction, could change if and when the defendants are indicted by a grand jury.
The complaint provides the most detailed chronicle to date of the planned May 2024 overthrow of Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi. At least six people, including Christian Malanga, died when armed men in camouflage fatigues led an attack on the homes of the president and a deputy prime minister.
The charging document makes clear that the alleged coup was the result of a months-in-the-making plot rather than a haphazard idea, with the men accused of recruiting friends in the U.S., acquiring drones and military-style weapons and also participating in extensive firearms training. The men are also alleged to have hijacked a bus and raided a Congolese police station to obtain weapons for the deadly attack.
Malanga told a Congolese judge that his father threatened to kill him if he did not follow his orders.
“We're about to go take out some terrorists,” Malanga is alleged to have told a friend he was recruiting to go to Africa. The friend is not named in the complaint.
Other friends told The Associated Press that Malanga had offered up to $100,000 to join him on a mysterious “security job” in Congo.
Prosecutors are seeking to keep all four men in jail as the case moves forward.
“The four defendants pose an extreme danger to the community and present an unmanageable risk of flight,” the Justice Department said in a detention memo.
It notes that Moesser, a longtime associate of Christian Malanga, faced allegations of criminal conduct years earlier when he was accused of trying to place explosive black powder on an plane departing from the Salt Lake City airport. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was sentenced to a form of probation.
Thompson, a friend and former high school football teammate of Marcel Malanga in Utah, is identified in court documents as a drone specialist who prosecutors say shopped for a flamethrower attachment that he planned to use to “light people on fire.”
His family has said he flew to Africa for what they believed was his first vacation abroad, paid for by Christian Malanga.
Witnesses observed Thompson and the younger Malanga conducting drone test flights and firing handguns and rifles at a shooting range near Salt Lake City before they left for Africa, according to the complaint.
Moesser allegedly helped Thompson and Malanga install the flamethrower attachment and showed them how to use drones to drop pipe bombs. Messages obtained by investigators show Moesser conspiring with Christian Malanga to ship explosives and AR-15 rifles to Congo, the complaint said.
Zalman-Polun reportedly traveled to Utah to help Malanga recruit soldiers for their rebel army. If the plot had been successful, Zalman-Polun would have become Christian Malanga's chief of staff or would “work in finance” in the new administration, court documents say.
The complaint also places three of the defendants at the scene itself, using images and posts from the men's social media accounts, including livestream videos that Christian Malanga recorded.
___
Tucker reported from Washington.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Truck await to load shipping containers at the Port of Los Angeles Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
The YM Uniform container ship is docked at the Port of Los Angeles Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
James Lamb works on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, Monday, April 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
People walk past the New York Stock Exchange, Monday, April 7, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump delivered another jarring reversal in American trade policy Wednesday, suspending for 90 days import taxes he'd imposed barely 13 hours earlier on dozens of countries while escalating his trade war with China. The moves triggered a powerful stock market rally on Wall Street but left businesses, investors and America's trading partners bewildered about what the president is attempting to achieve.
The U-turn came after the sweeping global tariffs Trump announced last week set off a four-day route in global financial markets, paralyzed businesses and raised fears the U.S. and world economies would tumble into recession.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to characterize the sudden change in policy as part of a grand negotiating strategy. But to those outside the Trump administration, it looked like a cave-in to market pressure and to growing fears that the president's impetuous use of import taxes -- tariffs -- would cause massive collateral economic damage.
“Other countries will welcome the 90-day stay of execution — if it lasts — but the whiplash from constant zig-zags creates more of the uncertainty that businesses and governments hate,” said Daniel Russel, vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “The Administration's blunt-force tactics have rattled allies, who see the sudden reversal as damage control following the market meltdown, rather than a pivot to respectful, balanced negotiations.''
Trump's turnaround Wednesday capped a wild week in U.S. trade policy. On Wednesday April 2 — which Trump labeled “Liberation Day'' — the president announced plans to impose tariffs on almost every country on earth, upending the world trading system. The first of his new tariffs -– a 10% “baseline'' tax on imports from most countries – went into effect Saturday.
At midnight Wednesday, he upped the ante by slapping what he called “reciprocal'' taxes on countries he accused of unfair trading practices and adding to U.S. trade deficits. Those are the tariffs he suspended for 90 days, saying the pause would give countries time to negotiate with him and his trade team.
There was one exception to the reprieve: He raised the tariff on Chinese imports to a staggering 125%, punishing Beijing for announcing retaliatory tariffs on the United States. Meanwhile, the 10% baseline tariffs – a substantial act of protectionism in their own right – remain in place.
Trump's ever-changing trade war tactics — which include earlier levies on cars, steel and aluminum, and Mexico and Canada — have already done damage, forcing dazed companies to delay or cancel plans as they tried to figure out what Trump was doing and how they should respond.
Some companies temporarily laid off workers after Trump's widespread tariffs were announced, while there were signs that many firms held off on hiring amid the widespread uncertainty the tariffs created.
Carmaker Stellantis temporarily cut 900 jobs at factories in Michigan and Indiana after production was halted at two plants in Canada and Mexico in the wake of Trump's 25% duties on imported cars.
And Cleveland-Cliffs laid off 1,200 workers at a factory in Michigan and an iron ore mine in Minnesota in response to a drop in demand from auto companies. Cleveland-Cliffs said it would resume production at the two facilities once auto production returned to the U.S.
Minutes from the Federal Reserve's March 18-19 meeting, released Wednesday, showed that many of its policymakers said that their business contacts “reported pausing hiring decisions because of elevated policy uncertainty.”
And Delta Air Lines said earlier Wednesday that demand for domestic leisure trips and corporate travel has stalled because of the uncertainty around global trade. In a conference call with investors, the company said it was cutting capacity. It also declined to provide a full-year financial forecast.
“Right now, it's hard to know how this is going to play out, given that this is somewhat self-imposed,” Delta CEO Ed Bastian said. “I'm hopeful that sanity will prevail and we'll move through this period of time on the global trade front relatively quickly.”
Businesses have sought greater clarity around Trump's ultimate tariff policies for weeks. It's not clear that the 90-day pause has reduced their uncertainty.
Jeff Jaisli, CEO of the New Jersey-based importer/exporter Jagro, said Trump's Truth Social post on Wednesday had made things “even worse'' and more confusing. He was trying to figure out which tariffs applied to which countries.
“We're scrambling to find correct information and procedures for entries we're processing NOW in real time,'' he said by email. He could find no guidance on the websites of the White House or the Customs and Border Protection agency, which collects tariffs. Earlier, Jaisli called Trump's tariffs “a grenade that was thrown into the room that's going to cause chaos.''
Trump's tariffs have set off a tit-for-tat trade war with China, the world's second-biggest economy. Even before Trump upped his taxes on China to 125%, the Chinese had set their own tariffs on the United States at 84%.
The World Trade Organization's director-general, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, warned that the rising tension could reduce U.S.-China merchandise trade by 80% and “severely damage the global economic outlook.”
“Of particular concern is the potential fragmentation of global trade along geopolitical lines,” she wrote in a statement late Wednesday. “A division of the global economy into two blocs could lead to a long-term reduction in global real GDP by nearly 7%.”
Citing WTO projections, she warned the negative effects could ripple through to other economies, especially developing ones. She urged countries to ensure an open global trading system and resolve differences through cooperation.
Meanwhile, U.S. companies struggled to figure out how to respond to huge levies on Chinese products they'd come to rely on.
Jessica Bettencourt is CEO of Klem's, a third-generation store in Spencer, Massachusetts that sells everything from lawn and garden items to workwear and gifts. She said that the escalation of tariffs from China have made her stop ordering any new fourth-quarter product that is holiday, gifts or toys. She is also reconsidering any fall apparel and footwear orders that aren't already placed.
“The worst thing is uncertainty and we have massive uncertainty,” said Jason Goldberg, chief commerce strategy officer at Publicis Groupe, a global marketing and communications company. “No one can make any moves. Everybody is trying to save as much cash and defer any unnecessary expense. People are getting laid off. Orders are getting cancelled. Expansion plans are being put on hold.”
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Robert Bumsted and Anne D'Innocenzio in New York, Dee-Ann Durbin in Detroit and Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed to this story.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Israel would be the “leader” of a potential military strike against Iran if Tehran doesn't give up its nuclear weapons program. Trump spoke ahead of this weekend's talks involving U.S. and Iranian officials in the Middle East.
President Donald Trump listens as Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a news conference in the East Room of the White House, Feb. 4, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
In this photo released by the Iranian Presidency Office, President Masoud Pezeshkian, second right, listens to head of Atomic Energy Organization of Iran Mohammad Eslami as he visits an exhibition of Iran's nuclear achievements, in Tehran, Iran, Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (Iranian Presidency Office via AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Israel would be the “leader” of a potential military strike against Iran if Tehran doesn't give up its nuclear weapons program.
Trump made the comments ahead of this weekend's scheduled talks involving U.S. and Iranian officials in the Middle East sultanate of Oman. Trump earlier this week said the talks would be “direct” while Iran has described the engagement as “indirect” talks with the U.S.
“If it requires military, we're going to have military,” Trump said. “Israel will obviously be very much involved in that. They'll be the leader of that. But nobody leads us, but we do what we want to do.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this week said he supports Trump's diplomatic efforts to reach a settlement with Iran. He added that Israel and the U.S. share the same goal of ensuring that Iran does not develop a nuclear weapon. Netanyahu, however, led efforts to persuade Trump to pull out of a U.S.-brokered deal with Iran in 2018.
The Israeli leader, known for his hawkish views on Iran and past calls for military pressure, said he would welcome a diplomatic agreement along the lines of Libya's deal with the international community in 2003. But that deal saw Libya's late dictator Moammar Gadhafi give up all of his clandestine nuclear program. Iran has insisted its program, acknowledged to the International Atomic Energy Agency, should continue.
“I think that would be a good thing,” Netanyahu said. “But whatever happens, we have to make sure that Iran does not have nuclear weapons.”
The United States is increasingly concerned as Tehran is closer than ever to a workable weapon. But Trump said on Wednesday that he doesn't have a definitive timeline for the talks to come to a resolution.
“When you start talks, you know, if they're going along well or not,” Trump said. “And I would say the conclusion would be what I think they're not going along well. So that's just a feeling.”
The U.S. and other world powers in 2015 reached a long-term, comprehensive nuclear agreement that limited Tehran's enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. But Trump unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from the nuclear agreement in 2018, calling it the “worst deal ever.”
Iran and the U.S., under President Joe Biden, held indirect negotiations in Vienna in 2021 aimed at restoring the nuclear deal. But those talks, and others between Tehran and European nations, failed to reach any agreement.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury Department earlier on Wednesday issued new sanctions targeting Iran's nuclear program.
Five entities and one person based in Iran are cited in the new sanctions for their support of Iran's nuclear program. The designated groups include the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and subordinates Iran Centrifuge Technology Company, Thorium Power Company, Pars Reactors Construction and Development Company and Azarab Industries Co.
“I want Iran to be great,” Trump said Wednesday. “The only thing that they can't have is a nuclear weapon. They understand that.”
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian again pledged Wednesday that his nation is “not after a nuclear bomb” and even dangled the prospect of direct American investment in the Islamic Republic if the countries can reach a deal.
The comments by the reformist leader represent a departure from Iran's stance after its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, in which Tehran sought to buy American airplanes but in effect barred U.S. companies from coming into the country.
“His excellency has no opposition to investment by American investors in Iran,” Pezeshkian said in a speech in Tehran, referring to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “American investors: Come and invest.”
___
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook's former director of Global Public Policy, arrives to testify before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., speaks in front of a chart showing what he described as Facebook internal documents during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook's former director of Global Public Policy, testifies before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook's former director of Global Public Policy, is sworn in to testify before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook's former director of Global Public Policy, testifies before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., speaks during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook's former director of Global Public Policy, testifies before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook's former director of Global Public Policy, testifies before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
The logo for Facebook appears on screens in New York's Times Square on March 29, 2018. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
Former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday, accusing the social media company of undermining national security and briefing China on U.S. artificial intelligence efforts in order to grow its business there.
“We are engaged in a high-stakes AI arms race against China. And during my time at Meta, company executives lied about what they were doing with the Chinese Communist Party to employees, shareholders, Congress, and the American public,” Wynn-Williams said in her prepared testimony.
Her book “Careless People,” an explosive insider account of her time at the social media giant, sold 60,000 copies in its first week and reached the top 10 on Amazon's best-seller list amid efforts by Meta to discredit the work and stop her from talking about her experiences at the company. Meta used a “campaign of threats and intimidation” to silence the former executive, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, during the hearing.
Wynn-Williams served as director of global public policy at Facebook, now Meta, from 2011 until she was fired in 2017.
“Throughout those seven years, I saw Meta executives repeatedly undermine U.S. national security and betray American values. They did these things in secret to win favor with Beijing and build an 18 billion dollar business in China,” she said in her prepared remarks.
Wynn-Williams also said Meta deleted the Facebook account of a prominent Chinese dissident living in the U.S., bowing to pressure from China to do so. Meta says that account, belonging to billionaire Guo Wengui, shared personally identifiable information such as people's passport numbers, social security numbers, national ID numbers and home addresses and was removed because this violated Facebook's rules.
And she said Meta “ignored warnings” that building a “physical pipeline” between the U.S. and China would provide China with backdoor access to U.S. user data. These plans — called the Pacific Light Cable Network — never materialized, but Wynn-Williams said that was only because lawmakers stepped in.
In a statement, Meta said Wynn-Williams' testimony “is divorced from reality and riddled with false claims. While Mark Zuckerberg himself was public about our interest in offering our services in China and details were widely reported beginning over a decade ago, the fact is this: we do not operate our services in China today.”
Zuckerberg, along with other Big Tech executives, have been trying to improve their standing with President Donald Trump's administration in recent months — through visits to Mar-a-Lago and the White House, as well as monetary donations — it's not yet clear if the efforts are paying off.
“This is a man who wears many different costumes,” Wynn-Williams said of Zuckerberg. “When I was there, he wanted the president of China to name his first child, he was learning Mandarin, he was censoring to his heart's content. Now his new costume is MMA fighting or... free speech. We don't know what the next costume is gonna be, but it will be something different. It's whatever gets him closest to power.”
The hearing comes just days before Meta's massive antitrust trial is scheduled to begin. The Federal Trade Commission's case against the tech giant could force the company to divest Instagram and WhatsApp.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
FBI Director Kash Patel, joined at right by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, answers questions as the Senate Intelligence Committee holds its worldwide threats hearing, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 25, 2025. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
WASHINGTON (AP) — FBI Director Kash Patel has been removed as the acting chief of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and has been replaced with the Army secretary, three people familiar with the matter said Wednesday.
It was not immediately clear why Patel was replaced by Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll to lead the Justice Department agency that's responsible for enforcing the nation's gun laws. One person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel move, said Patel was removed at the end of February, just days after he was sworn in.
But that was never publicly announced. Patel on Wednesday afternoon remained on the agency's website and was identified as the acting director in an April 7 press release. In March, he posted on social media a note he sent to the ATF workforce that read “special message from the acting director.” And senior ATF leaders were only informed Wednesday of the change, according to another person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the move.
Driscoll will remain secretary of the Army, according to a defense official. This puts a defense leader — with an already large job — in charge of a domestic law enforcement agency. U.S. defense officials have historically tried to maintain a strict divide between military forces and law enforcement. U.S. troops are not allowed to participate in law enforcement activities on American soil. They do, however, provide support and intelligence gathering to Custom and Border Protection to help secure the southern border
As Army secretary, Driscoll, 38, heads the U.S. military's largest service, which has about 452,000 soldiers including thousands who are deployed all over the world. He also oversees dozens of major weapons, aircraft and equipment programs worth billions of dollars and is responsible for an Army budget of more than $187 billion.
Harrison Fields, a White House spokesperson, said Patel was “briefly designated ATF Director while awaiting Senate confirmations — a standard, short-term move.”
“Director Patel is now excelling in his role at the FBI and delivering outstanding results,” Fields said.
Driscoll, of North Carolina, had served as an adviser to Vice President JD Vance, whom he met when both were attending Yale Law School. He served in the Army for less than four years and left at the rank of first lieutenant.
He ran unsuccessfully in the Republican primary for a North Carolina congressional seat in 2020, getting about 8% of the vote in a crowded field of candidates.
Patel was named acting ATF director in an unusual arrangement in February just days after he was sworn in to lead the FBI, putting him in charge of two separate and sprawling Justice Department agencies.
Justice Department officials have been considering a plan to combine the ATF and the Drug Enforcement Administration into a single agency. The two agencies often work together, along with the FBI, but are both led by separate directors and are tasked with distinctly different missions.
The plan is designed to “achieve efficiencies in resources, case deconfliction, and regulatory efforts,” according to a recent memo from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
The ATF investigates things like violent crime, gun trafficking, arson and bombings. It also provides technical expertise in tracing guns used in crimes and analyzing intelligence in shooting investigations. The DEA, meanwhile, is in charge of enforcing the nation's laws around drugs. Its agents are focused on combating criminal drug networks and stemming the illicit flow of fentanyl and other street drugs.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
A stamp is shown on an envelope Friday, May 28, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane, file)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Postal Service is seeking a rate increase this summer that includes hiking the cost of a first-class stamp from 73 cents to 78 cents.
The request was made Wednesday to the Postal Regulatory Commission, which must OK the proposal. If approved, the 5-cent increase for a “forever” stamp and similar increases for postcards, metered letters and international mail would take effect July 13.
The proposed changes would raise mailing services product prices approximately 7.4%.
The Postal Service contends, as it did last year when it enacted a similar increase, that it's needed to achieve financial stability.
Former U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy previously warned postal customers to get used to “uncomfortable” rate hikes as the Postal Service seeks to become self-sufficient. He said price increases were overdue after “at least 10 years of a defective pricing model.”
DeJoy resigned in March after nearly five years in the position, leaving as President Donald Trump and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency had floated the idea of privatizing mail service.
Deputy Postmaster General Doug Tulino has taken on the role of postmaster general until the Postal Service Board of Governors names a permanent replacement for DeJoy.
Trump has said he is considering putting USPS under the control of the Commerce Department in an effort to stop losses at the $78 billion-a-year agency, which has struggled at times to balance the books with the decline of first-class mail.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks during a news conference on Wednesday, April 9, 2025, at Port Everglades, Fla., to announce the seizure of illegal narcotics. (Amy Beth Bennett /South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP)
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel walk past pallets of shrink-wrapped narcotics and a drone used in the investigations as they arrive for a news conference on Wednesday, April 9, 2025, at Port Everglades, Fla. (Amy Beth Bennett /South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP)
U.S. Attorney General, Pam Bondi speaks during a news conference on Wednesday, April 9, 2025, at Port Everglades, Fla., to announce the seizure of illegal narcotics. (Amy Beth Bennett /South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP)
U.S. Attorney General, Pam Bondi gives a thumbs-up as she leaves a news conference with FBI Director Kash Patel after announcing the seizure of illegal narcotics on vessels headed for the U.S., Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (Amy Beth Bennett /South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP)
A Broward Sheriff's Deputy and a member of BSO Fire Rescue take a selfie with U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi as she leaves a news conference after announcing the seizure of illegal narcotics on vessels headed for the U.S., Wednesday, April 9, 2025 at Port Everglades, Fla. (Amy Beth Bennett /South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP)
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel shake hands with members of the inter-agency Panama Express Strikeforce following a news conference on Wednesday, April 9, 2025, at Port Everglades, Fla. (Amy Beth Bennett /South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP)
Members of the U.S. Coast Guard from U.S. Coast Guard cutter James await the arrival of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel for a news conference on Wednesday, April 9, 2025, at Port Everglades, Fla. (Amy Beth Bennett /South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP)
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi on Wednesday announced the seizure of roughly $510 million worth of illegal narcotics on vessels headed for the United States, seeking to highlight the government's efforts to take down sophisticated cartel drug networks.
Bondi traveled to Florida to tout the seizure of cocaine and marijuana by U.S. Coast Guard crews and put a spotlight a key Trump administration priority to go after drug traffickers helping to fuel America's addiction crisis.
Bondi's appearance at the south Florida port, standing in front of a Coast Guard ship and stacks of the intercepted drugs, underscores the Trump administration's efforts to reshape the Justice Department to align with the President Donald Trump's priorities to crack down on violent crime, illegal immigration and cartels.
Ships, aircraft and drones were used to intercept the traffickers off the coast of Peru, Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands, according to Bondi, who said the seizures have led to sealed indictments against 11 people.
Bondi said investigators have linked two cartels - Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa - to the shipments, and described the seizures as a “major blow” to their financial operations.
“What they did saved countless American lives,” Bondi said of Coast Guard crews that intercepted the drugs. “This cocaine would have been distributed throughout our country and perhaps throughout our world.”
The Sinaloa cartel, Mexico's oldest criminal group, which traffics drugs, weapons and people, and Jalisco New Generation were among eight Latin American crime organizations as “foreign terrorist organizations” by the Trump administration in February, upping its pressure on cartels operating in the U.S. and on anyone aiding them.
“This administration has labeled them foreign terrorist organizations because that's what they are,” said FBI Director Kash Patel, who joined Bondi in Florida Wednesday.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
This image provided by South Bow shows a spill from the Keystone oil pipeline that occurred Tuesday, April 8, 2025 near Fort Ransom, N.D. (South Bow via AP)
This photo provided by South Bow shows the area near Fort Ransom, N.D., affected by a spill of the Keystone oil pipeline that occurred Tuesday, April 8, 2025. (South Bow via AP)
This photo provided by South Bow shows workers gathered to respond to the Keystone oil pipeline spill that occured Tuesday, April 8, 2025. near Fort Ransom, N.D. (South Bow via AP)
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — Trucks and workers started cleaning up the Keystone oil pipeline spill in rural North Dakota, though its cause and the project timing is unclear.
The pipeline ruptured Tuesday morning in southeastern North Dakota and was shut down within two minutes by an employee who heard a mechanical bang. An aerial photo released Wednesday shows a black, pondlike pool of oil suspended in a partially snowy field that's traversed by tire tracks.
A farmer told The Associated Press he could smell the scent of crude oil, carried by the wind.
South Bow, a liquid pipelines business that manages the pipeline, estimated the spill's volume at 3,500 barrels, or 147,000 gallons. Keystone's entire system remains shut down.
That's not yet known. The company is investigating what caused the spill and how long repairs might take, spokesperson Kristin Anderson said Wednesday.
The spill is not a minor one, said Paul Blackburn, a policy analyst with Bold Alliance, an environmental and landowners group that fought the pipeline's extension, called Keystone XL.
The estimated volume of 3,500 barrels, or 147,000 gallons of crude oil, is equal to 16 tanker trucks of oil, he said. That estimate could increase over time, he added.
Blackburn said the bigger picture is what he called the Keystone Pipeline's history of spills at a higher rate than other pipelines. He compared Keystone to the Dakota Access oil pipeline since the latter came online in June 2017. In that period, Keystone's system has spilled nearly 1.2 million gallons (4.5 million liters) of oil, while Dakota Access spilled 1,282 gallons (4,853 liters), Blackburn said.
In its update, the company said the pipeline “was operating within its design and regulatory approval requirements at the time of the incident.”
Generally, underground oil pipelines can have a number of stressors, said Ramanan Krishnamoorti, vice president for energy and innovation at the University of Houston.
Those include corrosive elements from the liquid within the pipeline, changing temperatures, moving soil, movement from trains or construction equipment on the surface and stress to bends, turns and joints in the pipeline, he said.
The 2,700-mile (4,350-kilometer) pipeline originates in Alberta, Canada, and carries heavy tar sands crude oil south across the Dakotas and Nebraska before splitting to carry oil both to refineries in Illinois and south to Oklahoma and Texas.
The $5.2 billion Keystone Pipeline was built in 2010. TC Energy built the pipeline which is operated by South Bow as of last year.
The spill is contained to an agricultural field. In an update Wednesday, South Bow said it has multiple on-site vacuum trucks beginning to recover the oil. Continuous air quality monitoring is underway. The pipeline's affected segment is isolated, and the company said it's evaluating plans for a return to service.
Phone messages and emails were left Wednesday with the state Department of Environmental Quality and the Ransom County sheriff about the spill and response.
Myron Hammer, an adjacent landowner who farms the land affected by the spill, said it hasn't yet adversely affected him, aside from the smell of crude oil or sulfur carrying when the wind blows in a certain direction. The pipeline company appears to be doing its due diligence to fix the problem, he said.
There's been a lot of truck traffic bringing equipment to the scene, he said. His house is about 1.75 miles (2.82 kilometers) away.
“It's become a beehive of activity in the proximity there,” Hammer said. Some of his property is being used as a staging area for equipment. He said he'll have to cancel plans to farm on roughly 5 or more acres of land impacted by the spill.
The spill site is north of Fort Ransom, a tiny town in a hilly, forested area known for scenic views and outdoor recreation. A state park and hiking trails are nearby.
The rupture in North Dakota occurred within 2 1/2 years of a December 2022 rupture in rural northeastern Kansas that dumped about 13,000 barrels of crude oil into a creek. The company attributed the rupture to a faulty weld in a pipe bend, saying it caused a crack that grew over time under stress.
A report drafted by an outside engineering consulting firm for U.S. government regulators later said the bend had been “overstressed” since its installation in December 2010, likely because construction activity itself altered the land around the pipe. A July 2021 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office said the four biggest previous spills on the Keystone system were caused by issues tied to its original design, its construction or the manufacturing of the pipe.
They very well might, though energy experts have different outlooks.
The pipeline's shutdown could quickly raise gas prices in the Midwest and could have more effects on diesel and jet fuel because refineries will have less of the crude oil they need, Krishnamoorti said.
Higher-priced diesel could lead to higher grocery prices because diesel trucks transport those products, he said.
Other experts said the refineries likely have a supply of crude oil already on hand that would help protect against immediate impacts of the shutdown.
“Even if the pipeline gets cut off completely for, say, 2 or 3 weeks, they have enough crude (oil) to continue refining for gasoline,” said Mark LaCour, editor-in-chief of the Oil and Gas Global Network.
Gas prices increased for a third consecutive week in the U.S., but that could change as oil prices drop amid the escalating global trade war.
___
Associated Press writer John Hanna contributed from Topeka, Kansas.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer speaks with former television journalist Gretchen Carlson, not shown, at an event on Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer gives a policy speech at an event on Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Former television journalist Gretchen Carlson speaks with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, not shown, at an event on Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer speaks with former television journalist Gretchen Carlson at an event on Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer gives a policy speech at an event on Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer gives a policy speech at an event on Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer gives a policy speech at an event on Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer arrives to give a policy speech at an event on Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer gives a policy speech at an event on Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer speaks with former television journalist Gretchen Carlson, not shown, at an event on Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer delivered a speech emphasizing points of agreement with President Donald Trump on economic policy, just hours before their scheduled meeting — a reflection of the high-profile Democrat's more diplomatic approach toward the president as her party ramps up its attacks on him.
Framed by Whitmer as a “blueprint for success,” her lengthy “Build, America, Build” address called for bipartisan cooperation to boost American manufacturing. While she offered soft criticism of the president, she also underscored shared priorities.
“I understand the motivation behind the tariffs, and I can tell you, here's where President Trump and I do agree. We do need to make more stuff in America,” said Whitmer, before adding, “I'm not against tariffs outright, but it is a blunt tool. You can't just pull out the tariff hammer to swing at every problem without a clear defined end-goal.”
The address, rescheduled from last week due to severe ice storms in northern Michigan, came ahead of her second one-on-one meeting with Trump in less than a month, in addition to a dinner at the White House where she sat next to him.
Trump praised Whitmer as a “very good person” who has done an “excellent job” Wednesday afternoon, as the high-profile Democrat stood in the Oval Office while he signed executive orders and took aim at political opponents. Trump added that “we'll come home with a winner for Michigan.”
Wednesday's meeting follows Trump's announcement of new tariffs expected to disproportionately affect Michigan, whose economy is closely tied to an auto industry reliant on trade with Canada, Mexico and other countries. She added that she would also be meeting with members of Trump's Cabinet, and she planned to discuss the impact of tariffs.
Once one of Trump's most vocal critics during his first term and the campaign trail last year, Whitmer has adopted a more measured tone toward the president since his reelection, delivering multiple speeches in which she has called for finding “common ground.”
“If you're not at the table, you're on the menu,” Whitmer said during a discussion after her speech. “My oath to the people of Michigan is to continue to show up, even when it means I'm going to get my lunch handed to me.”
Whitmer's approach stands in sharp contrast to that of other high-profile Democratic governors, many of whom — like her — are seen as potential contenders for the party's 2028 presidential nomination.
Colorado's Democratic Gov. Jared Polis directly responded to Whitmer's speech Wednesday, saying the “tariff hammer” Whitmer referred to “winds up hitting your own hand rather than the nail.”
“Tariffs are bad outright because they lead to higher prices and destroy American manufacturing,” Polis said on social media.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has remained a leading voice of state-level opposition to Trump, sharply criticizing the new tariffs this week. Meanwhile, California Gov. Gavin Newsom appealed directly to international partners, urging them to spare his state from retaliatory measures and declaring, “California is not Washington, D.C.”
Whitmer faces a more challenging political landscape than either Pritzker or Newsom, with a divided state legislature and a state that went for Trump in two of the last three elections. But even Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of a state that voted for Trump in 2024, has taken a more critical approach toward Trump, telling reporters Tuesday that Trump is “looking to screw over our farmers” with tariffs.
Whitmer's balance was seen in her address Wednesday and the conversation with former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson afterward. She agreed with Trump on the need to build more in America, but made it clear that she disagrees with his approach to tariffs, emphasizing that such a shift “doesn't happen overnight.”
“There's not a shortcut here. Strategic reindustrialization must be a bipartisan project that spans multiple presidential administrations,” Whitmer said in her address. “We need to be strategic about tariffs on the technology we actually want to make in America.”
Whitmer — who has less than two years left in office because of term limits — has spent much of this year traveling outside Michigan on international trade trips and visits to Washington, D.C., and other states, following a 2024 in which she dedicated considerable time campaigning for fellow Democrats.
Despite this, she reiterated on Wednesday that she is not signaling a run for president in 2028, though her speech is unlikely to quiet the speculation.
“This year and in the years to come — no matter who's in the White House — we need to be betting on American workers. We need to bring chip manufactures back home. Let's dominate the seas and the skies and the roads. Let's innovate and let's build,” Whitmer said in closing.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
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Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley breaks down a new diversity in hiring case being brought to the Supreme Court and a judge halting President Donald Trump's mass firings on 'The Ingraham Angle.'
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Wednesday agreed to temporarily halt the reinstatement of two fired federal board members, delivering another near-term win to President Donald Trump as his administration continues to spar in federal courts over the extent of his executive branch powers.
The brief stay handed down by Roberts is not a final ruling on the reinstatement of the two board members, National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) member Gwynne Wilcox and Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) member Cathy Harris – two Democratic appointees who were abruptly terminated by the Trump administration earlier this year.
Both had challenged their terminations as "unlawful" in separate suits filed in D.C. federal court.
But the order from Roberts does temporarily halt their reinstatements from taking force two days after a federal appeals court voted en banc to reinstate them.
APPEALS COURT BLOCKS TRUMP FROM FIRING FEDERAL BOARD MEMBERS, TEES UP SUPREME COURT FIGHT
National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) member Gwynne Wilcox and Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) member Cathy Harris sued the administration after they were terminated from their posts. (NLRB; AP Photo; US District Court)
Judges for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit voted 7-4 Monday to restore Wilcox and Harris to their respective boards, citing Supreme Court precedent in Humphrey's Executor and Wiener v. United States as the backing for their decision.
They noted that the Supreme Court had never overturned or reversed the decades-old precedent regarding removal restrictions for government officials of "multimember adjudicatory boards" – including the NLRB and MSPB. "The Supreme Court has repeatedly told the courts of appeals to follow extant Supreme Court precedent unless and until that Court itself changes it or overturns it," judges noted in their opinion.
Monday's ruling from the full panel was expected to spark intense backlash from the Trump administration, which has lobbed accusations of so-called "activist judges" that have slowed or halted some of Trump's executive orders and actions.
The Trump administration appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court almost immediately.
TRUMP'S AUTHORITY TO FIRE OFFICIALS QUESTIONED IN COURT BATTLE OVER NLRB SEAT
Members of the Supreme Court (L-R) Associate Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, Sonia Sotomayor, and Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Associate Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Elena Kagan, and Brett M. Kavanaugh pose in the Justices Conference Room prior to the formal investiture ceremony of Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson September 30, 2022 in Washington, D.C. (Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States via Getty Images)
The en banc decision was the latest in a dizzying flurry of court developments that had upheld, then blocked, and upheld again the firings of the two employees, and came after D.C.-based federal judges had issued orders blocking their terminations.
"A President who touts an image of himself as a ‘king' or a ‘dictator,' perhaps as his vision of effective leadership, fundamentally misapprehends the role under Article II of the U.S. Constitution," U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who oversaw Wilcox's case, wrote in her opinion.
Likewise, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras, who was presiding over Harris's case, wrote that if the President were to "displace independent agency heads from their positions for the length of litigation such as this, those officials' independence would shatter."
Both opinions cited the 1935 Supreme Court precedent, Humphrey's Executor v. United States, that notably narrowed the president's constitutional power to remove agents of the executive branch, in support of Wilcox's and Harris's reinstatements.
Back in February, Trump's Justice Department penned a letter to Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin stating that it was seeking to overturn the landmark case.
"To the extent that Humphrey's Executor requires otherwise, the Department intends to urge the Supreme Court to overrule that decision, which prevents the President from adequately supervising principal officers in the Executive Branch who execute the laws on the President's behalf, and which has already been severely eroded by recent Supreme Court decisions," Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote in the letter.
Back in February, Trump's Justice Department penned a letter to Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin stating that it was seeking to overturn the landmark case. (Samuel Corum/Bloomberg via Getty Images, left, and MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images, right.)
The Trump administration appealed the orders to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, where a three-judge panel ruled 2-1 in favor of the Trump administration, allowing the firings to proceed.
Wilcox and Harris - now as a consolidated case - filed a motion for an en banc hearing, requesting the appeals court hear the case again with the entire bench present.
In an en banc ruling issued on April 7, the D.C. Circuit voted to block the terminations, reversing the previous appellate holding.
SUPREME COURT RULES ON STATUS OF TENS OF THOUSANDS OF FIRED PROBATIONARY EMPLOYEES
Hampton Dellinger, a Biden-appointee previously tapped to head the Office of Special Counsel, also sued the Trump administration over his own termination. (U.S. Office of Special Counsel/Handout via REUTERS )
The judges voted 7-4 to restore Wilcox and Harris to their posts.
Harris's and Wilcox's cases are just several legal challenges in a grander scheme of cases attempting to clearly define the executive's power.
Hampton Dellinger, a Biden-appointee previously tapped to head the Office of Special Counsel, also sued the Trump administration over his own termination. Dellinger filed suit in D.C. district court after his Feb. 7 firing.
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He had maintained the argument that, by law, he could only be dismissed from his position for job performance problems, which were not cited in an email dismissing him from his post.
Dellinger ultimately dropped his suit against the administration after the D.C. appellate court issued an unsigned order siding with the Trump administration.
Fox News Digital's Breanne Deppisch contributed to this report.
Breanne Deppisch is a national politics reporter for Fox News Digital covering the Trump administration, with a focus on the Justice Department, FBI, and other national news.
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The U.S. Capitol is seen, Tuesday, April 1, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)
NEW YORK (AP) — The House voted Wednesday to overturn a rule that would have limited bank overdraft fees to $5, following the Senate in moving to dismantle the regulation that the Biden administration had estimated would save consumers billions of dollars.
The resolution killing the rule, which passed the House 217-211, will now head to the White House for President Donald Trump's signature. Republicans argued that the “disastrous” regulation issued in the final days of President Joe Biden's term would have forced banks to stop offering overdraft protection altogether and made it harder for Americans to access credit.
“Competition and innovation, not government-mandated price caps, remain the best way to ensure consumers have access to affordable financial products and services,” said Arkansas Rep. French Hill, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.
Currently, the nation's biggest banks take in roughly $8 billion in the charges every year, according to data from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and bank public records. Right now, there is no cap on the overdraft fees that banks can legally charge.
Banks and banking groups had previously sued over the rule, arguing that it would have led to consumers leaning on worse, less-regulated services. Republicans voted to undo the regulation under the Congressional Review Act, a 1996 law that allows Congress to reverse recently adopted rules.
Democrats strongly opposed the effort and said the rule would help consumers who can't afford the fees. California Rep. Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the Financial Services panel, said that Americans are “fed up with these junk fees” and want to get them under control.
The rule, scheduled to go into effect in October, was part of Biden's effort to reduce fees that hit consumers on everyday purchases, including banking services. The CFPB estimated the rule would have saved consumers about $5 billion in annual overdraft fees, or $225 per household that typically experiences the fees. Biden had called the fees, which can be as high as $35 per transaction, “exploitative,” and consumer advocates point out they hit banks' most cash-strapped customers.
The Republican effort to overturn the rule is “shamefully targeting the American people,” said Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.
When a bank temporarily lends a consumer money after their account has reached a zero balance, the consumer is typically responsible for paying back both the overdrawn amount and an additional fee, which can be more than the original amount charged. In one example, a $3 cup of coffee can end up costing someone more than $30.
Overdraft fees originated during a time when consumers wrote and cashed checks more frequently — so that the checks would clear instead of bouncing, if there was an issue of timing — but banks steadily increased the fees in the first two decades of the 2000s. A majority of overdrafts — about 70% — are charged to customers with average account balances between $237 and $439, according to the CFPB.
“The overdraft fee rule close(d) a paper-check era loophole that has allowed big banks to trick people into paying excessive overdraft fees and earn billions in profits from some of their most vulnerable customers,” wrote Chuck Bell, the advocacy program director at Consumer Reports, in a letter to lawmakers. “Overdraft fees have morph(ed) from an occasional, ad hoc courtesy provided to consumers to a line of business.”
Under the finalized rule, banks would have been able to choose from three options: charging a flat overdraft fee of $5, charging a fee that covered their costs and losses, or charging any fee so long as they disclosed the terms of the overdraft loan the way they would for any other loan, typically expressed as an annual percentage rate, or APR.
The finalized rule applied to banks and credit unions with more than $10 billion in assets, which included the nation's largest banks. Banks had previously sued the CFPB over these rules and caps on credit card late fees.
“Without access to overdraft protection, many Americans would be driven to less regulated and higher risk non-bank lenders to cover unexpected or emergency expenses,” said Rob Nichols, American Banking Association president and CEO, in a statement. Nichols said the rule could have led banks to “limit or eliminate overdraft protection as we know it.”
___
The Associated Press receives support from the Charles Schwab Foundation for educational and explanatory reporting to improve financial literacy. The independent foundation is separate from Charles Schwab and Co. Inc. The AP is solely responsible for its journalism.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Afghan refugees take rest at a transit station setup to facilitate Afghan refugees' deportations, outskirt of Chaman, a town on the Pakistan and Afghanistan border, Tuesday, April 8, 2025. (AP Photo)
Afghan refugees take rest at a transit station setup to facilitate their deportations, outskirt of Chaman, a border town on the Pakistan and Afghanistan border, Tuesday, April 8, 2025. (AP Photo)
An Afghan refugee's family arrives at a transit station setup to facilitate Afghan refugees' deportations, outskirt of Chaman, a border town on the Pakistan and Afghanistan border, Thursday, April 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Jafar Khan)
An Afghan refugee's family arrives at a transit station setup to facilitate Afghan refugees' deportations, outskirt of Chaman, a border town on the Pakistan and Afghanistan border, Thursday, April 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Jafar Khan)
A Yemeni inspects the damage reportedly caused by U.S. airstrikes in Sanaa, Yemen, Monday, April 7, 2025. (AP Photo)
A Houthi security officer stands over the debris of a destroyed building reportedly hit by U.S. airstrikes in Sanaa, Yemen, Monday, April 7, 2025. (AP Photo)
A Houthi security officer inspects the debris of a destroyed building reportedly hit by U.S. airstrikes in Sanaa, Yemen, Monday, April 7, 2025. (AP Photo)
People inspect the damage of a building that reportedly was destroyed by U.S. airstrikes in Sanaa, Yemen, Monday, April 7, 2025. (AP Photo)
A man inspects the debris of a destroyed building reportedly hit by U.S. airstrikes in Sanaa, Yemen, Monday, April 7, 2025. (AP Photo)
A Houthi security officer inspects the debris of a destroyed building reportedly hit by U.S. airstrikes in Sanaa, Yemen, Monday, April 7, 2025. (AP Photo)
CAIRO (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has reversed new cutoffs in emergency food aid to several nations but maintained them in Afghanistan and Yemen, two of the world's poorest and most war-ravaged countries, according to the State Department and officials who spoke to The Associated Press.
It marks the latest round of abrupt cancellations of foreign aid contracts run through the U.S. Agency for International Development and equally sudden reversals. The whipsawing moves come as the Republican administration and Trump adviser Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency dismantle USAID and dramatically reduce foreign assistance, asserting that the spending is wasteful and advances liberal causes.
The United States over the weekend sent notices terminating funding for U.N. World Food Program emergency programs in more than a dozen countries. Aid officials warned that the cuts could threaten the lives of millions of refugees and other vulnerable people, stressing the risks of further destabilizing regions ridden by conflicts.
The State Department confirmed Wednesday that it had reversed those cuts in Somalia, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Ecuador. It said it would keep the cancellations for Afghanistan and Yemen but left the fate of food aid in six other unidentified nations unclear.
Even in Syria, Somalia and other crisis areas where it had reinstated support for lifesaving food programs, the U.S. would work with the U.N. to modify its funding “to better align with Administration priorities,” the State Department said by email. It gave no details.
Two USAID officials said Jeremy Lewin, the DOGE associate overseeing the dismantling of the aid agency, ordered the reversal of some of his contract terminations Tuesday, after the AP reported them. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media.
The USAID officials said Lewin sent a note internally expressing regret for the sudden contract terminations and reversals. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others had pledged that the kind of lifesaving aid targeted would be spared.
A United Nations official said the decision to restore funding came after intense behind-the-scenes lobbying of members of Congress by senior U.N. officials.
The State Department on Wednesday defended some of the new funding cuts, including for Yemen and Afghanistan, saying they were based on “credible and longstanding concerns that funding was benefitting terrorist groups including the Houthis and the Taliban.”
At a briefing this week, department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce cited a U.S. government watchdog's 2024 finding that department contractors reported paying at least $10.9 million to Afghanistan's Taliban government in taxes, utility payments and fees.
“Other programs with WFP that were terminated were contrary to an America First agenda and didn't make America stronger, safer, or more prosperous,” the department said Wednesday.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urged the administration to restore funding for other critical programs as well.
“Despite continued assurances that life-saving programs would be protected during the Trump Administration's ‘review' of foreign assistance, DOGE again spent the weekend cutting World Food Program assistance to feed people in crisis,” the New Hampshire senator said.
It will “weaken America's standing around the world,” she added.
Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, called the cuts “a potential extinction-level event” for two generations of progress in limiting the suffering of those caught in crises.
The U.S. had been the largest funder of the WFP, providing $4.5 billion of the $9.8 billion in donations to the world's largest food aid provider last year. Previous administrations had viewed such aid as serving U.S. national security by alleviating conflict, poverty and extremism and curbing migration.
More than half of Afghanistan's population — some 23 million people — need humanitarian assistance. It's a crisis caused by decades of conflict — including the 20-year U.S. war with the Taliban — as well as entrenched poverty and climate shocks.
Last year, the United States provided 43% of all international humanitarian funding to Afghanistan.
The cuts affect about $560 million in humanitarian aid, including for emergency food assistance, treatment of malnourished babies, medical care, safe drinking water and mental health treatment for survivors of sexual and physical violence, according to an assessment by current and former USAID officials and partner organizations. The figure has not been confirmed by the U.S. government.
A separate WFP assessment obtained by the AP showed that food assistance to 2 million people in Afghanistan would be terminated later this year. More than 650,000 malnourished children, mothers and pregnant women would would lose nutritional support.
The United Nations Population Fund said the U.S. had cut $100 million in support for maternal health services for millions of women, as well as gender-based violence services.
The International Rescue Committee, whose programs include nutritional assistance for tens of thousands of children under 5 and counseling services, said the cuts would affect nearly 1 million people.
“Kids who have seen great violence, who benefit from social work and psychosocial care that we provide, will be cut off,” said Bob Kitchen, IRC's head of global emergencies.
The poorest Arab country was plunged into war in 2014 when Iranian-backed Houthi rebels seized much of the North, including the capital, Sanaa. The U.S. supported a Saudi-led coalition that intervened the following year on behalf of the government. The conflict has been at a stalemate in recent years.
The war has led to widespread hunger, and experts warned as recently as 2024 that parts of Yemen were at risk of famine.
The U.S. cuts would end lifesaving food assistance to 2.4 million people and halt nutritional care for 100,000 children, WFP said.
The U.S. is carrying out a campaign of airstrikes against the Houthis in retaliation for their attacks on international shipping linked to the war in the Gaza Strip.
The WFP had already suspended its programs in Houthi-ruled northern Yemen, where the rebels have detained dozens of U.N. staffers and people associated with aid groups, civil society and the now-shuttered U.S. Embassy.
The latest cuts would affect southern Yemen, where the internationally recognized government opposed to the Houthis is based. The WFP warned that halting aid there “carries significant political and security implications and risks deepening the economic crisis and exacerbating instability.”
Last year, the WFP assisted 8.6 million people in Yemen, more than a quarter of its population, including more than 330,000 internally displaced people and 1.2 million with disabilities. Half were women and children.
Also Wednesday, the Trump administration and DOGE notified thousands of local staffers employed by USAID missions overseas that they would lose their jobs by Aug. 15. The group had been one of the last spared from layoffs.
The administration says it will move about 1,000 surviving humanitarian and development programs under the State Department, after ending 5,000 others. The email notices, which were sent Wednesday and reviewed by the AP, invited the newly laid-off workers abroad to apply for State Department jobs.
All but a few hundred of thousands of other USAID staffers have already been fired or been given severance notices effective this summer.
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Butt reported from Islamabad, Knickmeyer from Washington. Associated Press writers Matthew Lee in Washington, Sam Mednick in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Sarah El Deeb in Beirut contributed to this report.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
A stock investor stands in front of the stock price indices at a brokerage house in Hangzhou in eastern China's Zhejiang province, Monday, April 7, 2025. (Chinatopix Via AP)
A person walks past Bank of China U.S.A. New York Branch, Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)
An American flag hangs in a store owned by Kyung Sook Im in the Toy District of Los Angeles, Wednesday, April 9, 2025, where the majority of the merchandise is imported from China. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Cardboard boxes sit on a sidewalk with a small American flag in the Toy District of Los Angeles, Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
People walk past an electronic board displaying Shanghai shares trading index at a brokerage house, in Beijing, Tuesday, April 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The tariff fight between the world's two largest economies spiraled into greater peril Wednesday as President Donald Trump tried to narrow his global trade war into a direct — and risky — faceoff with Beijing.
As Trump reversed his larger “reciprocal” tariffs on most of the world in the face of recession fears, he nonetheless hiked his tariffs on China once again — to 125%. The move locks the strategic rivals into a deepening standoff that endangers both their economies and interests around the world. The stakes are higher than ever, as the U.S. and China are already embroiled in competition on everything from artificial intelligence to monetary policy to overall global influence.
Each nation dares the other to blink first. But the rounds of escalation are raising concerns that the window for diplomacy has narrowed even further, while the economic pain on both economies intensifies.
Behind it all, as usual, geopolitics lurks — the concerns about regional and global security that are always in play when economic relations between two of the world's most powerful nations turn aggressive.
“When you punch the United States of America,” said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, “President Trump is going to punch back harder.”
After Beijing responded to U.S. President Donald Trump's 34% “reciprocal” tax on China with the same 34% rate on American goods, Trump raised the tariff by another 50 percentage points, only to be met by the same tariff hike by Beijing on Wednesday morning. U.S. products going to China are now to be taxed 84%.
Hours later, Trump declared that Chinese imports to the United States would be “immediately” taxed at 125%, citing “lack of respect that China has shown to the World's Markets.”
“At some point, hopefully in the near future, China will realize that the days of ripping off the U.S.A., and other Countries, is no longer sustainable or acceptable,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent insisted this had been Trump's strategy all along and that Beijing has “shown themselves to the world as the bad actors.”
While the financial markets rebounded from their deepest lows at the news that China would be facing the brunt of Trump's wrath, the real-world prospects of the intensifying trade war with China were still set to be significant.
On Wednesday, the U.S.-China Business Council urged the two leaders to “come to the table” and talk. “Targeted tariffs to encourage China to come to the negotiating table are one thing, but these sweeping tit-for-tat tariffs are in no one's interests. They will significantly harm the global, U.S., and Chinese economies as well as American businesses, farmers, and consumers,” the council said.
Trump has left little room to negotiate an off-ramp with China, short of that country capitulating — which would be anathema to Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“Xi will not be forced into a call,” said Sun Yun, director of the China program at the Washington-based think tank Stimson Center. Only once in recent history, she noted, has a Chinese leader phoned the United States without invitation — after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The trade tensions, if unchecked, could spill into other domains, she warned.
Craig Singleton, the senior China fellow at another Washington-based think tank, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, agreed that a phone call from Beijing is “unlikely in this climate.”
“Each side believes time is on its side, which raises the risk that neither moves to de-escalate until real damage is done,” he said. “This is no longer about tariffs alone. It's a test of wills.”
Before Trump's announcement, Bessent called it “unfortunate that the Chinese actually don't want to come and negotiate.”
“And I can tell you that this escalation is a loser for them,” Bessent said on Fox Business Network's “Morning with Maria” on Wednesday. “Their exports to the U.S. are five times our exports to China. So, they can raise their tariffs. But, so what?”
China has its own calculations. Its leadership, overseeing the world's second-largest economy, has vowed not to surrender to U.S. bullying.
While Trump's higher-than-expected tariffs caught other countries by surprise, China says it has been prepared, having learned a lesson from its previous tariff dealings during Trump's first term. In response to Trump's several rounds of tariff raises, Beijing has responded swiftly each time with a package of tariff and non-tariff measures.
“We have been in a trade war with the United States for eight years and have accumulated rich struggle experience,” said an editorial by the ruling party's flagship newspaper People's Daily, dated Monday. The newspaper assured the Chinese public that “the sky will not fall.”
“Facing the impact of U.S. tariff bullying, we possess strong resilience,” the party newspaper said, citing the country's reduced dependence on exports to the U.S. market and new measures to boost domestic consumption.
Since Trump imposed his first round of tariffs on China in 2018, Beijing's leaders have developed a toolkit of tariffs, import curbs, export controls, sanctions, regulatory reviews and measures to limit companies from doing business in China. All are designed to inflict pain on the U.S. economy and businesses in response to any trade move by the U.S. government.
Melanie Hart, senior director of the Global China Hub at the Atlantic Council, said Beijing is now “throwing the entire toolkit against” the United States, blacklisting companies, hitting American farmers and cutting the nation off from critical minerals.
“They have a bunker that they've been building for this moment,” Hart said. “They're in the bunker. And if I'm Xi Jinping, I'm feeling a lot more comfortable than Donald Trump today.”
But People's Daily also made it clear that Beijing remains open to talks. “Faced with volatility and extreme pressure from the United States,” it said, “we have not closed the door to negotiations.”
The country's official Xinhua News Agency, in an editorial, insisted as well that China doesn't want a trade war — but can fight one.
“There are no winners in a trade war,” it said. “But China is not afraid of a trade war.”
___
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Live Updates
• Tariff pause: President Donald Trump announced a 90-day pause on all the “reciprocal” tariffs, with the exception of China, which will see tariffs increased to 125%. The president said he also expects Beijing to reach an agreement. “China wants to make a deal. They just don't know how quite to go about it,” he said.
• Markets soar: US stocks skyrocketed after Trump announced the pause. In a massive turnaround, the S&P 500 posted its best day since October 2008, the Nasdaq posted its best day since January 2001 and its second-best day in its history and the Dow posted its best day in five years.
• CNN town hall: Amid the tariff turmoil, independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders will take questions from voters tonight at a CNN town hall. The lawmaker, a progressive who caucuses with Democrats, has emerged as a leading voice of resistance as many Americans call for a stronger strategy from the Democratic Party to counter Trump.
President Donald Trump took aim today at former federal officials who criticized him during his first term, signing executive orders targeting former Department of Homeland Security official Miles Taylor and former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Chris Krebs.
Taylor rose to prominence after he wrote a 2018 New York Times op-ed and a subsequent book critical of Trump while serving as chief of staff to then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and has drawn Trump's ire, who's insisted he did not remember Taylor during his time in the administration.
Krebs was fired by Trump weeks after the 2020 election after he rejected Trump's claims of widespread voter fraud.
Today's executive orders strip Taylor and Krebs of any existing security clearance they may still hold since leaving office and orders the Justice Department to investigate both former officials in what marks the latest example of Trump targeting political rivals using the force of federal government.
“I think what he did, and he wrote a book, ‘Anonymous, ‘said all sorts of lies, bad things – and I think it's, I think it's like a traitor, like, it's like spying,” Trump said of Taylor. “I think it's a very important case, and I think he's guilty of treason, if you want to know the truth, but we'll find out.”
And he blasted Krebs for his comments on the 2020 election.
“I think he said this is the safest election we've ever had, and yet, every day you read in the papers about more and more fraud that's discovered,” Trump said. “He's the fraud. He's a disgrace. So, we'll find out whether or not it was a safe election, and if it wasn't, he's got a big price to pay, and he's a bad guy.”
CNN has reached out to Taylor and Krebs for comment.
President Donald Trump is willing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping as trade tensions escalate between the two countries.
“Oh sure, he's a friend of mine. I like him,” Trump said this afternoon when asked by a reporter if he would consider talking or meeting with the Chinese leader.“Sure, I'd meet with him,” he said.
Trump announced earlier he was raising tariff rates on China to 125% after Beijing imposed additional retaliatory tariffs on US goods. The US president said during another White House event today that he believed “China wants to make a deal.”
Trump, who was taking questions after signing some executive orders, said Japan, South Korea and other countries “are here and we're trying to see them,” but he didn't elaborate on if he meant officials from those countries are in Washington or if there are meetings being scheduled. Trump did say in recent days that Japan and South Korea were sending people to the US to talk about a deal.
“Everybody wants to make a deal, actually. We want to do what's right for our country, we also want to do what's right for the world,” Trump said.
Some background: Trump was speaking after the close of US markets, which soared after he posted on social media that he authorized a 90-day pause on the “reciprocal” tariffs, with the exception of China.
The day started with President Donald Trump telling everyone to “BE COOL!” Just hours later, the president announced on Truth Social that he is pausing new reciprocal tariffs for 90 days, except on China.
In fact, Trump said tariffs will be increased to 125% from 104% after Beijing announced additional retaliatory tariffs earlier in the day. All other countries that were subjected to reciprocal tariff rates will see rates go back down to the universal 10% rate, he said.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the pause would allow time to negotiate new trade agreements and insisted it was the president's strategy all along.
The about-turn triggered a massive rally on Wall Street. The Dow skyrocketed 2,963 points, or 7.87%. The S&P 500 shot up 9.51%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq soared 12.16%.
Here's what to know to get up to speed:
CNN's Elise Hammond, Aditi Sangal, Betsy Klein, Kevin Liptak, David Goldman, Anna Cooban, Alicia Wallace, John Towfighi, Donald Judd, Morgan Rimmer, Allison Morrow, Matt Egan and Lauren Fox contributed reporting to this post.
CNN's @Omar Jimenez reports on President Donald Trump's decision to take a 90-day pause on all the “reciprocal” tariffs that went into effect at midnight, with the exception of China, which will see tariffs increased to 125%.
President Donald Trump's decision to pause most country-specific tariffs is a near-term positive yet does not remove the cloud of uncertainty hanging over the economy and markets, according Raymond James analyst Ed Mills.
This move is “both unbelievable but also entirely predictable,” Mills wrote in a note to clients Wednesday.
Mills argued the decision by Trump is “an implicit recognition that the current strategy was not fully vetted and unsustainable.”
Although financial markets loudly cheered the decision to pause most country-specific tariffs, risks remain.
Mills said the continued 10% universal tariff, the 125% China tariff, looming sector-specific tariffs and the “elevated uncertainty generated by the reversal will ultimately compound existing uncertainty” for corporations.
The White House is appealing a federal judge's ruling restoring the Associated Press' access to some of President Donald Trump's events, the Oval Office and Air Force One, the Justice Department said in a court filing today.
The preliminary injunction issued yesterday by US District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, said that the president had violated the news organization's First Amendment rights by punishing it for using the phrase “Gulf of Mexico” after he renamed the body of water the “Gulf of America.”
But McFadden delayed his ruling for several days to give the government time to seek an appeal. It's likely that attorneys for the Justice Department will ask the appeals court to put the ruling on hold while the intermediate court reviews McFadden's injunction.
President Donald Trump touted market reaction to the announcement he'd paused most new tariffs for 90 days in a hot-mic moment at the White House today captured by CNN pool.
Trump was greeting lawmakers at a NASCAR event on the White House South Lawn when Republican Sen. John Barrasso approached president, telling him, “You got the markets seeing your brilliance.”
“Yeah, that's up almost 7 (percentage) points, 2,500 points, nobody's ever heard of it. It's gonna be a record,” Trump said in reply.
President Donald Trump said he was watching volatility in the bond market in recent days and appeared to indicate that it was among the factors that led to his decision to institute a 90-day pause on some tariffs.
“I was watching the bond market. The bond market is very tricky. I was watching it. But if you look at it now, it's beautiful. The bond market right now is beautiful. But yeah, I saw last night where people were getting a little queasy,” he said.
CNN reported prior to the president's decision that US Treasury yields had risen in recent days as investors sold off bonds. The benchmark 10-year yield Wednesday morning was 4.4% – up from 3.9% before Trump unveiled his tariffs.
Trump also said he watched JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon on Fox Business Network this morning.
The CEO “made the statement to the effect that something had to be done with the tariffs and trade. … He understood it,” Trump said. “It wasn't sustainable what was happening. Somebody had to pull the trigger. I was willing to pull the trigger.”
During that appearance, Dimon warned that a recession was a “likely outcome” of the escalating trade war resulting from Trump's tariff policies.
“No one's wishing for (a recession) but hopefully if there is one it'll be short,” he said. “I do think fixing these tariff issues and trade issues would be a good thing to do.”
President Donald Trump told CNN's Jeff Zeleny that he decided to institute a 90-day pause on new reciprocal tariffs because he thought “people were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy,” following last week's tariffs announcement.
“What was happening to us on trade, not only with, you know, if you look at it, not only with China, but China was by far the biggest abuser in history, and others also – but somebody had to do it. They had to stop because it was not sustainable,” Trump said on the White House South Lawn.
He touted outreach from other countries hit by tariffs. “They all want to make a deal – somebody had to do what we did, and I did a 90-day pause for the people that didn't retaliate, because they told them, ‘If you retaliate, we double it,'” he said. “And that's what I did with China, because they did retaliate, so we'll see how it all works out. I think it's going to work out amazing.”
Pressed on his about-face on a pause on tariffs, however, Trump told CNN, “You have to have flexibility,” acknowledging his team was monitoring the markets for reaction.
Some context: US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had earlier sought to cast Trump's decision as part of a longstanding master plan to encourage nations to negotiate, and not a haphazard application that shook the global economy.
“This was driven by the president's strategy. He and I had a long talk on Sunday, and this was his strategy all along,” he said. “You might even say he goaded China into a bad position. They responded. They have shown themselves to the world to be bad actors.”
President Donald Trump said he intends to make “fair deals for everybody” after he announced a complete three-month pause on all the “reciprocal” tariffs, with the exception of China.
Earlier today, the US treasury secretary said Trump's decision to pause the tariffs will allow time to negotiate new trade agreements.
“A deal is going to be made with China. That deal is going to be made with every one of them, and they'll be fair deals. I just want fair. They will be fair deals for everybody. But they weren't fair to the United States,” he told reporters outside the White House.
Trump announced he is raising tariff rates on China to 125% after Beijing announced additional retaliatory tariffs against the US earlier today.
Trump claimed “people took advantage of our country” and “ripped us off” for decades, though didn't specify what countries he was talking about.
The US is seeing “tremendous amount of spirit from other countries, including China,” President Donald Trump said this afternoon after announcing a 90-day pause on all the “reciprocal” tariffs, with the exception of China, which will see tariffs increased to 125%.
“China wants to make a deal. They just don't know how quite to go about it. You know, it's one of those things they don't know quite – They're proud people,” he told reporters during an event at the White House.“And President Xi's a proud man. I know him very well, and they don't know quite how to go about it. But they'll figure it out. They're in the process of figuring it out, but they want to make a deal.”
He said that he granted the 90-day pause to countries that didn't retaliate with tariffs.
“I told them, if you retaliate, we're going to double it,” he said. “And that's what I did with China, because they did retaliate. So we'll see how it all works out. I think it's going to work out amazing.”
This post was updated with more of Trump's remarks this afternoon.
The US economy still faces a significant risk of a recession even after President Donald Trump's 90-day pause on country-specific tariffs, Goldman Sachs warns.
In a note to clients this afternoon, Goldman Sachs economists projected the US economy will grow at a very slow pace of just 0.5% in 2025. The Wall Street bank now sees a 45% chance of a recession over the next 12 months.
Before Trump's decision to pause most tariffs, Goldman Sachs warned that a recession was the most likely outcome due to all the new tariffs that kicked in.
In other words, Goldman Sachs is signaling the US economy is not out of the woods, not yet at least.
Hours before issuing his stunning reversal of his reciprocal tariffs, President Donald Trump urged investors to buy, posting on Truth Social, “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!”
He concluded the post with “DJT.” Although those are the president's initials, it was also potentially a nod to Trump Media & Technology Group Corp, which trades under the ticker “DJT.”
At the time, the parent of Truth Social, DJT shares were down nearly 13% this month. After the announcement, shares were up over 20% for Wednesday alone.
President Donald Trump has, at least for now, narrowed his trade war to isolate China, the world's second largest economy after the US.
Trump appears to be ratcheting up pressure in the hopes that President Xi Jinping will blink first. He may be waiting a while, according to Wendong Zhang, an assistant professor of applied economics and policy at Cornell University.
“China has vowed to ‘fight to the end,' and there are risks of even more escalations,” Zhang said in an email. “China has already reduced its reliance on US products, such as soybeans and other agricultural products, since the 2018-19 trade war. But this time around, Chinese leaders have the backing of a more supportive general public to stand up to the US and pivot to domestic consumption.”
Stocks turned sharply higher today in response to President Donald Trump's abrupt shift in tariff policy that had brought global investors to their knees.
But US markets remain far below where they were at the start of Trump's term.
Since January 17, the last trading day before his inauguration, US stocks have shed $10.6 trillion, according to data from S&P Global.
Some $6 trillion of that loss came in just the past week, as investors sold stocks in response to Trump's tariff agenda, which promised to upend global trade and potentially plunge the US and other economies into a recession.
The S&P 500 remains down 5.5% from April 2, the day Trump announced his reciprocal tariffs. However, the market is up 10.8% from its nadir reached on Monday.
GOP senators said there was cheering and clapping and “a lot of smiles” when the 90-day pause on tariffs was announced during their lunch Wednesday, and defended the president's decision to pause the tariffs, despite publicly doubling down on them for days.
Sen. Mike Rounds told reporters, “I think it really lightened up the lunch discussion.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters that tariff policy is a “work in progress, but it sounds like they are getting good results.”
Sen. John Cornyn said he thinks the pause allows people some sense of relief. When asked about the mood in the room when the news was revealed, and whether there was relief, Cornyn replied, “Jubilation was too strong a word but it was positive.”
Sen. Ron Johnson, who has expressed concern about how tariffs will affect his constituents in Wisconsin, said senators in the lunch were “happy” to see markets start going up, and that he felt relieved.
Sen. John Kennedy added that, “Most people were pleased.”
Sen. Kevin Cramer said the news didn't surprise him. “It's on par with how Donald Trump responds to stimulus,” he said. “He doesn't tip his hand unless he wants to.”
Sen. Eric Schmitt, who had forcefully defended the tariffs in previous days, argued that the pause shows that the administration's strategy is working – and is not a sign that they are caving to market pressure. “I think this is a sign that there's an acknowledgement worldwide that America doesn't want to be taken advantage of anymore,” he said.
Separately, Sen. Kevin Cramer separately told CNN that the pause has led to “optimism.”
“There's all kinds of opportunity now that we weren't sure was going to exist 12 hours ago,” he said.
CNN's Annie Grayer and Alison Main contributed reporting to this post.
President Donald Trump's trade adviser Peter Navarro — a longtime advocate of tariffs — insisted the president's move today to pause new reciprocal levies was not a repudiation of his economic vision but rather validation of the negotiating power of tariff threats.
“I'm the default strategy, in a way — if they don't want to cooperate, then they get tariffs, OK, if they cooperate, we talk to them. I mean, it's a beautiful thing,” Navarro told Fox Business in an interview. “If you went behind the scenes and actually sat in on some of these meetings, we got really smart people, each has their own comparative advantage. We all get along. We all have great ideas.”
He said that those concerned about Trump's tariffs are underestimating his ability to make deals with other countries: “All the nervous Nellies on Wall Street who try to undermine us consistently underestimate the power of the president to negotiate.”
He said the goal in upcoming negotiations and discussions with various countries is to “dramatically reduce our trade deficit” and “level the playing field.”
Trump announced a 90-day pause on initial reciprocal tariffs for all countries except for China. For countries wanting to negotiate, Trump said a 10% tariff will be in place across the board.
Navarro previously defended Trump's economic policies and stood behind the president's widespread tariffs.
This post has been updated with more comments from Navarro.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that President Donald Trump's announcement raising tariffs on China to 125% is “about bad actors,” saying the president chose to increase tariffs on Beijing “due to their insistence on escalation.”
“As I've repeatedly said, and President Trump has been saying it for years, China is the most imbalanced economy in the history of the modern world, and they are the biggest source of the US trade problems. And indeed, they are problems for the rest of the world, because what we've seen is that, as the US announced the tariff wall last week, many of those goods have already started flooding into Europe,” Bessent said.
Still, the Treasury secretary insisted the US is not engaged in a “trade war,” despite spiraling uncertainty as China and the US have imposed increasingly steep tariffs on each other.
“I'm not calling it a trade war, but I'm saying that China has escalated, and President Trump responded very courageously to that, and we are going to work on a solution with our trading partners,” Bessent said.
He pointed to ongoing negations with other nations in the region, including Vietnam, Japan, South Korea and India.
And he called the escalating tariffs “an own goal” by China.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sought to cast President Donald Trump's decision to pause new tariffs as part of a longstanding master plan to encourage nations to negotiate, and not a haphazard application that shook the global economy.
“This was driven by the president's strategy. He and I had a long talk on Sunday, and this was his strategy all along,” he said this afternoon. “You might even say he goaded China into a bad position. They responded. They have shown themselves to the world to be bad actors.”
CNN previously reported that Bessent traveled to Mar-a-Lago on Sunday to discuss the tariffs with Trump, encouraging him to focus on an endgame of reaching new deals with a variety of countries.
Bessent said Trump would be “personally involved” in all the discussions as he seeks out concessions.
“No one creates leverage for himself like President Trump,” Bessent said.
President Donald Trump's sudden shift in his tariff regime may have been welcome news to investors, but they might not stave off a recession, according to Joe Brusuelas, the chief economist of consulting firm RSM US.
“My sense here is that the (US) economy is still likely to fall into recession, given the level of simultaneous shocks that its absorbed,” Brusuelas told CNN. “All this does is postpone temporarily what will likely be a series of punitive import taxes put on US trade allies.”
Earlier on Wednesday, RSM US raised its recession odds to 55% from 20%. Brusuelas said the recession is likely to occur this quarter. The increasingly steep tariffs on Chinese imports likely will have repercussions domestically as well, he said.
“Based on anecdotal discussions I've had with clients is that many of them are going to choose just to leave the products at the docks — they don't have the cash reserves to pay the tax,” he said. “So, we're going to see dislocation across the economy driven by an adverse supply shock.”
In addition to the 90-day pause, Trump indicated that the 10% across-the-board tariff would remain in place. Businesses aren't waiting to take action, Brusuelas said, but “are moving to raise price(s) forthrightly.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sought to position President Donald Trump's 90-day pause on some tariffs as a victory and signal of Trump's negotiation prowess, saying the move was the result of overwhelming response from US allies. He dismissed the suggestion that the decision was a reversal.
“No. President Trump created maximum negotiating leverage for himself,” he told reporters Wednesday. “We have just been overwhelmed, overwhelmed by the response from mostly our allies who want to come and negotiate in good faith.”
“We are expecting them to come with their best deal,” he added.
Pressed once more on what led to the pause and whether major market volatility played into the move, Bessent suggested that it was a direct result of the more than 75 countries that have come to the White House to negotiate and a function of the time it will take to cut each deal.
“It is just a processing problem. Each one of these solutions is going to be bespoke. It is going to take some time. And President Trump wants to be personally involved, so that's why we're getting the 90-day pause,” he said.
Bessent praised his boss, saying he personally decided to hold his fire until Wednesday.
“It was the president's decision to wait until today. … No one creates leverage for himself like President Trump,” he said.
US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said he wasn't aware of President Donald Trump's 90-day tariff pause until after it was announced.
Trump's announcement in a post on his Truth Social platform came as Greer was testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee on Trump's aggressive trade agenda.
Throughout the hearing he said the overall US trade is an “emergency” that warrants the massive tariffs the president announced last week, yet Trump himself pressed pause.
Asked by Democratic Rep. Steven Horsford of Nevada if he was clued in on Trump's latest move, Greer said he was “a few minutes ago.”
“It looks like your boss just pulled out the rug from under you and paused the tariffs,” Horsford said.
Greer then said he was aware the policy change was a possibility this morning, but when asked directly if he knew the policy was going into effect, he replied that the administration discusses “all kinds of policies.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed concerns about President Donald Trump's decision to impose widespread tariffs in the first place, telling reporters it is a negotiation tactic, as markets react now to a 90-day pause.
“Many of you in the media clearly missed the art of the deal. You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here,” she said outside the White House alongside Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
The “art of the deal” refers to Trump's book, “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” about his career in business.
Leavitt also criticized worries that the tariffs on allies would push countries closer to China.
“In fact, we've seen the opposite effect. The entire world is calling the United States of America, not China, because they need our markets, they need our consumers, and they need this president in the Oval Office to talk to them,” she said.
The press secretary claimed that more than 75 countries called the US to negotiate. The retaliatory tariffs went into effect just after midnight today.
President Donald Trump's decision to back off worldwide tariffs on every nation except China rewarded countries that chose not to retaliate amid a brewing trade war, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.
He said the pause would allow time to negotiate new trade agreements.
“It took great courage, great courage for him to stay the course until this moment,” Bessent told reporters at the White House moments after Trump announced a 90-day pause on the new reciprocal tariffs.
Bessent said the rate for countries looking to negotiate with the US would come down to 10%, including on Canada and Mexico.
“Every country in the world who wants to come and negotiate, we are willing to hear you,” he said.
He said the administration expected countries to come to the president with their best deal as they look to realign global trade.
US stocks were volatile and skyrocketed higher today after President Donald Trump posted on social media that he authorized a 90-day pause on all the reciprocal tariffs that went into effect at midnight, with the exception of China.
US stocks had a mixed start to the day after China announced significant retaliation and the European Union announced countermeasures against Trump's enormous “reciprocal” tariffs that had gone into effect earlier in the day, upending global trade.
Yet US stocks surged in the afternoon after Trump posted on Truth Social that he authorized the 90-day pause on most reciprocal tariffs.
Here's a snapshot: The Dow skyrocketed more than 2,300 points, or 6.2%. The S&P 500 shot up 7%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq soared 8.5%.
Tech stocks like Apple (AAPL), Nvidia (NVDA), Tesla (TSLA) all surged more than 6%, signaling investors might be bargain shopping while stocks are relatively cheap.
Remember: The S&P 500 had been on the precipice of bear market territory, coming close to a stunningly rapid drop of 20% from the all-time high it hit just seven weeks ago on February 19.
President Donald Trump was joined by his top economic advisers — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — to write his message announcing he was backing off his tariffs for 90 days.
“Scott Bessent and I sat with the President while he wrote one of the most extraordinary Truth posts of his Presidency. The world is ready to work with President Trump to fix global trade, and China has chosen the opposite direction,” Lutnick wrote on social media.
President Donald Trump said he is applying a 90-day pause on new tariffs as his trade war shakes the world economy.
At the same time, he announced he was raising tariff rates on China to 125%, ratcheting up his tit-for-tat with Beijing.
Trump said he has “authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately.”
It was not immediately clear which countries the pause will apply to. CNN is reaching out to the White House for further clarification.
In the same message, Trump said he was raising US tariffs on China as he works to bring Beijing to the negotiating table.
“Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World's Markets, I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125%, effective immediately. At some point, hopefully in the near future, China will realize that the days of ripping off the U.S.A., and other Countries, is no longer sustainable or acceptable,” he wrote.
Barstool founder Dave Portnoy, who voted for President Donald Trump, said he is willing to give the president time for his tariff plan to play out. The media empire owner made comments recently that went viral about his net worth dropping by millions because of stock market volatility since Trump's tariffs were announced.
“I think he believes in what he's doing and trying to basically strong arm China and get better deals for the US. I'm willing to still give him time,” Portnoy told CNN. He said Trump is “doing what he ran on.”
He said he believes the economy remains the top issue for Americans and if there is not improvement in the market by the midterm elections in 2026, voters will make their voices heard.
Still, Portnoy said that right now, Trump “can't show weakness in these negotiations, so you can't just run now that the market is bad because then all of this would have been for nothing. So I'm hoping his art of the deal comes to fruition,” he said.
Portnoy said it's not realistic to try to separate “Main Street” from Wall Street, as some in Trump's Cabinet are trying to argue. The Barstool founder said they are “far more intentangled” because it is easier for more Americans to invest in the stock market.
Still, while he thinks his audience of young men who listen and watch Barstool content is interested in what the market is doing, “I don't think people are bailing ship now. It's way too early now.”
As President Donald Trump's “reciprocal” tariffs on countries took effect today, some Republicans say they're concerned about the impact tariffs will have on their constituents. But, they continue to stand behind the president.
Here's what some are saying today:
• Sen. Shelley Moore Capito from West Virginia said she's concerned about the impact to consumer prices and job losses, but that she's willing to have faith in the president's approach.
“I support the president,” the West Virginia Republican said, adding that she'll “have faith that, in the end, that things are going to be better, and better for the American worker.”
• Sen. John Curtis of Utah said he's worried about anything that increases prices for his constituents as he told CNN that he's learning more about the actual impact in “hearing from a lot of people.”
“You know, the complexity of, of tariffs on prices is deep. We all know that. There's conflicting opinions. We'll see. I'm worried about anything that increases prices,” he said. “Obviously everybody's very sensitive to that right now.”
• Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt is supportive of the president's tariffs policy, arguing that the US is “responding to being treated unfairly.” Asked if he's concerned about the potential rise in costs for Missouri farmers from the US' tariffs placed on China, Schmitt said, “No, what I'm concerned about is that we haven't had a president willing to stand up against China in decades.”
House Republicans on Wednesday moved to kill a Democratic-led effort to force a vote overturning President Donald Trump's sweeping reciprocal tariffs.
Democratic Rep. Gregory Meeks had planned to force a vote as soon as today to end Trump's latest round of tariffs, just hours after they went into effect. But GOP leaders tucked language into an unrelated measure that nixed the powers that Meeks would have used to force that vote.
The full House is expected to approve that language — as part of the separate rule vote on the budget resolution — later today.
Some background: Republicans have previously taken steps to prevent Democrats, namely Meeks, from forcing a vote to end Trump's tariffs by tucking language into a prior spending bill. Democrats thought they found a loophole that would allow them to force a vote, since that language only specified Trump's tariffs from earlier this year.
But the GOP's new language turns off any vote related to the April 2 tariffs. Notably, the language only runs through September 30 of this year — meaning Democrats can attempt to force a vote after that.
Republican senator pushes back: Sen. Rand Paul railed on House Republican efforts, saying, “The House is currently, I think, illegally blocking a law with a rule.”
“I think that is insulting, but it's also, you got to wonder whether or not it's actually lawful for a rule to overturn a law,” continued Paul, arguing that the House is displaying “audacity and arrogance” in blocking votes to roll back tariffs.
CNN's Morgan Rimmer contributed to this report.
The Trump administration imposed sanctions targeting Iran's nuclear program Wednesday, just days before talks between Washington and Tehran are set to begin in Oman.
The latest round of sanctions targets five entities and one individual in Iran accused of supporting its nuclear program.
“The Iranian regime's reckless pursuit of nuclear weapons remains a grave threat to the United States and a menace to regional stability and global security,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement. “Treasury will continue to leverage our tools and authorities to disrupt any attempt by Iran to advance its nuclear program and its broader destabilizing agenda.”
Even as President Donald Trump has sought dialogue with Iran, his administration has continued its maximum pressure campaign of sanctions that was started under his first term.
In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi said the administration's “insistence on resuming the ‘maximum pressure' policy prior to any diplomatic interaction” has increased Iran's mistrust and doubts about the US' “sincerity of intentions.”
US immigration officials will begin screening the social media accounts of immigrants for antisemitism before determining their status, the Department of Homeland Security announced today.
Under the new guidance, US Citizenship and Immigration Services officials will consider content indicating an immigrant “endorsing, espousing, promoting, or supporting antisemitic terrorism, antisemitic terrorist organizations, or other antisemitic activity as a negative factor” while determining their status or whether to grant them a visa.
“This will immediately affect aliens applying for lawful permanent resident status, foreign students and aliens affiliated with educational institutions linked to antisemitic activity,” the agency said in a notice announcing their move.
More context: CNN previously reported the State Department sent a memo ordering all US embassies and consulates to screen the social media activity of certain student visa applicants for evidence of support for terrorist organizations. The expansive directive, which was signed by Rubio, tasks “Fraud Prevention Units” at the State Department with taking screenshots of any social media activity that is relevant to the ineligibility of a visa applicant, and to preserve those records in case the applicant deletes the information.
The announcement comes as the Trump administration has moved to withhold federal funding to colleges and universities that the administration say have insufficiently confronted antisemitism on their campuses.
It also comes as the administration has revoked visas and detained multiple international students attending colleges in the US who have participated in pro-Palestinian protests – including Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil - alleging that they supported terrorist organizations — allegations which several of their lawyers have denied.
CNN's Gloria Pazmino contributed to this alert.
The wife of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported on March 15 to El Salvador, says she wants her husband back home.
“We're very hurt. My kids ask daily, ‘When is dad coming home?'” his wife Jennifer told CNN.
Asked about the accusations by the Trump administration that Abrego Garcia is a known gang member, Jennifer responded, “They're wrong because my husband is not a gang member. He's actually an amazing father. An amazing husband. That's who he truly is.”
She said the last time she spoke to her husband was March 15, when he was about to board the plane to El Salvador.
She said in her last conversation with her husband before he was deported, he told her to “take care of the kids and be strong.”
Jennifer said she has not heard from the Trump administration and that they haven't provided her with updates. Her message to the White House is: “I want him, them to bring him back. I want to know if he's OK. I just want him back with me and the kids. The kids miss him. I miss him.”
Jennifer and Abrego Garcia are parents to three children age 5, 9 and 10.
Despite the Supreme Court temporarily pausing a court-imposed deadline to return Abrego Garcia back to the US, Jennifer says she still trusts the system.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent expressed his vision of negotiating trade deals with US allies, which would pave the way for a unified strategy to address what he called China's unbalanced trade practices during a summit on Wednesday.
“We can probably reach a deal with our allies,” Bessent said during a Q&A session after speaking at the American Bankers Association in Washington.
“They've been strong military allies, though not always perfect economic ones. And then, we can approach China as a group,” Bessent added.
The secretary went on to warn countries choosing to align with China on trade, saying that would be harming themselves.
“But in terms of escalation, unfortunately, the biggest defender in the global trading system is China, and they're the only country who's escalated,” Bessent said, warning that aligning with China “would be cutting your own throat.”
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called on the European Union to review its relationship with China amid the global turmoil sparked by the US tariffs on most countries, according to reports.
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) today informed all its foreign workforce that they will be laid off by mid-August, according to an internal email seen by CNN.
The move comes as the Trump administration moves to fully abolish the independent humanitarian agency and transfer some of its work to the State Department.
Foreign service nationals — non-US citizen employees who work in the US diplomatic missions for USAID — make up more than 40% of the USAID workforce. They are critical to the work, officials say, as they speak the local language, have contacts in the local community, and provide continuity. Unlike diplomats, who transfer to a new country after a few years, foreign service nationals serve at the posts long-term, and some have been employed by the US for decades.
One source noted that the sudden layoffs could violate local labor laws in the countries, so it may trigger more lawsuits or costs.
Some have expressed concern that the layoffs could put foreign service nationals at risk in places where it is dangerous to be affiliated with the US government.
“It's such a waste of talent,” a USAID official said. “And especially insulting for those in dangerous places who stuck it out working with us and are left with nothing, not even a SIV.” An SIV, or special immigrant visa, allows resettlement to the US for people who worked for the US government
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave an optimistic update on President Donald Trump's spending bill today during a speech to the American Bankers Association.
“It's going better, better than expected,” Bessent said.
“I understand why some of these congressmen, some of these senators, they are rabid and like ‘We got to do it now,' but we can't do it all at once, or that will cause a recession,” the secretary added.
Bessent claimed key measures to prevent economic downturn in passing Trump's “big” bill of tax breaks and spending reductions.
“What will keep us from having a recession is making sure that the tax bill doesn't expire, adding back 100% depreciation and then adding some President Trump's agenda.”
Trump took to social media today to encourage the passage of his bill, telling Republicans, “It is more important now, than ever,” to pass the “one big beautiful bill.”
GOP hardliners have yet to fall in line on a critical House vote this week that will allow Congress to finally move ahead on Trump's first big legislative package, as reported by CNN.
Brian Bethune, an economics professor at Boston College, told CNN that, as a result of President Donald Trump's tariffs, the probability of stagflation in the US is “100%.”
While others have stressed this scenario could be averted, it would only happen if Trump abandons his signature trade policy.
The origins of “stagflation”: In 1965, when the British economy was slumping while inflation was simultaneously rising, a Conservative politician declared that the country had “the worst of both worlds.”
Britain had “not just inflation on the one side or stagnation on the other, but both of them together. We have a sort of ‘stagflation,'” Ian Macleod told Parliament.
His portmanteau described the doomsday scenario for central bankers globally — and one that has reared its head in the United States once more following the introduction of Trump's tariffs.
Usually, inflation rises when an economy runs hot and employment is high. Conversely, inflation slows when an economy stagnates or contracts. But when inflation rises even while an economy is weak, you get “stagflation” — the worst of both worlds.
What this means now: Stagflation puts central bankers in a bind: Trying to fix one problem makes the other worse.
If they raise interest rates to tame inflation, this will dampen demand and weaken the economy further. If they cut rates to stimulate demand and economic growth, inflation will risk spiraling.
These are the choices the Federal Reserve may have to make in the weeks and months ahead.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said a recession is “a likely outcome” of an escalating trade war resulting from President Donald Trump's tariff policies.
“Markets aren't always right, but sometimes they are right,” Dimon told Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo in an interview Wednesday.
“I think this time they are right because they're just pricing uncertainty at the macro level, and uncertainty at the micro level, at the actual company level. … If companies start cutting back, then consumer sentiment changes … I think you've already seen business sentiment change a little bit.”
Dimon ultimately struck a note of calm, saying the current situation is “nothing like '08,” referring to the financial crisis, but it is “serious.”
“No one's wishing for [a recession] but hopefully if there is one it'll be short,” he said. “I do think fixing these tariff issues and trade issues would be a good thing to do.”
President Donald Trump imposed the highest tariffs in over a century at midnight ET, threatening a global recession and significantly higher inflation.
But he instructed everyone this morning to “BE COOL!”
“Everything is going to work out well. The USA will be bigger and better than ever before!” he said in a Truth Social post.
The stock market has been completely rocked by Trump's tariffs, which include a 104% increase across all Chinese goods. That prompted steep retaliatory tariffs from several nations on US goods that were announced Wednesday morning.
Meanwhile, in a separate post Wednesday morning, Trump said, “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!”
Vietnam's Deputy Prime Minister Ho Duc Phoc is expected to meet with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, as the Trump administration continues negotiations with several countries regarding the president's tariffs, a person familiar with the meeting told CNN.
Bessent has also been in talks with representatives of Japan and South Korea, in addition to multiple other countries.
Vietnam is among the nations hit with the highest “reciprocal” tariff rates of 46%, which took effect today, according to the new tariff regime the Trump administration unveiled last week.
The tariffs that went into place Saturday and today came with several notable exclusions: Steel, aluminum and autos (three areas already subjected to their tariffs); copper and lumber; plus pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and critical minerals.
Those could be next, President Donald Trump has warned.
• Copper and critical minerals: Copper is a critical cog in the ongoing electrification of America and industries such as defense.
The US imports about 50% of the copper it uses, and demand is only expected to grow, especially as energy-consuming industries such as artificial intelligence and blockchain boom.
• Lumber: Softwood lumber is a critical and preferred ingredient to homebuilding, and 30% of it is imported by the US. Homebuilders warn that tariffs and other charges (including the potential doubling of existing duties on Canadian lumber) on softwood lumber and other materials could further exacerbate the housing affordability crisis.
Higher costs of lumber imports could also affect other products, such as furniture and even toilet paper.
• Pharmaceuticals: Trump said last night that “we're going to be announcing very shortly a major tariff on pharmaceuticals.” Tariffs on drugs could drive up health care costs and hamper the affordability of medication, especially for people without insurance.
Under a 25% tariff, commonly prescribed drugs could increase from 82 cents per pill to 94 cents a pill, or roughly $42 more per year, Diederik Stadig, health care sector economist for ING, wrote in a post last week. More complex prescriptions, such as those for cancer treatment, could jump even higher, he wrote, estimating that a 24-week prescription could see additional costs in the $8,000 to $10,000 range.
Semiconductors: Medical devices, Wi-Fi routers, laptops, smartphones, cars, household appliances and LED lightbulbs are just a few examples of where semiconductor chips are found. And these products often don't just require one or two. For instance, new cars contain thousands of them.
The US exported $143.5 billion worth of goods to China last year, according to the US trade representative.
The top exports, per the United States International Trade Commission were:
With China now slapping an 84% tariff on US goods in retaliation for US President Donald Trump's tariffs, these US exports will be affected starting tomorrow. Some – like soybeans – were already subject to tariffs, albeit at a much lower level.
When China introduced tariffs on soybeans in the past, that hurt American farmers. US exports of soybeans declined sharply immediately after China put tariffs in place in 2018.
CNN's Katie Lobosco contributed reporting to this post.
The European Union has backed its first countermeasures against tariffs imposed by the United States, after member states today approved a proposal made in response to the 25% tariff the US placed on the EU's steel and aluminum exports.
“The EU considers US tariffs unjustified and damaging, causing economic harm to both sides, as well as the global economy. The EU has stated its clear preference to find negotiated outcomes with the US, which would be balanced and mutually beneficial,” the European Commission said in a statement.
It said it would start to collect duties from April 15, stressing that “these countermeasures can be suspended at any time, should the US agree to a fair and balanced negotiated outcome.”
The commission did not immediately provide details about the tariff rate it would impose on certain goods imported from the US.
MrBeast has weighed in on US President Donald Trump's tariff policy: it's bad for his business.
The YouTube and TikTok star, who sells a range of chocolate bars, said in a Tuesday post on X that “ironically because of all the new tariffs it is now way cheaper to make our chocolate bars (that) we sell globally NOT in America.”
He added in a separate post that tariffs could be a “nail in the coffin” for small businesses.
As President Donald Trump's new tariffs take effect, several countries are now opening talks with his representatives on deals they hope could see the duties eased.
Here is a non-comprehensive list of countries that have begun discussions — or have said they are looking to meet soon to start talks:
The US dollar fell Wednesday to its lowest level in six months after US President Donald Trump's punishing new tariffs came into effect.
At 8:50 a.m. ET, the ICE US dollar index, which measures the greenback's strength against a basket of major currencies, was down nearly 0.9% — hitting a fresh six-month low, below the nadir reached last week.
Some context: A weaker dollar is not usually how markets respond to US tariffs, Neil Shearing, group chief economist at consultancy Capital Economics, wrote in a note Wednesday.
Normally, he said, higher US tariffs would boost the dollar by lowering American demand for foreign goods and, so, weakening other currencies.
Factors behind US dollar decline: A possible explanation for the weakness in the dollar is that “tariffs of this size and scope are a clear and present danger to the health of the US economy.”
Another theory in the dollar is that the scale and manner of implementation of the tariffs have “shaken investor faith in the credibility of US policymaking and its institutions,” he said.
“If so, then the dollar is now behaving more like an emerging market currency,” Shearing wrote.
The US economy is experiencing so many shocks at the same time that it will likely plunge into recession this quarter, consulting firm RSM warned today.
The firm raised its 12-month recession odds to 55%, up sharply from 20% previously.
“There are too many simultaneous shocks cascading through this economy: A trade shock, a financial shock and the price shock is coming. This does not look good right now,” RSM chief economist Joe Brusuelas told CNN.
Brusuelas has also said that the freefall in the financial markets over the past several days indicates there's a crisis of confidence brewing in the US dollar.
Additionally, oil prices have plunged as investors fear a global recession could sap demand for travel, transportation and shipping — all of which require fuel.
Read what else economic experts are saying:
• “No one is coming to save the global economy”: The world is entering economic territory it hasn't seen in a century and there are “no good economic models” for guidance, said Josh Lipsky, senior director of the Atlantic Council's GeoEconomics Center.
“No one is coming to save the global economy, it's made by a decision right now by the White House and only a reversal of that decision is what could deescalate things at the moment,” he added.
• “Wrongheaded economics”: The “reciprocal” tariffs that went into effect today are anything but that. The additional levies, some of which shot north of 45%, were calculated by essentially dividing bilateral goods trade deficits by goods trade exports. But trade deficits, by their very nature, aren't necessarily all bad.
“It's very wrongheaded economics; it's quite natural that you will have deficits with some countries and surpluses with others,” economist Marcus Noland, executive vice president and director of studies with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told CNN. “So, trying to implement a policy to generate balanced trade with all countries just flies in the face of any kind of comparative advantage or specialization.”
• “Investors being extremely skittish”: The CBOE volatility index, also known as the “VIX” and Wall Street's “fear gauge,” surged to a level it has only surpassed twice before: During the early stages of the Covid pandemic and the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
“The US and China are now locked into a trade war without either likely to back down at the moment,” Susannah Streeter, head of money and markets at Hargreaves Lansdown told CNN. “What you're seeing in investors being extremely skittish which is why (there are) big fluctuations.”
Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent said it is unfortunate that China does not “want to come and negotiate” a tariff deal, calling China the “worst offenders in the international trading system.”
After President Donald Trump's sweeping increase on tariffs on China to 104%, China slapped an 84% tariff on US goods. Bessent shrugged off China's retaliatory move Wednesday morning on Fox Business.
“They have the most imbalanced economy in the history of the modern world, and I can tell you that this escalation is a loser for them… They're the surplus country,” Bessent said. China's “exports to the US are five times our exports to China. So, they can raise their tariffs. But so what?”
Maintaining that Trump and President Xi Jinping continue to have a “very good personal relationship,” Bessent said that China and the US “can move together” so long as the US tries to “rebalance toward more manufacturing” and China rebalances toward “more consumption.”
Bessent later said that it is now “Main Streets turn” to grow as Wall Street did for decades.
“Wall Street has grown wealthier than ever before, and it can continue to grow and do well. But for the next four years, the Trump agenda is focused on Main Street. It's Main Street's turn,” Bessent said during a speech to the American Bankers Association.
He also said the tariffs that took effect “are a ceiling” and added that he would take a leading role negotiating with other countries.
“I think what a lot of people are missing here is that the levels that were put out last Wednesday are a ceiling,” the treasury secretary told the crowd of bankers, “but if you don't retaliate, that is the ceiling,” he added.
This post has been updated with additional comments from Bessent.
As he moves ahead with his global tariffs plan, President Donald Trump took to social media today to encourage the passage of his bill of tax breaks and spending reductions.
“Republicans, it is more important now, than ever, that we pass THE ONE, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL. The USA will Soar like never before!!!” Trump's wrote on Truth Social.
Trump urged House Republican members to “stop grandstanding” and unite to pass the Senate-passed budget resolution while speaking at at the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) President's Dinner in Washington, DC.
Where things stand on Capitol Hill: Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team made a frantic push yesterday to convince GOP hardliners to fall in line on a critical House vote this week that will allow Congress to finally move ahead on Trump's first big legislative package, as reported by CNN.
CNN had reported that the House Rules Committee has been told it could meet early on Wednesday to tee up the budget resolution, according to two sources familiar with the plans.
Hardliner Rep. Andy Biggs, a Republican from Arizona, made clear this morning that Johnson faces a steep climb to having enough GOP votes to approve the Senate blueprint.
Asked by CNN's Manu Raju how he plans to vote on the blueprint approved last week in the Senate if Johnson puts it on the House floor today, Biggs answered, “Well I haven't even whipped so I'm not going to tell you.”
He called the Senate plan “unserious,” taking aim at the level of spending cuts.
Pressed on if he could get to a yes, Biggs answered: “We continue to talk, continue to work, see what we can find out.”
CNN's Alison Main, Manu Raju and Casey Riddle contributed reporting to this post. This post has been updated with reactions from GOP lawmakers.
China lashed out against President Donald Trump's tariffs, imposing a massive 84% tariff on US goods and saying it wouldn't back down from a trade war.
“The US escalation of tariffs on China is a mistake upon mistake, severely infringing upon China's legitimate rights and interests, and seriously damaging the multilateral trading system based on rules,” China's State Council Tariff Commission said in a statement announcing the fresh levy.
In addition to the tit-for-tat tariffs, China's Commerce Ministry also retaliated against Trump's tariffs by imposing export controls on 12 American companies and added six more US firms to its “unreliable entity list.” Companies on that list are banned from trading or investing in China.
Meanwhile, China also filed a complaint to the World Trade Organization over the latest US tariffs, according to the Commerce Ministry.
President Donald Trump said yesterday the US would announce new tariffs on pharmaceutical imports, without specifying when.
“I think pharmaceuticals are gonna be there,” Trump said while addressing the National Republican Congressional Committee dinner last night.
The president complained about the high costs Americans pay for the same pharmaceuticals that are cheaper in other countries: “It's sometimes 10 times more,” he said.
Trump said: “We're going to do something that we have to do — we're going to tariff our pharmaceuticals, and once we do that, they're going to come rushing back into our country.”
“We're going to be announcing very shortly a major tariff on pharmaceuticals,” he added.
US stock futures tumbled Wednesday after China announced significant retaliation against President Donald Trump's enormous “reciprocal” tariffs that went into effect Wednesday, upending global trade.
Where things stand: China's new tariffs on US goods stand at 84%, matching the additional tariff the Trump administration placed on the world's second-biggest economy. Trump's reciprocal tariffs, America's largest in a century, place massive across-the-board import taxes, some as high as 50%, on dozens of nations. China, an extreme outlier, now faces a US tariff of at least 104%, compounding the new tariffs with ones already in place.
US stock futures tumbled, set to open lower for the fifth straight session. Dow futures fell 500 points, or 1.4%. The S&P 500 was down 1.2%. Meanwhile, Nasdaq futures were trading 1% lower.
China announced retaliatory tariffs of 84% on imports of US goods on Wednesday, further inflaming a trade war between the world's two biggest economies.
China increased its intended levy on US imports by another 50 percentage points from the initial amount that is set to take effect tomorrow, matching the additional charge that US President Donald Trump has already imposed on Chinese goods.
Earlier in the day, China promised to take “resolute and effective measures” to safeguard its rights and interests after Trump's 104% tariffs on Chinese imports took effect on Wednesday.
This post has been updated with more information about China's tariffs.
US stock futures were falling and stocks in Europe and Asia were mostly lower Wednesday after President Donald Trump's enormous “reciprocal” tariffs went into effect, upending global trade.
US futures: Dow futures fell 400 points, or 1%. The S&P 500 was down 0.7%. Meanwhile, Nasdaq futures were trading 0.3% lower.
The S&P 500 is on the precipice of bear market territory, coming close to a stunningly rapid drop of 20% from the all-time high it hit just seven weeks ago on February 19.
Fear has gripped investors across the world as the tariffs threaten to plunge the global and US economies into a recession this year.
More on global markets: Japan's Nikkei index closed 4% down, while Hong Kong's Hang Seng finished marginally higher. On Monday, the Hang Seng tanked in a 13% rout – the biggest daily decline for the index since the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
South Korea's benchmark Kospi index headed into bear market territory on Wednesday, a decline of 20% from a recent peak, after the country announced $1.3 billion in emergency support measures for its auto industry as it seeks to mitigate the blow of the Trump administration's tariffs. The index closed 1.7%, falling about 20% from a peak reached in July 2024.
Markets in Taiwan also fell sharply. But the Shanghai stock market closed more than 1% higher, an outlier in a sea of red Wednesday.
In Europe, the region's benchmark STOXX 600 index was down 3% at 5.57 a.m. ET. France's CAC index was down 2.6% and Germany's DAX 2.8% lower. London's FTSE 100 index was also trading 2.4% lower by the same time.
The massive tariffs announced by US President Donald Trump are just one part of a “breakdown of the major monetary, political, and geopolitical orders,” according to Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of the world's largest hedge fund.
“This sort of breakdown only occurs about once in a lifetime, but they have happened many times in history when similar unsustainable conditions were in place,” Dalio wrote in an essay posted earlier this week on X.
While Trump's tariffs are “justifiably” receiving lots of attention, “very little attention is being paid to the circumstances that caused them and the biggest disruptions that are likely ahead,” he said.
What are those circumstances? Dalio listed five:
Dalio said the interrelationships between these factors are “critically important,” and Trump's tariffs are likely to affect all of them.
The investor said the history of previous crises suggested how policymakers could respond, pointing to “suspending debt service payments to ‘enemy' countries,” introducing capital controls to stop money leaving the country and “imposing special taxes.”
The European Union is expected today to pass the bloc's first countermeasures against US President Donald Trump's tariffs, which seem set to spark a global trade war.
The 27-member bloc has been hit by three sets of US tariffs:
EU retaliation plans: After weeks of consulting with industry, the EU will decide on step one of its retaliation – to the steel and aluminum tariffs announced in March – in a vote Wednesday afternoon local time.
The European Commission – which coordinates trade EU policy – is continuing talks with key business sectors and EU member states to formulate their response to Trump's tariffs on cars and car parts, as well as to the so-called “reciprocal tariffs” announced last week.
Some industries are concerned that the EU's eventual response could backfire. Winemakers in France, Italy and Spain have voiced concern after Trump threatened to slap a 200% tariff on EU wines and spirits if the EU put a 50% tariff on US bourbon.
Ursula von der Leyen, the commission's president, said Monday that the EU is “ready to negotiate” with Trump – and had offered in February to go “zero-for-zero” on tariffs on industrial goods and cars, which the US rejected. But von der Leyen stressed the bloc was also ready to play hardball.
Whereas Trump's tariffs have so far only targeted goods, some in Europe have suggested the bloc could hit US services, which would hurt tech giants like Google.
President Donald Trump just ignited a direct showdown with the one nation that might be able to beat the United States in a trade war.
Trump's escalation against China — which is about to face tariffs of at least 104% on goods entering the US — is the most serious pivot yet in his global tariff onslaught and has the most potential to inflict severe blowback on American citizens in soaring prices.
The confrontation follows years of US attempts to address perceived trade abuses by China. It's also the culmination of a decade or more of worsening relations prompted by an aggressive and nationalistic shift by a Pacific competitor turned hostile superpower that now seems itching to challenge US might.
And it's a dark landmark in a diplomatic relationship that will help define the 21st century and a breakdown for a long US project to prevent tensions erupting into a full-on trade war — or potentially much worse — between two giants.
The US has been trying to manage China's emergence for more than 50 years — since President Richard Nixon's pioneering visit to Chairman Mao Zedong to “open” an isolated and impoverished nation and to drive a wedge between its leaders and their communist brethren in the Soviet Union. It's been nearly a quarter-century since another milestone: when the US ushered China into the World Trade Organization in hopes of promoting democratic change and locking it into a rules-based, Western-oriented economic system.
The ultimate failure of those well-intentioned efforts is being laid bare in Trump's second term.
Read Collinson's full analysis of Trump's tariff war here.
Stocks in Europe and Asia were mostly lower on Wednesday after President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs went into effect, upending global trade.
Fear has gripped investors across the world as the tariffs threaten to plunge the global and US economies into a recession.
This is how major US stock indexes have looked since Trump took office with a pledge to enact the tariffs:
Keep across the latest market updates in our story here.
Supermarkets sell imported items in every section of the store: from fresh and packaged foods to household basics. In the next few weeks, coffee, seafood and fruit will become more expensive with President Donald Trump's tariffs, supermarket executives and food industry experts say.
Trump instituted 10% tariffs across all countries last Saturday and slapped higher reciprocal tariffs on 60 countries and trading blocs today. US businesses shipping goods from overseas will pay for those tariffs, and they will pass some of the higher costs down to consumers.
Shoppers can expect to see prices rise on seafood, coffee, fruit, cheese, nuts, candy bars and other imported foods, according to experts.
Items that contain ingredients and packaging such as plastic and aluminum from other countries will also be hit. Perishable food prices will rise first, followed by shelf-stable goods. Customers may also see smaller-sized products, known as shrinkflation, and find that certain versions of items have been eliminated as companies try to offset their cost hikes from tariffs.
Customers can expect grocery prices to increase “in the next couple of weeks,” said John Ross, the CEO of IGA, a chain of independent grocery stores.
“Shoppers will start seeing it at scale across the store in the next 90 days.”
The US Federal Reserve has an impossible choice on interest rates, says Neil Shearing, group chief economist at Capital Economics: cut them to try and stimulate demand, or keep them high to try and curb inflation caused by high tariffs.
“They're stuck between a rock and a hard place – the rock being President (Donald) Trump and the hard place being inflation,” Shearing told CNN's Rahel Solomon.
Some context: Before his sweeping tariff announcement, Trump had been calling on the Fed to cut interest rates, putting political pressure on the body that is meant to be independent of government. In its last decision in March, the Fed kept rates unchanged in the 4.25% to 4.5% range.
On Monday, as global markets tanked following Trump's tariff announcement last week, Trump called again on the “slow moving Fed” to cut rates. But Shearing stressed that the Fed is not likely to heed his demand.
“Unless the US economy experiences a really substantial downturn – a recession – the Fed's going to be really loath to cut interest rates, because it's worried about the second round effects of inflation through wages, the labor market and then pushing up other prices in the economy,” Shearing said.
The present moment was setting up to be “a good time to cut interest rates,” before Trump “imposed the biggest increase in tariffs this side of the Great Depression… which is going to push up inflation in the US,” he added.
The massive tariffs that President Donald Trump announced for dozens of trading partners last week were pitched as “reciprocal,” aiming to match the tariffs other countries charge the US.
But the methodology behind Trump's attempt to rebalance trade has nothing to do with the tariff rate that foreign countries impose on the US.
The Trump administration instead used a grossly oversimplified calculation that it said factored in a broad set of issues such as Chinese investment, alleged currency manipulation and other countries' regulations. The administration's calculation divided a country's trade deficit with the US by its exports into the country, then divided this percentage by half, in a gesture of “kindness.” That's it.
The president is essentially taking a sledgehammer to address a litany of grievances, using the trade deficit that other countries have with the US as a scapegoat. And the vague calculation could have broad implications for countries the US depends on for goods — and the foreign companies that supply them.
“There does not appear to have been any tariffs used in the calculation of the rate,” said Mike O'Rourke, chief marketing strategist at Jones Trading, in a note to investors Wednesday. “The Trump administration is specifically targeting nations with large trade surpluses with the United States relative to their exports to the United States.”
Read more about Trump's tariff math.
Everyone loses in a trade war — and US consumers are set to be the biggest losers from President Donald Trump's huge tariffs that took effect overnight, according to Neil Shearing, group chief economist at Capital Economics.
“There's no winners from a tariff war in aggregate. Everyone's worse off if we start taxing consumption,” which is what tariffs do in effect, Shearing told CNN.
Asked which groups of people are set to suffer the most from Trump's tariffs, Shearing said US consumers, because they will have to pay more for imports, and Chinese producers, “because it looks like tariffs on China are going to settle at a higher rate than those on other countries.”
Chinese imports to the US now face a 104% tariff, more than doubling the cost of all imported products.
Shearing said he was concerned about the interaction between financial markets, stocks and bonds, and the real economy – the flow of goods and services.
“If global bond markets sell off and equity markets fall, then that tightens what are called financial conditions. Interest rates in the real economy go up, the amount people have to pay on their mortgages go up,” Shearing said.
A collapsing stock market also destroys people's wealth, and the uncertainty will “make businesses think twice about investment,” he added.
Despite rattled financial markets, threats of retaliation, and some of Donald Trump's biggest supporters encouraging him to back off his signature economic policy, the president didn't give in. His administration piled on tariffs at midnight on dozens of allies and adversaries alike, aiming to — as he claims — restore fairness and boost American manufacturing.
Goods from China, by far the biggest target, are now subject to at least a 104% tariff. Tariffs also went into effect on about 60 other countries. Trump has instructed his trade team to make “tailor-made” deals with leaders who want to negotiate.
Here's what you should know:
China has promised to take “resolute and effective measures” to safeguard its rights and interests after US President Donald Trump's 104% tariffs on Chinese imports took effect on Wednesday.
“The United States is still imposing arbitrary tariffs on China and relentlessly applying extreme pressure. China firmly opposes and will never accept such domineering and bullying behavior,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said.
“If the US disregards the interests of both countries and the international community and insists on waging a tariff war and trade war, China will fight to the end.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian
US levies on Chinese imports had been set to increase by 34% on Wednesday as part of Trump's “reciprocal” tariffs package. But the president tacked on another 50% after Beijing didn't back down on its promise to impose 34% retaliatory tariffs on US goods by noon Tuesday. Prior to the latest round of escalation, Trump had already imposed 20% levies on China since his return to the White House.
“The legitimate right to development of the Chinese people cannot be deprived, and China's sovereignty, security, and development interests cannot be infringed upon,” Lin said.
Beijing has not announced immediate retaliatory measures against Trump's latest round of levies. But so far, the message from the Chinese government, state media and opinion leaders alike has been one of defiance – and determination to strike back.
US President Donald Trump has boasted “jobs and factories will come roaring back” as he unleashed unprecedented tariffs around the world last week.
With his sweeping global tariffs now in effect, steep price hikes on products ranging from clothing to electronics could largely be borne by American consumers. A prominent tech analyst has warned that the price of an Apple iPhone could soar to around $3,500 if they were made in the US.
The president and his economic officials have promised that, as a result of the tariffs, numerous manufacturing jobs will eventually be “reshored” to US, employing millions of Americans.
But Dan Ives, global head of technology research at financial services firm Wedbush Securities, told CNN's Erin Burnett that the idea is a “fictional tale.”
US-made iPhones could cost more than three times their current price of around $1,000, he added, because it would be necessary to replicate the highly complex production ecosystem that currently exists in Asia.
“You build that (supply chain) in the US with a fab in West Virginia and New Jersey. They'll be $3,500 iPhones,” he said, referring to fabrication plants, or high-tech manufacturing facilities where computer chips that power electronic devices are normally made.
And even then, it would cost Apple about $30 billion and three years to move just 10% of their supply chain to the US to begin with, Ives told Burnett on Monday.
Some background: The making and assembly of smartphone parts shifted to Asia decades ago, as American companies largely focused on software development and product design, which generate much higher profit margins. That move has helped make Apple one of the world's most valuable companies and cement itself as a dominant smartphone maker.
South Korea has announced $1.3 billion in emergency support measures for its auto industry as it seeks to mitigate the blow of the Trump administration's tariffs.
Unveiling the package on Wednesday, the government cited concerns over “serious threats” that the US tariffs pose to its automotive industry, alluding particularly to small-and-medium firms that manufacture auto parts.
The Trump administration previously announced 25% tariffs on all imported cars and auto parts, including those from its allies, dealing a blow to South Korea's major carmaker Hyundai and its affiliate Kia.
Most South Korean auto parts manufacturers lack the capacity to absorb the shock, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy said. It warned against a “chain reaction” involving reduced exports to the US, increased tariff burdens and blows to production and jobs.
The government also announced that an electric vehicle subsidy program will continue through the end of this year, and that government subsidies will be significantly expanded. It would consider further financial aid to the wider industry, the trade ministry said.
Some context: Last year, South Korea exported $34.7 billion worth of automobiles to the US, which accounted for 49% of its total auto exports. During the same period, the country also exported $8.2 billion of auto parts to the US, according to its trade ministry.
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Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Relatives gathered outside the Dominican Republic's legendary Jet Set club in Santo Domingo on Wednesday as search and rescue teams continued to remove bodies from the rubble.
People anxiously wait outside morgue in the Dominican republic after roof collapses (AP video/Martin Adames)
Drone shots show the extent of the destruction from a roof collapse at an iconic nightclub in the Dominican capital which has killed at least 124 people and injured hundreds more. Politicians, athletes and a fashion designer were among those at the Jet Set club in Santo Domingo when disaster struck early Tuesday.
A woman touches a photo of one of the missing during the search for survivors at the Jet Set nightclub after its roof collapsed two nights prior during a merengue concert in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Ricardo Hernandez)
Rescue workers search for survivors at the Jet Set nightclub after its roof collapsed two nights before during a merengue concert in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Ricardo Hernandez)
Soldiers arrive to the area where rescue workers search for survivors at the Jet Set nightclub after its roof collapsed two nights prior during a merengue concert in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Ricardo Hernandez)
Women cry during the search for survivors at the Jet Set nightclub after its roof collapsed two nights prior during a merengue concert in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Ricardo Hernandez)
Rescue workers search for survivors at the Jet Set nightclub after its roof collapsed during a merengue concert in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Tuesday, April 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Eddy Vittini)
A rescue worker comforts a woman during the search for survivors at the Jet Set nightclub after its roof collapsed two nights prior during a merengue concert in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Ricardo Hernandez)
A rescue worker rests as others continue the search for survivors at the Jet Set nightclub after its roof collapsed two nights prior during a merengue concert in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Ricardo Hernandez)
Rescue workers use sheets as they recover bodies from the rubble at the Jet Set nightclub after its roof collapsed two nights prior during a merengue concert in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Ricardo Hernandez)
Relatives wait as rescue workers search for survivors at the Jet Set nightclub after its roof collapsed two nights prior during a merengue concert in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, early Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Ricardo Hernandez)
Rescue workers cut a wall while searching for survivors at the Jet Set nightclub after its roof collapsed two days prior during a merengue concert in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Ricardo Hernandez)
Rescue workers search for survivors at the Jet Set nightclub after its roof collapsed two nights prior during a merengue concert in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Ricardo Hernandez)
Lee esta historia en español
SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (AP) — A crowd of people grew increasingly agitated Wednesday as they waited at the Dominican Republic's forensic institute for news of their loved ones still missing a day after a roof collapsed at an iconic nightclub, killing at least 124 people and injuring hundreds more.
National Institute of Forensic Pathology officials read the names of 54 victims they have identified so far.
“We cannot wait until nighttime!” said one woman who was waiting for news of a relative whose name she did not hear. “We're going to go crazy!”
Officials called for calm, saying they have already delivered 28 bodies to their families but do not yet have a tally of all the bodies recovered. Officials said more than 250 people were hurt.
“The authorities are selling us false dreams!” cried out José Sánchez, whose brother and brother-in-law were still missing.
Rescue workers search for survivors at the Jet Set nightclub after its roof collapsed during a merengue concert in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Tuesday, April 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Eddy Vittini)
The legendary Jet Set club in Santo Domingo was packed with musicians, professional athletes and government officials when dust began falling from the ceiling and into people's drinks early Tuesday.
Minutes later, the entire roof collapsed. Concrete slabs killed some instantly and trapped dozens of others on a dancefloor where hundreds had been dancing to a lively merengue concert. In the minutes that followed, the country's 911 system received more than 100 calls, many from people buried under rubble
The victims include merengue icon Rubby Pérez, who had been singing to the crowd before disaster struck. His body was found early Wednesday, said emergency operations director Juan Manuel Méndez.
Rescue crews are still searching for survivors more than 24 hours after the collapse. Officials said Wednesday they have rescued 145 survivors from the wreckage of the nightclub.
“As long as they report that there is a missing person, we will be here,” Méndez said.
Rescue crews from Puerto Rico and Israel arrived Wednesday to help with the search. Officials said crews used sonar to detect what could be one person still breathing under the rubble.
Santo Domingo Mayor Carolina Mejía praised what she said were acts of love, including one Dominican who was handing out coffee to those at the scene and a man on vacation from Costa Rica who joined the search because he's part of a rescue crew back home.
A woman touches a photo of one of the missing during the search for survivors at the Jet Set nightclub after its roof collapsed two nights prior during a merengue concert in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Ricardo Hernandez)
So far, only a few dozen people have been identified in one of the worst disasters to hit the Dominican Republic. Local media reported that those who died include a cardiologist, a government architect, a retired police officer and the brother of the vice minister of the Ministry of Youth.
Also killed was MLB pitcher Octavio Dotel and Dominican player Tony Enrique Blanco Cabrera, Satosky Terrero, spokesperson for the country's Professional Baseball League, told The Associated Press.
MLB Hall of Famer Pedro Martínez said he shares the pain of victims' relatives because some of his family members also are missing.
“I hope our relatives appear,” Martínez said.
Nelsy Cruz, the governor of the northwestern province of Montecristi and sister of seven-time Major League Baseball All-Star Nelson Cruz, alerted President Luis Abinader about the disaster. She called him from underneath the rubble but later died at a hospital.
People hold up photos of their relatives while waiting to identify them at the National Institute of Forensic Pathology after the roof collapsed at Jet Set nightclub during a merengue concert in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Tuesday, April 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Ricardo Hernandez)
Other victims include saxophonist Luis Solís, who was playing onstage when the roof fell; New York-based fashion designer Martín Polanco; several Venezuelan bartenders; and an Army captain who left behind four young girls. Grupo Popular, a financial services company, said three of its employees also died, including the president of AFP Popular Bank and his wife.
Countless more remain unidentified.
“I have been to many hospitals, and I have not found her,” Deysi Suriel said of her friend, 61-year-old Milca Curiel, a North Carolina resident who was on vacation in the Dominican Republic.
More than 20 of the injured remained hospitalized Wednesday, including at least eight in critical condition.
“A point in their favor is that they're young,” said Dr. Julio Landrón, director general of the Dr. Ney Arias Lora Trauma Hospital, which has 21 of the Jet Set injured, including five in critical condition.
Landrón warned, however, that none of them are in the clear, noting some suffered fractures in the skull, femur and pelvis.
“They spent hours, more than six, seven, eight hours under rubble with multiple fractures, multiple injuries, with bleeding related to being crushed,” he said.
Rescue workers search for survivors at the Jet Set nightclub after its roof collapsed two nights before during a merengue concert in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Ricardo Hernandez)
Dozens of frantic relatives listened to officials read aloud a list of the identified victims at the forensics institute, while others went from hospital to hospital looking for their loved ones, some clutching photographs.
“Francisco Alberto Méndez ... Rosa Herminia Pérez ... Ramón Teodoro Jiménez ... Juan Manuel Santana,” one official read as the crowd strained to listen.
“Here! Here!” yelled one person upon hearing the name of their loved one.
In the crowd was Virginia Rosario, who was looking for relatives including her cousin, who is still missing, and her sister, Rosa Herminia Pérez, who died and whom she described as “beautiful, precious, very nice.”
“I'm in a lot of pain,” she said. “I have had many moments of despair.”
Officials said they have not been able to identify at least 33 bodies.
“This is a very traumatic situation,” said national lawmaker Pedro Martínez, who also has relatives missing.
Women cry during the search for survivors at the Jet Set nightclub after its roof collapsed two nights prior during a merengue concert in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Ricardo Hernandez)
Among those searching for friends and family was Kimberly Jones, whose godson, 45-year-old artist Osiris Blanc, and his friends were missing.
“It was their favorite place, they went there almost every Monday,” Jones said. She said her niece also was missing.
It wasn't immediately clear what caused the roof to collapse, or when the Jet Set building was last inspected.
The club issued a statement saying it was cooperating with authorities. A spokesperson for the family that owns the club told The Associated Press that she passed along questions about potential inspections.
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Public Works referred questions to the mayor's office. A spokesperson for the mayor's office did not respond to a request for comment.
A rescue worker rests as others continue the search for survivors at the Jet Set nightclub after its roof collapsed two nights prior during a merengue concert in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Ricardo Hernandez)
Coto reported from San Juan, Puerto Rico.
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Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, joins 'The Faulkner Focus' to react to the Supreme Court's decision upholding the Trump administration's use of the Alien Enemies Act to carry out mass deportation flights.
Two federal judges in Texas and New York on Wednesday temporarily blocked the Trump administration's use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan nationals — the latest in a high-profile legal saga centered on the administration's use of a wartime immigration law to immediately deport certain migrants.
Plaintiffs filed two separate lawsuits asking federal judges in Brownville, Texas, and Orange County, New York, to grant a temporary restraining order blocking their removals under the 1798 wartime immigration law that was reviewed by the Supreme Court just days earlier.
U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr., in Brownsville, Texas, granted a temporary restraining order filed on behalf of three Venezuelan nationals. The order temporarily blocks their removal under the AEA, as well as the removal of "any other person that Respondents claim are subject to removal under the Proclamation" from the district's El Valle Detention Center, according to the text of his ruling.
Rodriguez, a Trump appointee, sided with plaintiffs' contention that allowing the law to be used for their deportations would likely cause "immediate and irreparable injury to the removed individuals," whom he said would likely be "unable to seek habeas relief."
JUDGE BOASBERG POISED TO HOLD TRUMP ADMIN IN CONTEMPT, TAKES DOWN NAMES OF DHS OFFICIALS: 'PRETTY SKETCHY'
Prison officers stand guard a cell block at maximum security penitentiary CECOT (Center for the Compulsory Housing of Terrorism) on Apr. 4, 2025 in Tecoluca, San Vicente, El Salvador. (Alex Peña/Getty Images)
In addition, he said, the "substantial likelihood exists that the individual could not be returned to the United States" if deported.
Rodriguez said he will hear from both parties in court again Friday to continue extending the 14-day emergency order.
In the New York case filed in Manhattan federal court, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein — a Clinton appointee — sided with two Venezuelan nationals whose attorneys argued they likely wouldn't have time to seek the habeas relief granted by the Supreme Court in its emergency ruling.
Venezuelan migrants walk following their arrival on a flight after being deported from the United States, in Caracas, Venezuela, March 24, 2025. (REUTERS/Leonardo Fernandez Viloria)
Both clients, "and others similarly situated to them," are now "all at imminent risk of removal" by the Trump administration without proper notice, lawyers said in the filing.
Hellerstein's ruling, unlike that of the federal judge in Texas, stopped short of directly addressing whether the Alien Enemies Act is an appropriate legal basis for deporting the two individuals, though it temporarily blocks the law from being used to remove them.
The updates follow a 5–4 Supreme Court ruling on Monday that lifted a lower court's restraining order, allowing the Trump administration to temporarily resume use of the Alien Enemies Act — albeit with new due process protections for migrants.
JUDGE BLOCKS TRUMP ADMIN FROM FIRING FEDERAL PROBATIONARY WORKERS
President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The high court said individuals slated for deportation must have the opportunity to challenge their removal, with sufficient time to do so in a U.S. court.
But the proceedings must take place in the federal jurisdictions where detainees are held — raising concerns among immigration advocates, who note that these cases are often difficult to bring individually and typically occur in court districts where most migrants are detained.
"Whether or not you're a gang member, the Alien Enemies Act cannot be used under these circumstances," lawyers for the ACLU said in an earlier court filing, noting that the Alien Enemies Act "is a military authority."
"It is not supposed to be used in peacetime against a gang," they said.
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In granting the temporary restraining order, Rodriguez, the Trump appointee, agreed with the plaintiffs' argument that "maintaining the status quo is required to afford the parties the ability to develop a fuller record for the Court to consider the request for a preliminary injunction and other forms of relief," and to "prevent the immediate and irreparable injury that may occur with the immediate removal of any Venezuelan alien subject to the Proclamation."
"Furthermore, if the United States erroneously removed an individual to another country based on the Proclamation, a substantial likelihood exists that the individual could not be returned to the United States," he said.
Lawyers for the Trump administration had urged the court to vacate the lower court ruling, arguing in a Supreme Court filing that the lower court orders "rebuffed" their immigration agenda, including their ability "to protect the Nation against foreign terrorist organizations and risk debilitating effects for delicate foreign negotiations."
Breanne Deppisch is a national politics reporter for Fox News Digital covering the Trump administration, with a focus on the Justice Department, FBI, and other national news.
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Harvey Weinstein appears in State Supreme Court for a hearing in his sexual assault case on Wednesday, April 9, 2025 in New York. (Curtis Means/Pool Photo via AP)
Harvey Weinstein appears in State Supreme Court for a hearing in his sexual assault case on Wednesday, April 9, 2025 in New York. (Jefferson Siegel /The New York Times via AP, Pool)
Harvey Weinstein appears in State Supreme Court for a hearing in his sexual assault case on Wednesday, April 9, 2025 in New York. (Jefferson Siegel /The New York Times via AP, Pool)
Harvey Weinstein appears in State Supreme Court for a hearing in his sexual assault case on Wednesday, April 9, 2025 in New York. (Jefferson Siegel /The New York Times via AP, Pool)
Harvey Weinstein appears in State Supreme Court for a hearing in his sexual assault case on Wednesday, April 9, 2025 in New York. (Curtis Means/Pool Photo via AP)
Harvey Weinstein appears in State Supreme Court for a hearing in his sexual assault case on Wednesday, April 9, 2025 in New York. (Curtis Means/Pool Photo via AP)
Harvey Weinstein appears in State Supreme Court for a hearing in his sexual assault case on Wednesday, April 9, 2025 in New York. (Curtis Means/Pool Photo via AP)
Harvey Weinstein appears in State Supreme Court for a hearing in his sexual assault case on Wednesday, April 9, 2025 in New York. (Curtis Means/Pool Photo via AP)
Harvey Weinstein appears in State Supreme Court for a hearing in his sexual assault case on Wednesday, April 9, 2025 in New York. (Jefferson Siegel /The New York Times via AP, Pool)
Harvey Weinstein appears in State Supreme Court for a hearing in his sexual assault case on Wednesday, April 9, 2025 in New York. (Jefferson Siegel /The New York Times via AP, Pool)
NEW YORK (AP) — A woman who says Harvey Weinstein trapped her in a Manhattan hotel room and raped her in 2013 can use the word “force” when she testifies at his retrial even though the disgraced movie mogul was acquitted of using physical force against her, a judge ruled Wednesday.
Judge Curtis Farber reversed his earlier decision to forbid Jessica Mann from telling jurors that Weinstein used force against her, explaining that after a review of case law he decided it would be unreasonable to put limits on how the former aspiring actor describes what she says happened.
Mann is one of three accusers whose allegations form the basis of the charges in Weinstein's trial. Nearly a year ago, New York's highest court overturned his 2020 convictions. Jury selection is set to begin next Tuesday.
Weinstein may appeal Farber's ruling, his lawyer, Arthur Aidala, said Wednesday.
Jurors acquitted Weinstein of first-degree rape in Mann's case, a charge that requires proof of “forcible compulsion,” but convicted him of third-degree rape, which involves a lack of consent. The conviction was overturned, but the acquittal still stands.
“It does fly in the face of common sense that the first trial was all about force and he was found not guilty of force,” Aidala told reporters during a break in a pretrial hearing. “So now, why are they allowed to relitigate that?”
Weinstein has denied that he raped or sexually assaulted anyone.
Weinstein's lawyers argued that letting Mann testify that he used physical force against her at a Manhattan hotel would open the door to telling jurors about his first-degree rape acquittal.
But Farber said that isn't necessarily the case. He said Weinstein's lawyers are free to challenge Mann's version of events on cross examination and he suggested that they could add a jury instruction to clear up any confusion.
The Manhattan district attorney's office has wanted to prevent jurors from hearing any mention of Weinstein's acquittals and vacated conviction.
Weinstein, 73, is being retried on a sex crime charge as well as third-degree rape. Authorities said he forcibly performed oral sex on a TV and film production assistant in 2006, and raped Mann in 2013.
Weinstein is also being tried on an additional charge based on a woman whose rape allegation was added to the case last year. That charge, filed last September, alleges he forced oral sex her at a Manhattan hotel in 2006.
At Weinstein's 2020 trial, Mann alleged the studio boss trapped her in a New York hotel room in March 2013, angrily ordered her to undress as he loomed over her, and then raped her. She alleges Weinstein raped her again eight months later at a Beverly Hills hotel, where she worked as a hairdresser.
“I want the jury to know that he is my rapist,” she told jurors in 2020.
The trial's April 15 start time was thrown into doubt Wednesday as Weinstein's lawyers and prosecutors wrangled over notes that an assistant district attorney on the case took during a 2020 interview with the accuser who was not part of the first case.
Weinstein's lawyers said they may seek to call the notetaking assistant district attorney as a witness, disqualifying her from working on the case, as they seek to undermine the accuser's credibility. The defense contends the woman's grand jury testimony last year about Weinstein using physical force on her was inconsistent with what she said in the 2020 interview.
Prosecutors said they would seek to delay the trial by 60 days if they can't reach an agreement with Weinstein's lawyers on the note dispute.
The accusations against Weinstein helped catalyze the #MeToo movement, when many women came forward with sexual harassment allegations involving men in power.
In vacating Weinstein's conviction, the state Court of Appeals ruled that the trial judge, James M. Burke, unfairly allowed testimony against him based on allegations from other women that were not part of the case. Burke is no longer on the bench and such testimony won't be part of the retrial.
Weinstein was convicted in Los Angeles in 2022 of another rape. His 16-year prison sentence in that case still stands, but his lawyers appealed in June, arguing he did not get a fair trial.
Farber ruled Wednesday that if Weinstein were to testify at his retrial, prosecutors can ask him if he has a felony conviction in California, but not the nature of the crimes or underlying facts.
The Associated Press does not generally identify people alleging sexual assault unless they consent to be named, as Mann has done.
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Fox News senior White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich has the latest on tariff negotiations on 'America Reports.'
Americans' concerns over the economy, and specifically inflation and tariffs, appear to be partially fueling the downward trend of President Donald Trump's approval ratings in a new national poll.
Trump stands at 41% approval and 53% disapproval in a Quinnipiac University survey conducted April 3-7 and released on Wednesday.
The president stood at 46%-43% approval/disapproval in a Quinnipiac poll conducted during his first week back in the White House, in late January. And Trump was slightly underwater at 45%-49% in mid-February. But the president's approval ratings are basically unchanged from Quinnipiac's previous survey, which was in the field early last month.
POLL POSITION: WHERE TRUMP STANDS WITH AMERICANS 11 WEEKS INTO HIS SECOND ADMINISTRATION
President Donald Trump delivers remarks on reciprocal tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House on April 2, 2025. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
Most, but not all, of the most recent national public opinion surveys indicate Trump's approval ratings in negative territory, which is a slide from the president's poll position when he started his second tour of duty in the White House.
According to the new Quinnipiac poll, Trump stands at 40% approval and 55% disapproval on his handling of the economy. And asked how the president is dealing with the issue of trade, only 39% of respondents said they approved, while 55% gave Trump a thumbs down.
WHERE TRUMP STANDS IN THE LATEST FOX NEWS NATIONAL POLL
In the wake of Trump's blockbuster announcement last week to impose tariffs on dozens of countries across the globe, nearly three-quarters thought the tariffs would hurt the U.S. economy in the short term, while just over half said the move by the president would also hurt the nation's economy in the long term as well.
President Donald Trump talks to members of the press aboard Air Force One during a flight to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, on April 6, 2025. (Reuters/Kent Nishimura )
"A large majority of voters acknowledge the tariffs are delivering a bruising body blow to the economy in the near term. Will time reduce the pain? Some think it will, but a majority don't envision that happening," Quinnipiac University polling analyst Tim Malloy emphasized.
WHY TRUMP, MUSK, FACE BLAME OVER BALLOT BOX SET BACKS LAST WEEK
Given a list of four economic issues and asked which one worries voters the most right now, 47% of those questioned in the poll said the price of food and consumer goods, with one-in-five saying the cost of housing or rent, 17% saying the stock market, and 6% pointing to their job situation.
"In a rare moment of political unanimity, Democrats, Republicans and independents in equal numbers worry most about the prices of what they eat and what they buy," Malloy noted.
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According to the poll, voters were divided over which party they think cares more about the needs and problems of people like them.
A third of respondents said the Democratic Party, with an equal amount (33%) saying the Republican Party. Thirty-one percent answered that neither party cared more.
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In retreating from a vast front of global tariff war, President Donald Trump escalated a showdown with the one nation that might be able to beat the United States in a trade duel.
Trump on Wednesday suddenly announced a 90-day pause in all the “reciprocal” tariffs that he rolled out with massive fanfare last week. But he excluded China, pushing up its tariff from 104% to 125% in the latest phase of a tit-for-tat struggle that has pitched the world's two superpowers into a bitter standoff.
The president's decision to back off from reciprocal tariffs came after days of stock market losses and amid mounting warnings that he was about to tip the US economy into a disastrous recession.
His doubling down on China may have been an attempt to save face as he reversed his previous policy, but it will sharpen fears that trade between the world's two largest economies will grind to a halt, severely hurting both sides and sending negative reverberations across the globe.
The White House tried to spin an embarrassing retreat into a great victory, explaining that the reciprocal tariffs were paused because of a rush of countries wanting to do deals with Washington. It said China was punished because it responded to Trump's trade warfare with its own tariffs.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described the singling out of Beijing as an attempt to take on “bad actors” and said it was “due to their insistence on escalation.”
Almost everyone in Washington agrees the trading relationship with China is unbalanced and that a firm US stance is needed to respond to Beijing's perceived violations. But Trump's haphazard leadership seems unlikely to have the desired effect, since his every dare is met by a riposte from President Xi Jinping — who has as much credibility invested in the showdown as the US president.
The confrontation follows years of US attempts to address perceived trade abuses by China. It's also the culmination of a decade or more of worsening relations prompted by an aggressive and nationalistic shift by a Pacific competitor turned hostile superpower that now seems itching to challenge US might.
And it's a dark landmark in a diplomatic relationship that will help define the 21st century and a breakdown for a long US project to prevent tensions erupting into a full-on trade war — or potentially much worse — between two giants. On Wednesday, China responded by unveiling retaliatory tariffs of 84% on imports of US goods. Global policymakers and investors will be watching for its response to Trump's latest provocation on Thursday morning, Beijing time.
The US has been trying to manage China's emergence for more than 50 years — since President Richard Nixon's pioneering visit to Chairman Mao Zedong to “open” an isolated and impoverished nation and to drive a wedge between its leaders and their communist brethren in the Soviet Union. It's been nearly a quarter-century since another milestone: when the US ushered China into the World Trade Organization in hopes of promoting democratic change and locking it into a rules-based, Western-oriented economic system.
The ultimate failure of those well-intentioned efforts is being laid bare in Trump's second term. The president rose to power on a populist wave that was partly a reaction to globalization that exported US industrial jobs to China and left blight in its wake.
Trump claims that scores of nations are eager to make trade deals to defray painful US tariffs.
But China isn't joining their ranks.
Beijing rebuffed Trump's warning not to retaliate against an earlier 34% tariff on top of a first round of duties — warning that it was ready to fight to “the end.” The US leader, caught up in a fast-spiraling clash with President Xi Jinping, then had to preserve his credibility by making good on his threat to impose a gargantuan import tax from goods from the world's second-largest economy on Wednesday.
“Countries like China who have chosen to retaliate and try to double down on their mistreatment of American workers are making a mistake,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday. “President Trump has a spine of steel, and he will not break, and America will not break under his leadership.”
The vast stock of personal and political capital Trump has now invested in the faceoff with Xi makes this the most serious lurch of a volatile week since the US president announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs in the White House Rose Garden.
China is showing every sign that it thinks it can outlast Trump in their clash, for which it has been preparing for years. And it's not clear Trump and his top officials are fully prepared for the extent of China's resilience or the pain it can impose on American consumers.
If the US president assumed that what he almost daily hails as his “great relationship” with Xi would yield a quick Chinese climbdown, he's wrong. The prospect of a trade agreement with Beijing similar to the one in the first Trump term, which largely fell apart during the pandemic, seems distant.
Trump's claims that the US has been “raped” and “pillaged” by trade partners are hyperbolic. But his grievances about Beijing's behavior have been shared by multiple presidents. Tensions often flare over import dumping, market access for US firms, intellectual property theft, currency manipulation and industrial espionage. Previous White Houses pursued targeted enforcement and other penalties to try to reshape China's behavior. Years of acrimony in the relationship have fueled the shared bipartisan doctrine in Washington that Beijing is the preeminent military and economic threat to US power.
But Trump's aggression is unparalleled. He believes he has a unique and perhaps final opportunity to transform the US dynamic with what the US Trade Representative's office describes as the world's largest trading nation. “We have one shot at this,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday.
But his method is impulsive and indiscriminate; it lacks a clear strategy.
It also shows little respect for Chinese dignity and power — a recurring theme in the administration's dealings with other countries.
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Congress gave presidents power over tariffs. They could aways take it back
Vice President JD Vance, for instance, last week mocked China in criticizing past US trading policy. “We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture,” he said. “That is not a recipe for economic prosperity. It's not a recipe for low prices, and it's not a recipe for good jobs in the United States of America,” Vance told “Fox & Friends.”
The vice president's contemptuous remarks ignored the transformation in China's economy. It is now a global leader in innovation on artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, energy production and in many other areas. Beijing on Tuesday condemned Vance's words as “astonishing,” “lamentable,” “ignorant” and “disrespectful.”
There are high-stakes political, global, economic reasons why Xi can't bend.
The ruthless Chinese leader presents himself as a historic catalyst of Chinese civilization's rightful return to power and prestige. A capitulation to a tough-talking American president would therefore be unthinkable. Showing weakness to the United States would also undercut China's own power and would be seen as a loss of face — especially within Asia.
China's rhetoric, meanwhile, is peppered with assumptions that the US is trying to devastate its economy and political system. Liu Pengyu, spokesman for China's embassy in Washington, for instance, condemned US tariffs on Tuesday as “abuse” and as an infringement of China's “legitimate rights.”
In Beijing, as in Washington, hubris is stoking the antagonism.
China's official media bristles with certainty that America is an empire in decline. Far from being a show of strength, Trump's second presidency and the political chaos he incites are seen as symptoms of weakness.
Trump's histrionics and attacks on US allies, including in Southeast Asia, also play into China's argument that the United States is not a reliable partner, and that China's brand of capitalism twinned with political control is a better model.
China's confidence ahead of what could be a dragged-out trade battle with the United States is also rooted in Xi's reorientation and modernizing of the Chinese economy.
“I think if you are Xi Jinping right now, you're thinking, ‘Well, hey, on the metrics that I care about — technological resilience and self-reliance, we are doing ok, these tariffs may not immediately impact us,” said Lily McElwee, adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Xi may also believe that beyond China's core strength, it has “retaliatory tools that (it) can impose that will be costly to the United States as well,” said McElwee, who is also president and CEO of the Phoenix Committee on Foreign Relations.
As a real authoritarian leader, Xi, unlike Trump, has no worries about the impact of a trade war on looming elections — such as the congressional midterms next year. And while public opinion is still important in China, Xi may reason he can afford to inflict more pain on the Chinese than Trump can on Americans.
If US inflation soars and sets off a recession, it may be the Americans who sue for trade peace on conditions favorable to Beijing.
Pain is coming for American consumers.
China has been the top foreign supplier of goods to the US, accounting for up to 16% of total imports in recent years, according to the USTR. It dominates the market in smartphones, computers and toys — likely to be hit by massive price hikes that take them out of reach of many Americans when the new tariffs come into force. Taken together with Biden administration tariffs on China, which expanded on Trump first-term duties, China now faces an effective average tariff rate of nearly 150%.
Beijing can also inflict other penalties on the United States, such as halting export licenses for rare earth minerals that are vital to the US tech industry — one reason why Trump may have been so obsessed in finding alternative sources of supply in places like Ukraine and Greenland.
After seeing the severe inflationary impact in the US of supply chain crunches during the pandemic, Chinese leaders could choose to impose new artificial curbs on the flow of goods to the US. American law and commercial firms might be restricted from operating in China. And Beijing could jolt the US agricultural heartland by limiting the import of soy beans and Sorghum. Each of these steps would hurt Chinese as well as Americans — but they'd demonstrate Xi's power of retaliation.
Small businesses are also vulnerable. While giants like Apple can seek alternative manufacturing bases — in India, say — US firms that rely on goods and components from China will be left hugely exposed.
“If you are a small business, particularly on the import side or the input side, there's going to be pain,” said Alex Jacquez, a former special assistant for Economic Development and Industrial Strategy to President Joe Biden. Broader economic consequences will follow. “You're looking at a drag on GDP that is going to be a drag on the labor market. You are looking at inflationary pressure,” Jacquez said.
“One of the concerns here is there is not rational thought or direction to the strategy.”
This story has been updated with additional developments.
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A group of influential conservatives and lawmakers is warning the Trump administration that the U.S. does not have the tactical nuclear weapons to fight China if war broke out in the Indo-Pacific. (Credit: The Heritage Foundation)
The development of a nuclear bomb that would be 24 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II is "significantly ahead of schedule," according to U.S. national security officials.
"The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will complete the First Production Unit of the B61-13, a modern variant of the B61 nuclear gravity bomb, this fiscal year and significantly ahead of schedule," an NNSA spokesperson told Fox News.
"One of seven warhead modernization programs to ensure the reliability and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, the B61-13 will provide additional options against certain harder and large-area military targets," the spokesperson added. "NNSA accelerated delivery of the weapon by leveraging manufacturing processes from the related B61-12 program, whose final unit was completed in 2024, and implementing a range of technical innovations to optimize production."
SUPPORTERS DEFEND TRUMP'S PICK TO CONTROL AMERICA'S NUCLEAR ARSENAL BEFORE SENATE GRILLING
An aerial photograph of Hiroshima, Japan, shortly after the "Little Boy" atomic bomb was dropped. Dated 1945. (Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty images)
The process for the newest version began in the Biden administration in 2023, and it is now going into full production seven months ahead of schedule. A Department of Defense fact sheet from 2023 said the B61-13 would "strengthen deterrence of adversaries," referring to the 2022 nuclear posture review that observed U.S. adversaries like China and Russia continue to expand their nuclear forces while "increasing reliance on nuclear weapons."
The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was about a 15-kiloton bomb. The DoD fact sheet released in October 2023 said the "B61-13 will have a yield similar to the B61-7, which is higher than that of the B61- 12."
Citing defense officials, the Federation of American Scientists said the B61-7 has a maximum yield of 360 kilotons, making it 24 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The B61-13, therefore, would also be 14 times more powerful than the 25-kiloton bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
Sandia National Laboratories, where the new bomb is being developed, said the B61-13 program "used innovative program planning that resulted in projected delivery seven months earlier than expected, a more than 25% decrease in overall time to first production unit." Their statement cited "a critical challenge and urgent need" for the acceleration and said the B61-13 "team reprioritized qualification activities, planned tests with U.S. Air Force stakeholders and jointly completed requirements with Los Alamos National Laboratory and NNSA."
A postwar replica of the 'Little Boy' nuclear weapon, which was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in August 1945. Circa 1946. (MPI/Getty Images)
REPUBLICAN LAWMAKER SAYS ENERGY 'UNDERPINS EVERYTHING WE DO'
"Their creativity in system qualification put an aggressive set of plans in motion to meet stakeholder expectations," Sandia National Laboratories said.
The statement comes a day after President Donald Trump's nominee for NNSA administration, former Rep. Brandon Williams, faced off with senators during his confirmation hearing.
NNSA administrator nominee Brandon Williams testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, April 8, 2025. (Handout)
Williams notably testified that he would not advise the resumption of nuclear detonation tests last conducted in the United States in 1992. He said the ultimate decision would be "above my paygrade" but that he would not recommend tests and instead preferred to rely on "scientific information," such as computer modeling done at NNSA laboratories based on data gathered from nonnuclear detonation tests.
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His response came during a line of questioning by Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., who cited how "millions of people and acres of land were contaminated by radiation" during nuclear detonation testing conducted in her home state during the Cold War.
Danielle Wallace is a breaking news and politics reporter at Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to danielle.wallace@fox.com and on X: @danimwallace.
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President Donald Trump launched a broadside against longtime foe Adam Schiff, calling him 'corrupt.'
Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., fired back late Tuesday after President Donald Trump mocked the California Democrat during a black-tie Republican dinner in Washington, D.C.
"The President of the United States seems oddly focused on me," Schiff posted after footage of Trump's jokes made the rounds.
"Shouldn't he be focused on the economy he's crashing?" he wrote.
During the event hosted by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) — the House Republicans' campaign arm — Trump wove in a few insults about the Boston-born Angeleno's appearance into a verbal indictment of his role in the 2016 Russia collusion investigation.
KASH PATEL ENRAGES ADAM SCHIFF IN CLINTONIAN BATTLE OVER THE WORD ‘WE'
"Adam ‘Schifty' Schiff — can you believe this guy?" Trump said. "He's got the smallest neck I've ever seen — and the biggest head: We call him Watermelon-Head." Trump went on to ruminate about how Schiff's "big fat face" could "stand on a neck" the size of the president's finger.
"It's the weirdest thing — it's a mystery; no one can understand it," he said.
Trump went on to call Schiff "one of the most dishonest human beings I've ever seen," and wondered aloud how people like Schiff could be able to run for office.
FLASHBACK: SCHIFF, WHO REPEATEDLY CLAIMED EVIDENCE OF RUSSIAN COLLUSION, DENOUNCES DURHAM REPORT AS ‘FLAWED'
President Donald Trump, left, and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. (Getty Images)
"He was in charge of the fake witch hunt — with 'Russia, Russia, Russia' — it was a made-up story," he said, playing off the "Brady Bunch" line, "Marsha, Marsha, Marsha."
In 2020, Schiff managed the House's impeachment probe into Trump, leading off his opening remarks that January by comparing former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's 1792 warning to then-President George Washington about future American leaders who would rise to the executive "despotic in [their] ordinary demeanor."
"When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits… known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty — when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day — It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind,'" Schiff said at the time.
Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. (Getty Images)
Since then, he and Trump have often traded criticisms, with Trump also referring to him in the past as a "structural marvel," with an appearance like a "finger on a basketball."
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In October, Trump compared Schiff to the "enemy from within" and called him a "sleazebag" on FOX Business before lamenting that the Democrat would likely defeat former MLB star Steve Garvey for California's open U.S. Senate seat.
For his part, Schiff has also clapped back at Republicans for their criticisms — responding in July to a report that now-Vice President JD Vance had lamented campaign name-calling after Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz called the GOP ticket "weird."
"Shifty Schiff, pencil neck and watermelon head, would like a word, JD," Schiff responded at the time on Facebook.
Fox News Digital reached out to Schiff for additional comment but did not immediately hear back.
Charles Creitz is a reporter for Fox News Digital.
He joined Fox News in 2013 as a writer and production assistant.
Charles covers media, politics and culture for Fox News Digital.
Charles is a Pennsylvania native and graduated from Temple University with a B.A. in Broadcast Journalism. Story tips can be sent to charles.creitz@fox.com.
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In exclusive video taken by Fox News Digital on April 7, the nearly 200-year-old Southern magnolia tree planted amid Andrew Jackson's presidency was taken down by The White House Grounds team and the National Park Service. A new tree will go up.
As the best golfers in the world gather in Augusta, Georgia, this week for the Masters tournament, some players are already noticing a significant change in the iconic landscape. Those changes will be detected as well by approximately 40,000 fans who visit Augusta to take in the tournament from Thursday to Sunday.
The aftermath of Hurricane Helene has left Augusta National Golf Club with a noticeable change in its lush greenery.
The Category 4 storm hit in September, ripping through the Southeast and taking hundreds of trees down at Augusta National.
TRUMP PLANTS NEW JACKSON MAGNOLIA TREE AFTER WHITE HOUSE CHOP-DOWN: 'WE'VE DONE EVERYTHING FOR THIS TREE'
At the time, Augusta National chair Fred Ridley said in a press release that the club's focus was on ensuring the safety of the community.
"Our Augusta community has suffered catastrophic and historic impact from Hurricane Helene," said Ridley.
Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia, lost hundreds of trees (not pictured) following the destruction of Hurricane Helene last fall. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Players in pursuit of the coveted green jacket have noticed that some holes have been thinned out, possibly presenting new attack plans.
The par-four 10th hole has sparked the most conversations, with golfers noting the loss of trees on the left side of the fairway, The Associated Press (AP) reported.
GRANDMOTHER'S BIBLE SURVIVES HURRICANE HELENE AFTER STORM DESTROYS HER HOME: 'IT WAS THE LORD'
"If you are feeling extremely dangerous, there's a little gap on the left side of the trees where you can kind of hit it through," Xander Schauffele said, according to AP.
Schauffele added, "It's a little risky, but in the past your ball would hit a tree there and fall 90 feet from the tee box … But for the most part, I think the course is going to play the exact same as before."
Hurricane destruction has altered Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia, with players commenting on the trees that have gone missing. (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
"I was looking at trees. It almost felt like I was playing the back nine for the first time," said the nine-time PGA Tour winner.
Schauffele also said "it's pretty crazy and sad" to see how many trees have been removed due to the storm.
EXTREMELY RARE ‘ALBINO' DEER SPOTTED BY FAMILY DRIVING HOME ON BACK ROADS
Augusta National is renowned for its magnificent magnolia trees, which lend their name to the iconic "Magnolia Lane" at the club's entrance.
Many holes on the course are named after trees or flowers in proximity, such as the second "Pink Dogwood" and the thirteenth hole "Azalea."
Seen here is the thirteenth hole at Augusta, known as "Azalea." (Augusta National/Getty Images)
Jon Rahm also shared that he's heard conversations about possible new routes on the tenth tee.
"Somebody did tell me you can hit a high cut over the cabins on 10. I don't believe it," Rahm said, according to AP.
The 2023 Masters champion said that he is a bit skeptical of changes in play over the loss of the trees.
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"I don't see there's a chance where so many trees fell where that's a possibility," he said.
"I have heard from members that you can tell there's a difference. When you're looking down the property, you can see a little bit further down."
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Rahm did say there is a "visual change" to the hole.
Rory McIlroy commented on the missing trees on ten, apparently making the tee shot less intimidating — and that there is a little more room on the par-four third right side given the missing overhanging trees.
Jon Rahm, the 2023 Masters champion, said there is a "visual change" to the hole. (Katie Goodale-Imagn Images)
"But really, apart from that, I think it's pretty much the same … Definitely a couple of tee shots look a little bit different," said McIlroy, according to AP.
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Fox News Digital reached out to Augusta National and the PGA Tour for further comment.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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“Liberation Day” came and went, with President Donald Trump's sweeping new tariffs battering markets, unsettling the global order, and prompting businesses and households to reconsider their spending.
And it's far from over.
There's the immediate aftermath: Trump's actions, based on economically questionable math, have triggered retaliatory tariffs, stoked trade wars, and escalated recession odds.
There are near-, medium-, and long-term risks: The dangerous mix of fear, unpredictability, lost investments, and sudden cost spikes could quickly spill into the economy, causing real and lasting pain for people.
And there are likely more tariffs coming down the pike: A suite of crucial materials was exempt from Wednesday's tariff actions, including copper, computer chips, lumber, pharmaceuticals and critical minerals. However, Trump administration officials have indicated these products could be subject to tariffs at a later date.
It also remains to be seen whether Canada and Mexico, two of the biggest targets of Trump's on-again, off-again tariffs, will continue to be largely spared.
“This list does not strike me as a negotiating position right now,” said Tyler Schipper, associate professor of economics at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. “Hopefully, some of these come down, but it's a big list, and it's across the board.”
“This seems to suggest more like we're putting up walls, rather than we're negotiating to hopefully get all the walls to come down,” he added.
Trump's one-two tariff punch announced last week included a baseline 10% tariff on all imported goods to the US, followed by steeper “reciprocals” tariff on five dozen countries that the White House claimed were the “worst offenders” in charging high tariffs or imposing non-tariff trade barriers.
The former went into place April 5, and the latter took effect Wednesday.
However, the “reciprocal” tariffs were anything but that, further complicating and potentially amplifying the negative consequences of Trump's actions. The additional levies, some of which shot north of 45%, were calculated by essentially dividing bilateral goods trade deficits by goods trade exports.
Trade deficits, by their very nature, aren't necessarily all bad.
“It's very wrongheaded economics; it's quite natural that you will have deficits with some countries and surpluses with others,” economist Marcus Noland, executive vice president and director of studies with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told CNN. “So, trying to implement a policy to generate balanced trade with all countries just flies in the face of any kind of comparative advantage or specialization.”
Plus, the resulting tariffs should be a quarter lower than stated because the Trump administration erred in its calculations by undervaluing how the duty could impact items' import prices, noted economists for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. The formula, which AEI economists said had “no foundation in either economic theory or trade law,” instead wrongly incorporated the elasticity for retail prices.
As it stands, the Trump administration's severe and widespread tariff actions flung a powder keg into the global economy, pushing recession forecasts higher.
Domestically, the tariffs could have swiftly negative consequences, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon warned.
“As for the short-term, we are likely to see inflationary outcomes, not only on imported goods but on domestic prices, as input costs rise and demand increases on domestic products,” he wrote in his annual letter to shareholders. “How this plays out on different products will partially depend on their substitutability and price elasticity. Whether or not the menu of tariffs causes a recession remains in question, but it will slow down growth.”
And plenty of uncertainties remain, Dimon noted, including the extent of retaliatory actions and the effects on confidence, investments, capital flows, corporate profits and the almighty dollar.
“The quicker this issue is resolved, the better, because some of the negative effects increase cumulatively over time and would be hard to reverse,” he wrote.
The freefall in the financial markets indicates there's a crisis of confidence brewing in the US dollar, said Joe Brusuelas, RSM US chief economist.
“We can now not ignore nor avoid the discussion of the devaluation of the dollar and the dollar's reserve currency status,” Brusuelas told CNN.
In terms of the economic impact, even the best-case scenario involves accelerated inflation in addition to hits to real gross domestic product growth and unemployment, according to Sung Won Sohn, professor of finance and economics at Loyola-Marymount University and president of SS Economics, who detailed the economic implications for the US in a note issued last week.
The best-case scenario over the next 12 months: Real GDP contracts by 0.2 percentage points, employment shrinks by 0.1% and inflation ticks up by 0.2 percentage points.
The worst-case: Economic activity sinks 1.3 percentage points (real GDP grew 2.4% at the end of 2024), the US economy loses 1.3 million jobs, and inflation rises by 1.3 percentage points, he noted.
Sohn, whose “base case” falls in between, expressed optimism that the US economy could be resilient enough to avoid a recession.
A few factors played into his calculus: The US economy is overwhelmingly services-driven, so the sectoral composition should provide a cushion; tariffs are a one-time price adjustment and shouldn't accelerate underlying inflation pressures; touted policies such as tax cuts and deregulation could provide a stimulating effect on demand; and now that the announcements have been made, it could ease uncertainty.
However, certainty is anything but a sure thing these days, and the bread-and-butter of the US economy might not go unscathed, said RSM economist Brusuelas.
“The US is a service-based economy,” he said. “That's where the wealth is; that's where the money is. (Countries) are going to likely retaliate against the banks, the airlines and tech.”
The retaliation could very well escalate, depending on how the administration moves forward on plans for sectoral tariffs and Trump's continued application of Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 (what used to be a rarely employed trade provision) that allows a president to impose tariffs if there are potential national security threats.
Last week's tariff announcement came with several notable exclusions: Steel, aluminum and autos (three areas already subjected to their tariffs); copper and lumber (which are under Section 232 investigations for potential national security impacts); and pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and critical minerals (where Section 232 investigations are expected).
Trump has frequently quipped that the US doesn't need to import items like lumber, cars and oil, claiming that natural resources and manufacturing potential are plentiful enough domestically for America to be self-sufficient.
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Economists, researchers and other experts have frequently warned that it's not that simple: It takes years for manufacturing facilities to be built, supply chains to be established, and skilled workforces to be trained. (Plus, the construction of those new facilities would likely require imported materials that now are coming at a premium.)
Still, the sector tariffs could push inflation even higher, said Kathy Bostjancic, Nationwide Mutual's chief economist.
Following last week's announcement, Nationwide's modeling indicated that the Consumer Price Index, which had cooled to an annual rate of 2.8% in February, could climb to between 3.5% and 4% by the end of the year. The sector tariffs could very well push that to the higher range of 4% to 4.5%, she said.
CPI hasn't been above 4% for nearly two years, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows.
In addition to those near- and longer-term headwinds, tariffs could pose unique challenges for each sector:
Copper and critical minerals: It's not yet known which minerals the US could consider investigating under Section 232; however, an investigation is already underway on copper — a critical cog in the ongoing electrification of America and industries such as defense.
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The US imports about 50% of the copper it uses, and demand is only expected to grow, especially as energy-consuming industries such as artificial intelligence and blockchain boom, Dan Ikenson, economist and trade policy scholar at Ikenomics Consulting, told CNN.
“It takes 16, 17, 18 years to get the licenses for mines and permits for refining,” he said. “Since we don't have those resources, and we're dependent on the world for it, we should not be agitating and looking to pick trade fights, we should be working out arrangements where we can have long-term access to Canada's exports, Chile's and Peru's.”
Lumber: Softwood lumber is a critical and preferred ingredient to homebuilding, and 30% of it is imported by the US. Homebuilders warn that tariffs and other charges (including the potential doubling of existing duties on Canadian lumber) on softwood lumber and other materials could further exacerbate the housing affordability crisis.
Higher costs of lumber imports could also affect other products, such as furniture and even toilet paper.
The Trump administration, to bolster the US lumber industry, recently ordered that half of America's national forests be opened up for logging — a move criticized for its potential negative effects on the environment, species, watersheds, and recreation.
Pharmaceuticals: Tariffs here present conflicting policy goals for Trump, who's stated he wants to bring down the prices of pharmaceutical products and bolster US manufacturing, Diederik Stadig, health care sector economist for ING, wrote in a post last week.
“While some branded production might gradually be shifted to the US, a big increase in generic production is unlikely,” he said, noting that the construction of new facilities takes roughly 10 years.
Tariffs also have an inflationary effect, which would drive up health care costs and hamper the affordability of medication, especially for people without insurance: Under a 25% tariff, commonly prescribed drugs could increase from 82 cents per pill to 94 cents a pill, or roughly $42 more per year, he wrote. More complex prescriptions, such as those for cancer treatment, could jump even higher, he wrote, estimating that a 24-week prescription could see additional costs in the $8,000 to $10,000 range.
Semiconductors: Medical devices, Wi-Fi routers, laptops, smartphones, cars, household appliances and LED lightbulbs are just a few examples of where semiconductor chips are found. And these products often don't just require one or two. For instance, new cars contain thousands of them.
Put another way, semiconductor chips are “the crude oil of the 21st century.” And it became glaringly obvious what happens when that oil runs dry: As a side effect of the pandemic, a chip shortage put cars and other products in short supply and fanned the flames of inflation.
Although the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act passed in 2022 helped incentivize chipmakers like TSMC to open US facilities, even if tariffs spurred more domestic chip production, America still lacks electronic assembly capabilities, John Dallesasse, an electrical and computer engineering professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, previously told CNN.
Because of that, any chips produced in the US would still have to be shipped abroad to places like Taiwan, South Korea, China and Mexico to be put into the finished electronics Americans buy, and those would be subject to tariffs.
CNN's Elisabeth Buchwald contributed to this report
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President Donald Trump was speaking to reporters alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office on Monday when he made a surprise announcement: Direct nuclear talks are underway between the United States and Iran and a “very big meeting” will take place on Saturday.
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If true, these would be the first direct talks between the two nations since 2015, when they signed a landmark nuclear deal under the Obama administration, which Trump ditched three years later.
Iran denies that negotiations are direct, insisting they will be mediated by the Gulf Arab nation of Oman, where Saturday's talks will take place. Direct or not, the talks represent a breakthrough between the Islamic Republic and a US administration led by a president whom American officials accuse Tehran of once plotting to assassinate.
Trump has pledged to deliver a far “stronger” nuclear deal than Obama's. His administration has said it will push for the complete dismantling of Iran's nuclear program, rather than merely restricting it to peaceful purposes. Israel backs this demand – but Tehran has dismissed it outright as a non-starter.
Here's what we know about the talks, why they may be happening now and what's at stake.
Trump on Monday said a “very big meeting” would take place Saturday “at the top level,” adding that “everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable to doing the obvious,” referring to potential military action against Iranian nuclear sites.
US envoy Steve Witkoff will be leading the US delegation, according to the US State Department, and Araghchi will represent Iran in indirect talks moderated by Oman officials, according to Iranian officials.
On Wednesday, Araghchi said in a Washington Post op-ed that his country is ready to strike a peaceful deal with the US through diplomacy, which could result in a “trillion-dollar” business opportunity, and avoid a costly US military involvement in the region.
He wrote that the “ball is in America's court” to achieve peace and normalize relations, which could include lucrative business opportunities, in an apparent attempt to speak to Trump's business background.
Araghchi also made clear the talks would be indirect, writing that “indirect negotiations is not a tactic or reflection of ideology but a strategic choice rooted in experience,” especially when faced with “a significant wall of mistrust.”
Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian diplomat and ex-nuclear negotiator, said that Iran and the US are likely to “initially start the negotiations indirectly, and after an hour or two, if the outcome is positive, Iranian and American representatives will begin direct talks.”
“It seems that Washington and Tehran have adopted a wise approach, and there is a chance for an agreement,” he wrote on X.
A nuclear deal was reached in 2015 between Iran and world powers, including the US.
Under the deal, Iran had agreed to limit its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.
That agreement was, however, abandoned by Trump in 2018 during his first presidential term. Iran retaliated by resuming its nuclear activities, and has so far advanced its program to alarming levels.
In December, Rafael Grossi, the head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, told Reuters that Iran was “dramatically” accelerating its enrichment of uranium to up to 60% purity, closer to the roughly 90% level that is weapons grade. In January, Grossi again warned that Iran was “pressing the gas pedal” on its uranium enrichment.
Iran insists its nuclear program is peaceful.
Last month, Trump sent a letter to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei proposing negotiations on a new nuclear deal, making it clear that Iran had a two-month deadline to reach an agreement, a source familiar with the letter's contents told CNN.
Days later, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said the Islamic Republic rejected direct negotiations with the US. He said however that Iran's response, delivered by Oman, left open the possibility of indirect talks with Washington.
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“We don't avoid talks; it's the breach of promises that has caused issues for us so far,” Pezeshkian said in televised remarks. “They must prove that they can build trust.”
Iran has in recent weeks been vocal with its concerns about striking a nuclear deal with Trump, who it says has a history of backtracking.
Pezeshkian was elected last year on a reformist agenda that pledged to mend the country's relationship with the world and ease sanctions that have crippled the economy. But he also faces a powerful hardline establishment, including Khamenei, that distrusts the US and is wary of engaging with it.
The value of Iran's currency, the rial, increased off the back of the news of talks after recording a record low just weeks ago.
US officials have said that Trump is demanding that Iran dismantle its entire nuclear program, and not just accept restrictions on its ability to build a nuclear weapon, as it did in 2015.
The 2015 deal allowed Iran to “fully enjoy its right to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes under the relevant articles of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT),” according to the treaty. The NPT, to which Iran is signatory, is an international agreement aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.
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Experts have said that complete denuclearization would be a non-starter for Iran given that the nuclear program is its last remaining point of leverage against the West after its regional proxies have been weakened.
Last week, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz told CBS' “Face the Nation” that Trump will demand a “full dismantlement” of Iran's uranium enrichment program.
“Iran has to give up its program in a way that the entire world can see,” Waltz said, adding that Tehran must agree to “walk away completely” from its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
Waltz added that this time, the deal won't be “some kind of tit for tat that we had under the Obama administration, or Biden.”
Asked whether the deal would be similar to the 2015 agreement, Trump on Monday told reporters that “it'll be different, and maybe a lot stronger.”
If talks are not successful, he added, “I think Iran's going to be in great danger… I actually think it'll be a very bad day for Iran.”
The sudden revelation of the upcoming US-Iran talks at the press conference following Trump and Netanyahu's meeting appeared to surprise the Israeli prime minister, the smile quickly vanishing from his face as he looked toward his team of advisers.
News of the talks are “certainly not” to Israel's liking, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
It's unclear if Netanyahu was given advance notice of the US-Iran talks or if he was consulted ahead of time, the sources said.
Sat beside Trump at the Oval Office, Netanyahu touted a Libya-style nuclear deal between the US and Iran, which in 2003 dismantled the North African nation's nuclear program in the hopes of ushering in a new era of relations with the US after its two-decade oil embargo on Muammar Qaddafi's regime.
“If it can be done diplomatically, in a full way, the way it was done in Libya, I think that would be a good thing,” Netanyahu said.
Following denuclearization, Libya eventually descended into civil war after a 2011 NATO-backed uprising that toppled and killed Qaddafi. Iranian officials have long warned that a similar deal would be intended to weaken Iran and eventually overthrow its regime.
Asked about a Libya-style deal, Araghchi told Iranian media on Tuesday that Israel's hopes for what Iran's nuclear program should look like would be disregarded.
“When it comes to the Zionist regime's hopes of what a deal will look like and what they have suggested, that's their hopes and ultimately will not be factored in,” he said.
Netanyahu had vehemently opposed the 2015 nuclear deal, saying it did not prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon.
Since the last US-Iran talks, Tehran has seen its ability to project power in the region significantly curtailed after Israel struck severe blows to its allied regional militias and launched direct attacks on Iranian soil.
In Gaza, Israel continues to pound the enclave as it seeks to eradicate Hamas. In Syria, which Iran used as transit for weapons to proxies, Tehran's ally Bashar al-Assad has been deposed, and Israel continues to attack the country and take new territory. In Iraq, the US has retaliated against attacks by Iran-backed militants on its assets there. And in Lebanon, a series of Israeli attacks on the country have decapitated the militant group Hezbollah.
In Yemen, where Iran's last remaining ally, the Houthi rebel group, remains standing, the US is intensifying airstrikes.
Last year, Iran and Israel exchanged two rounds of tit-for-tat attacks, the first time either side has directly attacked the other. Israel is said to have taken out Iranian defenses in one of those attacks.
“Remember, the Iranians' air defenses have been eviscerated by that attack from Israel. They're open to attack today,” Witkoff told journalist Tucker Carlson in an interview last month.
CNN's Pauline Lockwood, Kevin Liptak, Jennifer Hansler, Alayna Treene, Alireza Hajihosseini, Leila Gharagozlou, Angus Watson, Eugenia Yosef and Michael Schwartz contributed reporting.
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During a speech at the National Republican Congressional Committee President's Dinner, President Donald Trump claimed that other countries were calling and "kissing my a**" to negotiate tariff rates just before they went into effect.
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A new documentary reveals the incredible results of a project to create 3D underwater scans of the doomed ocean liner RMS Titanic, which sank 113 years ago.
“Titanic: The Digital Resurrection” tells the story of how deep-sea mapping company Magellan created “the most precise model of the Titanic ever created: a full-scale, 1:1 digital twin, accurate down to the rivet,” according to a statement from National Geographic, published Tuesday.
When Titanic set sail on April 10, 1912, she was the largest passenger ship in service and considered unsinkable.
Just four days later, Titanic's maiden voyage became an international tragedy when she struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic at 11:40 p.m. April 14. She sank in less than three hours.
The ship did not have enough lifeboats for the approximately 2,220 people on board. More than 1,500 people died in the accident, and Titanic became the most famous shipwreck in history. There were just over 700 survivors.
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The 90-minute National Geographic documentary allows filmmaker Anthony Geffen “to reconstruct the ship's final moments—challenging long-held assumptions and revealing new insights into what truly happened on that fateful night in 1912,” according to the statement.
In the film, Titanic analyst Parks Stephenson, metallurgist Jennifer Hooper and master mariner Chris Hearn walk around a full-scale reproduction of the ship, highlighting previously hidden details.
One key finding is a visibly open steam valve, which corroborates accounts that engineers manned their stations in Boiler Room Two for more than two hours after Titanic hit the iceberg.
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This maintained the electricity supply and allowed crew to send distress signals, meaning the 35 men in the boiler room may have sacrificed themselves to save hundreds of other people.
The team also reconstruct hull fragments found scattered around the site, revealing that Titanic didn't split in two, but “was violently torn apart, ripping through first-class cabins where prominent passengers like J.J. Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim may have sought refuge as the ship went down.”
The scan also helps to exonerate First Officer William Murdoch, who has been accused of abandoning his post. The position of a lifeboat davit, a piece of equipment used to lower the craft, corroborates testimony that Murdoch was, in fact, washed out to sea as the crew prepared to launch it.
Magellan's scans also reveal how parts of the wreck are collapsing, but National Geographic said the digital twin means “the Titanic is preserved in perfect detail as it appeared in 2022, securing its place in history for generations to come and marking a new era in underwater archaeology.”
“Titanic: The Digital Resurrection” will premiere on National Geographic on April 11, and then be available on streaming services Disney+ and Hulu from April 12.
CNN's Marnie Hunter contributed to this report.
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With the United States observing National Former Prisoner of War Recognition Day on April 9, Fox News anchor and former White House press secretary Dana Perino interviewed former White House speechwriter and historian Jonathan Horn about his newest book, "The Fate of the Generals." The book tells the true story of Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, the highest-ranking American POW of World War II.
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Dana Perino: Who was Gen. Jonathan Wainwright?
Jonathan Horn: Gen. Wainwright was a gritty cavalryman who grew up in Montana not far from the Little Bighorn battlefield — the site of one of history's most famous last stands — but who could not have known that he would one day have to make a last stand of his own. It happened in the Philippines (then an American colony) during the early days of World War II, when the Japanese invaded the islands after attacking Pearl Harbor.
US ARMY VETERAN STARTS SUCCESSFUL BARBECUE BUSINESS DESPITE HEALTH CHALLENGES: ‘VERY PROUD'
Wainwright became the top United States commander in the Philippines after his superior Douglas MacArthur received orders to flee the islands, even as his troops there fought on against impossible odds. While MacArthur vowed to return to the islands, Wainwright took a very different oath: to stay there and share the fate of his men, even if it meant surrendering with them and becoming the highest-ranking American prisoner of the Japanese.
Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, right, broadcasts his surrender message following the capture of Corregidor by the Japanese, May 1942. (Dr. Diosdado M. Yap, Editor-Publisher, Bataan Magazine, Washington, D.C., 1971)
Perino: Why does the United States observe National Former Prisoner of War Recognition Day on April 9?
Horn: It's the anniversary of the largest surrender of United States forces in history. When the Japanese landed in the Philippines in December 1941, American and Filipino troops fell back into the jungles of the Bataan peninsula, where they fought on without sufficient food or medicine until their bodies could fight on no longer. That sad day came on April 9, 1942.
Nearly 80,000 men lay down their arms. Those who survived the terrors of the Bataan Death March would find new horrors as prisoners of the Japanese. Wainwright would carry on the struggle for another month on a small island called Corregidor, a few miles off the tip of Bataan. He finally agreed to surrender himself and the rest of the Philippines only because he feared the Japanese would otherwise carry out a massacre.
A photograph of the surrender of Gen. Jonathan Wainwright's forces to the Japanese on the small island of Corregidor in the Philippines in May 1942. (National Archives)
Perino: What happened to Wainwright during his time as a prisoner of the Japanese?
Horn: Wainwright remained a prisoner for the rest of the war. The Japanese subjected him to what he called "systematic starvation" and beatings as they moved him from the Philippines to camps in Taiwan and eventually all the way to Manchuria.
GRANDSON OF FORMER COMMANDANT OF AUSCHWITZ ON RISE OF ANTISEMITISM, HIS LIFE AS A PASTOR
Perhaps the cruelest torture was isolation from the outside world. Receiving no letters for long periods and cut off from the news, Wainwright worried that the American people would never forgive him for the decision he had made to surrender for the sake of his men.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur, left, embraces an emaciated Gen. Jonathan Wainwright on Aug. 31, 1945 after Wainwright's release from prison. (National Archives)
Perino: When Wainwright returned to America after the war, he received a hero's welcome and the Medal of Honor. Why do you think so many Americans today are unfamiliar with his name?
Horn: The story of MacArthur's vow to return to the Philippines has overshadowed the story of Wainwright's vow to stay with his men there. More than four decades have passed since a biography about Wainwright last came out.
During that time, boxes of Wainwright's personal papers, including his diaries and letters, have become available for research in military archives. As a result, it's possible to tell his story now in a way never before possible and to restore him to his proper place in history.
Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, wearing his Congressional Medal of Honor presented to him the day before by President Harry S. Truman, is shown with his wife leaving the White House in a convertible following the presentation. (Harris & Ewing, Harry S. Truman Library & Museum)
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Perino: What lesson do you hope Americans today will draw from Wainwright's story?
Horn: I hope Americans today will remember the lesson Wainwright himself drew from his terrible ordeal: the need for military preparedness. I also hope they will never forget the courage he and his fellow prisoners of war showed and the sacrifice they made for our country.
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"The Fate of the Generals: MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines" will be published by Scribner on April 15.
Dana Perino currently co-anchors FOX News Channel's (FNC) morning news program America's Newsroom (weekdays 9-11 AM/ET) and serves as co-host of The Five (weekdays 5-6 PM/ET), the most watched program in cable news. Perino also hosts FOX News Audio's weekly podcast Perino on Politics. She joined the network in 2009 as a contributor.
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Delegations from Japan and South Korea are en route. Italy's prime minister will be in Washington next week. And Israel's “proactive approach” to seeking out new US trade agreements could serve as a model for everyone, according to the White House.
A day before President Donald Trump's new worldwide tariffs are set to take hold, the White House made clear Tuesday the door for new trade negotiations was wide open — even if the exact formula for earning relief from the duties remained unclear.
“These countries are calling us up. Kissing my a**. They are dying to make a deal,” Trump told a group of Republicans on Tuesday evening, hours before the tariffs were set to take hold. He described foreign leaders essentially groveling to avoid the new tariffs: “Please, please sir, make a deal. I'll do anything sir.”
As countries scramble to respond to Trump's sweeping tariff announcements last week, many are receiving advice from US diplomats and sources close to the White House encouraging them to think creatively, beyond the scope of trade, as they prepare to negotiate with the White House.
Their message to foreign counterparts seems simple: If they have a unique card to play, they should.
Ideas being discussed run the gamut, and include possible action on securing the freedom of Americans wrongfully detained abroad, committing to working with US artificial intelligence companies, buying more US energy or combatting global drug trafficking, according to five people familiar with the brainstorming sessions.
After days of mixed signals over how willing the president would be to negotiate tariff relief, Tuesday's message was far clearer: Trump is ready for opening bids.
“The phones have been ringing off the hook, wanting to talk to this administration, this president and his trade team to try to strike a deal,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said midday.
It's not just foreign leaders who have been calling. As the tariff deadline neared this week, the chief executives of some of the largest multinational companies — who have been loathe to criticize Trump's tariffs publicly — nonetheless maintained a robust backchannel to the White House.
An onslaught of CEOs from banking, technology, and industrial companies – among others – have been lighting up the phone lines of chief of staff Susie Wiles, Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, several executives told CNN, to argue the tariff policy will harm the global economy and credibility of American business and government. The recent effort was described by one CEO close to the White House as a “tsunami” in recent days.
Trump endorsed the shift in message toward more dealmaking – and notably, messengers – after becoming frustrated by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's television appearances, which seemed to fuel the market's meltdown, several executives familiar with the discussions told CNN. The shift also came after aides warned Trump that the damage sustained in the market would endanger him politically, those people told CNN.
Wiles, those executives added, had been particularly effective in convincing Trump that the market rout was costing considerable political capital that he would need for future agenda items, with lawmakers fielding increasingly angry constituent calls as the market continued sinking.
“There are voices in the White House that want high tariffs forever. There are angels and demons sitting on President Trump's shoulders,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz posted on X. “Who does he listen to? I hope he listens to the angels.”
After days of criticism from some of his closest allies over his tariff strategy, Trump on Tuesday made clear he was confident in his decisions.
“I know what the hell I'm doing,” he told the GOP crowd.
White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement to CNN that “the administration maintains regular contact with business leaders, industry groups, and everyday Americans,” adding that “the only special interest guiding President Trump's decision-making, however, is the best interest of the American people.”
Desai added: “The entire Trump administration is playing from the same playbook – President Trump's playbook – to level the playing field for our industries and workers, and Secretary Lutnick continues to be one of the administration's most effective TV communicators for that playbook.”
But what precisely the president is looking for from his foreign interlocutors will vary by nation, White House officials said. It seemed certain the contours of his new trade deals would extend well beyond tariffs and trade barriers to other areas, including US military presence and foreign aid.
Trump described the approach Tuesday as “one-stop shopping”: using the threat of withering tariffs as leverage on any manner of issues arising between the United States and its partners.
“A beautiful and efficient process!!!” he wrote online.
In some cases, the White House is working with the State Department on preparing lists of actions that countries could take, according to one US official.
That is the case with China, where one idea on the table is for President Xi Jinping to make a public pronouncement that Chinese companies should stop producing fentanyl precursor chemicals, which could be an effective step in reining in the global drug war, an issue that Trump has prioritized.
There is no expectation that an offer completely devoid of trade or tariff action will spur movement, particularly because Trump himself has said that this is the “only chance” for the US to “re-set the table” on trade. But sources involved in the current discussions expect offers that couple action on trade plus something else to sweeten the deal could be effective.
Trump's advisers hope to have results soon that can demonstrate the success of his tariff plan, which has generated deep concern even among his closest allies and sent markets reeling earlier this week.
Trump, too, is eagerly watching as his global counterparts seek him out in the hopes he'll lift his tariffs, relishing his role as the ultimate decider on what — and who — gets a reprieve, depending on what they're offering.
“I call them tailored, not off the rack,” Trump said of the nascent agreements his team is now entertaining with as many as 70 countries that have approached the administration to talk trade.
The logistics of arbitrating dozens of new bilateral agreements did not seem lost on the president, who suggested he may conscript lawyers at the large law firms he's targeted for retribution to help him write up the terms.
“We need a lot of talent. We have a lot of countries coming that want to make deals,” he said in the East Room, where he was discussing a new energy initiative surrounded by coal workers in hard hats. “Our problem is [we] can't see that many that fast,” he said of the countries reaching out.
For that reason, there appeared little hope for an eleventh-hour cancelation of the new duties that are set to take effect at midnight. For as keen as Trump and his team are to secure new agreements that can be trumpeted as examples of the tariffs' success, advisers expressed doubt they could be struck in only a day's time, even for a president in a hurry.
And for as enthusiastic as many foreign leaders appeared to be to hop on an airplane or pick up the phone, the world's second-largest economy proved a tougher case.
“China also wants to make a deal, badly, but they don't know how to get it started,” Trump wrote on social media. “We are waiting for their call. It will happen!”
It hadn't happened by the time US markets closed Tuesday. After posting big gains earlier in the day, the S&P 500 slumped again in late-day trading when it became clear Trump was plowing ahead with the new tariffs, including an extraordinary 104% tariff on China that will take effect a minute past midnight.
Trump has spent the last four years brooding about the shortcomings of the trade agreements he signed with China during his first administration. Beijing reneged on many of its promised purchases of American farm products, and Chinese duties on US soybeans and corns caused agricultural exports to sink.
This time around, Trump is seeking out a bigger, better trade agreement, and hopes the massive tariffs applied on China will lure its leader, Xi Jinping, to the negotiating table. So far, however, Xi has resisted Trump's pressure to submit, ratcheting up tit-for-tat tariffs that could have widespread consequences.
Trump acknowledged the effect his tariffs were having on global stability in his remarks Tuesday.
“Sometimes you have to mix it up a little bit,” he said, describing his tariffs as “somewhat explosive.”
Just this week, the market has shifted based on the conflicting messages of the people around the president. On Sunday, Lutnick said any chance of Trump reversing, pausing, or diluting his tariffs would “absolutely not” happen. That stance spurred steep losses for global markets that positioned US markets to open at levels that represented a 20% drop from all-time highs reached in mid-February, the fastest drop of that magnitude in history.
Markets experienced a slight bounce on Monday when National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett sidestepped a question over whether Trump would consider a 90-day pause – leading to false interpretations that Trump was, in fact, open to such a move.
By Tuesday, though, Bessent was front and center, attempting to reset the White House's message that the tariffs were a means to a negotiated end.
But as early deliberations are now underway among nations looking to strike a deal, some countries say they are still receiving mixed messages from different corners of the administration.
In recent days, Lutnick told Japanese officials that making commitments on a possible future 800-mile pipeline facilitating transport of US natural gas to Asia more quickly – which has been referenced as a possible Alaska pipeline – would not be meaningful in these conversations, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.
The Alaska pipeline is a project Trump has supported and has urged Japan, South Korea and Taiwan to partake in. And on Tuesday morning, Bessent, who has been tapped to lead the tariff talks with Japan, publicly spoke about the Alaska pipeline as a ripe topic to include in the negotiations.
“We will see what our trading partners offer. For instance there is talk of a big energy deal in Alaska where the Japanese, and perhaps the Koreans, perhaps the Taiwanese, would provide – would take a lot of the offtake – and provide financing for the deal,” Bessent said on CNBC. “That could be an alternative for them to come forward with that because not only would that provide a lot of American jobs, it would narrow the trade deficit.”
The confusion over what to include and what not to include underscores a concern among some former Trump administration officials that negotiating without a clear end game could become messy and unproductive.
“The president always wants the same thing in any negotiation: more,” said a former administration official.
“Even if the president was willing to discuss compromises, his differing rationales for the tariffs could conflict with one another and raise a question as to if he is even willing to negotiate.”
This story has been updated with additional details.
CNN's Jennifer Hansler contributed to this report.
© 2025 Cable News Network. A Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All Rights Reserved. CNN Sans ™ & © 2016 Cable News Network.
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National Republican Congressional Committee chair Rep. Richard Hudson tells Fox News Digital 'we have to raise enough money to keep up with the Democrats and make sure that our candidates can get their message out'
President Donald Trump touted the record-breaking fundraising numbers garnered by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) during its annual president's dinner Tuesday evening.
"You know, we've done very well in this room before," Trump told attendees at the annual dinner Tuesday night. "But right now we broke every record. I just heard from Mike Johnson, he said, ‘We broke every record, sir.' There is over $35 million. That's not bad, for an evening."
The fundraising numbers achieved during Tuesday night's dinner rival what the NRCC has garnered across entire quarters. In July, the group highlighted a "record-shattering" fundraising haul for the second quarter of 2024, which was only $2 million more than what the NRCC was able to garner Tuesday night.
TRUMP'S NAME CONTINUES TO BE FUNDRAISING BEHEMOTH FOR BOTH POLITICAL PARTIES: ‘CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE'
Fox News was first to report, in advance of Tuesday night's dinner, that, according to a source familiar, the event would bring in eight-figures in fundraising for the NRCC.
Republicans and Democrats elicit President Donald Trump's name in fundraising messages. (Getty)
"Next year we'll do 45 or 50 million, right?" Trump asked the crowd, garnering cheers. "A lot of people, you broke your record attendance, and you broke your money record, and that's a great tribute to the Republicans and the party and everything it stands for."
Tuesday's event had "giving levels" as high as $310,100, with the lowest costing seat being $6,000 per person, or $10,000 per couple.
"We have some unbelievable supporters of our House Republican majority with us, as you know, and with the help of everyone in this room the next year's Republican Party is going to defy history. We're going to really defy it, and we already are."
TRUMP, HEGSETH REVEAL WHOPPING FIGURE THEY WANT FOR THE NEXT PENTAGON BUDGET
Former US president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump leaves Trump Tower to attend his trial for allegedly covering up hush money payments linked to extramarital affairs in New York, on April 22, 2024. (CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images)
To illustrate this point, Trump pointed to the "fortune" America is making with his new tariff plan.
"Two billion dollars a day – do you believe it? I was told $2 billion a day," Trump told the crowd. "You know I get hit by the press about tariffs, we're making $2 billion – billion – this isn't $35 million, that's peanuts. $2 billion a day."
"In addition, we have a lot of countries coming to see us – they want to make a deal. And we're doing – we're doing things that nobody's ever even thought about."
Republicans currently control the House – when the chamber returns to full strength – with a fragile 220-215 majority, and fundraising will be crucial to the GOP's game-plan to keep control.
Asked what concerns him the most when it comes to defending the House majority, NRCC chair Rep. Richard Hudson said in a Fox News Digital interview on Monday that "Democrats have a structural advantage when it comes to fundraising. They always seem to have just mountains of money. So I think the amount of money the Democrats raise is probably the only thing that really concerns me."
"We have to raise enough money to keep up with the Democrats and make sure that our candidates can get their message out," Hudson emphasized.
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Hudson, a North Carolina Republican and 12-year veteran of the House, said that "the President understands that he's got to keep the House majority in the midterm so that he has a four-year runway, instead of a two-year runway to get his agenda enacted."
And pointing to the House Democratic leader, Hudson added, "Speaker Hakeem Jeffries would fight President Trump on every front, and it would be really difficult for him to achieve his agenda. President Trump understands it's important to hold the House and he's, he's been extremely helpful to us and we appreciate it."
Hours before Trump attended the NRCC fundraiser, the House Democrats' campaign arm took aim at nearly three dozen Republican-held seats in the chamber as they aim to win back the majority.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) on Tuesday morning released its initial 2026 target list, which included 35 GOP-controlled seats, and launched an effort to fundraise for the party's eventual nominees in each of the districts.
The DCCC emphasized that their moves signal that "Democrats are on offense and poised to win the majority in 2026."
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Babydog, the English bulldog of Sen. Jim Justice, R-W.Va., made a surprise appearance at the Senate Agriculture Committee hearing, charming attendees and senators. (@BabydogJustice via X)
It was supposed to be a routine Senate Agriculture Committee hearing to consider nominees for top USDA posts, but one visitor turned the event into a tail-wagging affair.
Babydog Justice, the beloved English bulldog of Sen. Jim Justice, R-W.Va., made a surprise and highly photogenic appearance Tuesday as the committee met to review the nominations of Judge Stephen Vaden for Deputy Secretary of Agriculture and Tyler Clarkson for USDA General Counsel.
The hearing may have been serious business, but Babydog's presence brought smiles, laughter, and even a little bipartisan levity.
Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., couldn't resist the moment, joking, "Babydog is the key to the West Virginia Senator's success," as Justice and his pup settled in.BABYDOG BRIDGES 'PAWTISAN' DIVIDE IN THE SENATE ON SOCIAL MEDIA: 'SHE KNOWS NO POLITICAL BIAS'
The English bulldog's X account playfully captioned this photo, "Is this thing on?" after stealing the show at Tuesday's Agriculture Committee hearing. (@BabydogJustice via X)
Justice, who recently joined the Senate after serving as West Virginia's governor, shared an exclusive comment with Fox News Digital about his pup's Capitol Hill cameo.
"I am so pleased to see the warm reception of Babydog from folks in Congress. Today she came along with me to the Agriculture Committee hearing and knew if she participated, there would be a treat as a reward. Senator Boozman took the time to introduce her to the committee, and contrary to what Senator Hoeven said in the hearing, she is not livestock or up for auction — even though she may resemble a little brown cow!" Justice told Fox News Digital.
At one point during the hearing, a comment by Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., sparked laughter when he joked about Babydog possibly being livestock — a suggestion Justice playfully refuted.After holding up the pooch to the microphone and sharing how Babydog "humanizes all of us," Justice requested a staffer remove the dog from his lap, adding, "She's heavy!"
The social media response was swift. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who was confirmed earlier this year, reposted footage of Babydog in action, writing: "We love you Babydog! Senate Ag is never the same when you're around."SENATOR-ELECT JIM JUSTICE'S TEAM CLARIFIES REPORT CLAIMING FAMOUS POOCH BABYDOG BANNED FROM SENATE FLOOR
Even the Senate Agriculture Committee's own social media accounts joined the fun, posting behind-the-scenes content of the pup's visit and noting she was "making new friends and monitoring policy."Following her eventful day on Capitol Hill, Babydog Justice took to her own social media account. Posting a photo from the Senate Agriculture Committee hearing, she humorously captioned it, "Is this thing on?" in reference to the microphone.
Babydog's charm extended beyond the committee room, capturing the attention of senators in the halls of Congress. Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., shared a photo with Babydog, tweeting, "All in favor of making @babydogjustice our 101st senator, say AYE!"
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., also joined in, posting a picture of himself petting Babydog with the caption, "@BabydogJustice is America's favorite dog."
Babydog is no stranger to the spotlight. Born in 2019, the 60-pound English bulldog has been a fixture in Justice's political life since she was gifted to him by his children. She gained national attention during the COVID-19 pandemic when Justice launched the "Do It for Babydog" vaccine lottery to encourage West Virginians to get vaccinated.
Babydog, dog of West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, appears on stage on the second day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 16, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)
Babydog's most famous public appearance was at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where she charmed attendees and the media alike from a bulldog-sized chair on the main stage.While Babydog may have captured the spotlight, Justice is focused on the work ahead as a newly appointed member of the Senate Agriculture Committee. The West Virginia Republican has long emphasized the importance of supporting rural communities and strengthening the agricultural economy — key concerns in his home state.
Justice, a former two-term governor and lifelong farmer and businessman, has frequently spoken about the need for practical, common-sense solutions to issues like food security, rural development, and infrastructure investment. His role on the Agriculture Committee positions him to advocate for policies aligned with West Virginia's agricultural and economic interests.CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
As Babydog continues to turn heads on Capitol Hill, Justice is expected to use his platform to advance those priorities with his four-legged sidekick never too far behind.
Jasmine is a writer at Fox News Digital and a military spouse based in New Orleans. Stories can be sent to jasmine.baehr@fox.com
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Former Anheuser-Busch executive Anson Frericks explained how companies' focus on politics and social issues backfired on their bottom line as President Trump reassures Americans about market uncertainty.
City council members in Maryland introduced a bill Monday to expand access to menstrual products in all city-run bathrooms, including those designated for men.
Baltimore Councilman Paris Gray, who is the lead sponsor of the bill, introduced the legislation during the city council's bi-monthly meeting.
Gray said the bill is not just a proposal, but it reflects the city's commitment to menstrual equity and the values Baltimore holds dear, including dignity, accessibility and public health.
"Access to menstrual products should be as fundamental as access to soap or toilet paper," Gray said. "It is an essential part of personal hygiene, and yet, for far too many people, these products remain out of reach. Menstrual products are not a luxury. They are a necessity, and the absence of access can create undue stress and hardship."
CALIFORNIA SCHOOL DISTRICT INFORMS PARENTS PERIOD PRODUCTS ARE IN BATHROOMS FOR ‘ANY STUDENT WHO MENSTRUATES'
Whether feminine hygiene products should be available in men's restrooms has become a divisive topic in places like college campuses, as only women can menstruate. (Getty Images)
Gray said the bill, if approved, will require all city-owned and leased buildings with public restrooms to provide menstrual products, free of charge.
"This includes restrooms and all kinds of facilities, whether they are designated for men, women, family use or single occupancy," he said.
But the bill, Gray noted, is nothing new. Instead, the bill codifies what Mayor Brandon Scott's administration and Department of General Services have already done by taking steps to ensure menstrual products are available in many public facilities across the city.
CALIFORNIA REQUIRES MENSTRUAL PRODUCTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Gray also said Baltimore is not joining a national movement for menstrual equality, but instead, is leading the charge across the country.
If the bill were to pass, all city-owned and leased buildings in Baltimore, Md., with public restrooms would have to provide menstrual products free of charge, including in men's restrooms. (Getty Images)
"Cities and municipalities are recognizing the point-importance of free access to menstrual products and Baltimore's proudly taking this place at the forefront of this critical effort," he said.
Gray did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment on the matter.
In February, the Long Beach Unified School District in California took similar measures when it notified parents in an email that all schools containing grades 3 through 12 would have menstrual products in girls bathrooms, all-gender bathrooms, and in at least one boys bathroom.
EMERSON COLLEGE ADDS PERIOD PRODUCTS TO MEN'S RESTROOMS, MEETING GROUP'S DEMAND FOR 'MENSTRUAL EQUALITY'
The email told parents and caregivers the system is "committed to reducing barriers to learning and fostering a supportive environment for all students."
The availability of period products in girls bathrooms and at least one boys bathroom is to "ensure that any student who menstruates-including transgender boys and nonbinary students-can access these necessary products with dignity and discretion," per the email.
The Baltimore city council proposed putting period products in bathrooms for men at all city-run facilities. (iStock)
In California, the "Menstrual Equality for All Act" was passed in October 2023, and it mandated that changes must be enacted at or before the start of the 2024-25 school year.
The following text was added to the state's education code when the bill was passed:
"On or before the start of the 2024–25 school year, a public school, including a school operated by a school district, county office of education, or charter school, maintaining any combination of classes from grades 3 to 12, inclusive, shall stock the school's restrooms at all times with an adequate supply of menstrual products, available and accessible, free of cost, in all women's restrooms and all-gender restrooms, and in at least one men's restroom."
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Menstrual products were defined in the bill as pads and tampons specifically "for use in connection with the menstrual cycle."
The bill also said it is the state legislature's intent "to promote period equity through adequate access to menstrual products in schools also serving grades 3 to 5, inclusive."
Fox News Digital's Elizabeth Pritchett contributed to this report.
Greg Wehner is a breaking news reporter for Fox News Digital.
Story tips and ideas can be sent to Greg.Wehner@Fox.com and on Twitter @GregWehner.
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This was CNBC's live coverage of how U.S. trade partners, the White House and employers responded to President Donald Trump's historic tariffs.
What you need to know
CNBC's reporters are covering the tariffs and their effects, live on air and online from our bureaus in Washington; London; Singapore; San Francisco; and Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.
Canada and Mexico will not face an additional 10% tariff as a result of Trump's announcement revising his so-called reciprocal tariff policy, a White House official tells CNBC.
The existing U.S. tariff structure on imports from Canada and Mexico — a 25% duty on goods not covered by the trilateral trade deal known as USMCA — remains unchanged, the official says.
— Kevin Breuninger
The president for days has insisted that his tariffs would not be lifted, despite turmoil in the markets and backlash from investors, voters and allies.
Here are three examples of Trump digging in, just days before reversing course:
— Erin Doherty
Trump says he watched Jamie Dimon's interview earlier in the day, in which the JP Morgan CEO said a recession is a "likely outcome" as a result of the tariffs.
Trump says that Dimon was "very good" during the interview and that he said "something had to be done with the tariffs and trade."
"He's very smart and ... a genius financially, he's done a fantastic job at the bank," Trump says.
— Erin Doherty
The White House tells NBC News that it will not be releasing a list of the countries that have so far reached out to start negotiating with the U.S. over Trump's so-called reciprocal tariffs.
Trump, in his Truth Social post announcing the 90-day tariff pause, said that "more than 75 Countries" have called U.S. officials seeking to strike new trade deals.
— Garrett Haake and Kevin Breuninger
Trump said he paused the imposition of higher tariffs on many countries because people "were getting a little bit yippy."
"Well, I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line," Trump told reporters at the White House.
"They were getting yippy, you know, they were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid, unlike these champions, because we have a big job to do," the president said while standing with auto racing champions.
"No other president would have done what I did. No other president," he said. "And it had to be done."
Trump later said, "You have to have flexibility" in policies.
— Dan Mangan
Trump's political operation is amplifying a Truth Social post the president sent just hours before he suspended most tariffs, in which he announced that it was "a great time to buy."
"Did the Panicans listen to @POTUS's advice this morning?" Trump War Room posted on X, just after the tariff pause announcement.
— Erin Doherty
A range of retail stocks spiked after Trump's tariff policy reversal.
Some of the top performers make a significant share of their products in Vietnam. The country's imports will now face a 10% tariff for 90 days, as opposed to the 46% Trump had proposed.
Wayfair shares spiked nearly 20%, while Levi Strauss spiked more than 18%. Deckers and Crocs shares jumped 14% and 12%, respectively.
Nike's stock rose 10%, while shares of Walmart and Target climbed more than 8% each.
— Jacob Pramuk
U.S. crude oil futures jumped more than 4% after Trump announced a lower tariff rate for countries except China, their best day since October 2024.
The U.S. benchmark rose $2.77, or 4.65%, to close at $62.35 per barrel, while global benchmark Brent was up $2.48, or 3.95%, to $65.30 per barrel.
U.S. crude hit an intraday low of $55.12 earlier in the session after Beijing announced tariffs of 84% on U.S. goods in response to Trump's levies. China's tariffs take effect April 10.
But the oil market turned around, swinging more than 13% from its low after Trump dramatically reversed course on his trade war. The president said lower tariff rates of 10% would apply to countries for 90 days with the exception of China.
— Spencer Kimball
The Nasdaq Composite jumped nearly 10% and headed for its best day since 2008 as technology stocks rallied after Trump postponed some tariffs for 90 days.
Tesla, Nvidia and Apple surged more than 10% each, while the VanEck Semiconductor ETF popped more than 14% as chipmaking stocks gained. The bounce comes after a rocky few trading sessions after the White House announced wide sweeping tariffs.
— Samantha Subin
Rep. Steven Horsford grilled Trump's trade representative, Jamieson Greer, about his knowledge of the tariff pause.
"So the trade representative hasn't spoken to the president of the United States about a global reordering of trade, but yet he announced it on a tweet?" the Nevada Democrat said to Greer during a hearing.
"WTF! Who is in charge?" he asked.
"It looks like your boss just pulled out the rug from under you," he added. "This is amateur hour, and it needs to stop."
— Erin Doherty
As tariffs are set to drive up prices for many goods, Walmart may be able to attract new customers and more frequent visits from shoppers, Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey said Wednesday.
At an investor event in Dallas, he said the retail giant sees an opportunity to gain market share.
"If you look back two years ago when we saw inflation, we invited a lot of new customers to Walmart with high prices," he said. "And what we saw over those two years is they stayed with us."
Walmart executives made the comments before Trump said he would temporarily lower tariffs on dozens of trading partners to 10%, and raise duties on Chinese imports to 125%.
Earlier in the day, the retail giant stuck by its full-year forecast yet it scrapped its first-quarter operating income guidance and did not provide an updated range for that metric. In a news release, the discounter said it wants to "maintain flexibility to invest in price as tariffs are implemented."
CEO Doug McMillon said the discounter is committed to keeping prices low.
"We like where our price gaps are. We want to keep them," he said.
He added, "we're not going to let them narrow."
— Melissa Repko
Shares of Truth Social operator Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. are rocketing nearly 19% higher, just minutes after the president temporarily backed off his so-called reciprocal tariffs for dozens of countries.
— Kevin Breuninger
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says Trump was always planning to pull back his sweeping tariff plans for dozens of countries just days after announcing it.
"This was his strategy all along," Bessent tells reporters at the White House.
"You might even say he goaded China into a bad position," Bessent says, referring to the fact that China, which imposed retaliatory tariffs, now faces higher U.S. duties while others get a reprieve.
— Kevin Breuninger
Bessent says Trump wants to be "personally involved" in negotiations over the tariffs, which is why the White House is announcing the 90-day pause.
"Each one of these is going to be a separate, bespoke negotiation," Bessent says.
— Erin Doherty
The White House is clarifying that Trump's announcement of a 90-day tariff "pause" means that the "tariff level will be brought down to a universal 10% tariff" during that time, while "negotiations are ongoing."
That respite does not apply to China, which will see U.S. tariffs on its goods rise to 125%.
— Kevin Breuninger
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says on X that he and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent "sat with the President while he wrote one of the most extraordinary Truth posts of his Presidency."
"The world is ready to work with President Trump to fix global trade, and China has chosen the opposite direction," Lutnick writes.
— Kevin Breuninger
Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said the carrier will defer deliveries of new aircraft if they are hit with tariffs.
The airline is a major customer of European manufacturer Airbus. While the company has been also assembling narrow-body aircraft out of its Mobile, Alabama, factory, tariffs on products from Europe could hit many of the hundreds of components that go into a plane.
"We'll work very closely with Airbus, who are great partners, and they understand our perspective," Bastian said in an earnings call.
Earlier, in an interview with CNBC, Bastian called Trump's tariffs the "wrong approach."
He also noted that the U.S. exports more aerospace products than it brings in.
"That's a really important fact to know and I hope our leaders in Washington are paying attention to that," Bastian said on the earnings call.
— Leslie Josephs
Markets ripped higher on Trump's announcement of a 90-day tariff "pause."
Read CNBC's full markets coverage here.
— Kevin Breuninger
Trump in a Truth Social post says he is "immediately" raising U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports to 125% "based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World's Markets."
But Trump in the same post says he has "authorized a 90 day PAUSE" for other countries and that more than 75 nations have reached out to negotiate.
That pause, and "a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%," are both "effective immediately," Trump writes.
Read the full post:
Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World's Markets, I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125%, effective immediately. At some point, hopefully in the near future, China will realize that the days of ripping off the U.S.A., and other Countries, is no longer sustainable or acceptable. Conversely, and based on the fact that more than 75 Countries have called Representatives of the United States, including the Departments of Commerce, Treasury, and the USTR, to negotiate a solution to the subjects being discussed relative to Trade, Trade Barriers, Tariffs, Currency Manipulation, and Non Monetary Tariffs, and that these Countries have not, at my strong suggestion, retaliated in any way, shape, or form against the United States, I have authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
— Kevin Breuninger
Trump's job approval rating fell sharply after the rollout of his sweeping global tariff policy a week ago, a new Economist/YouGov poll shows.
The survey found that 51% of respondents disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president, versus 43% who view his efforts positively.
Trump's disapproval gap widened by 5 percentage points from the pollster's prior survey, conducted from March 30 to April 1 — a day before he unveiled his so-called reciprocal tariffs.
The new poll found 56% of Americans said that Trump's efforts to slap tariffs on imports have "gone too far." Just 27% say they've "been about right."
Respondents' views of Trump's handling of jobs and the economy also soured: 51% disapprove and 41% approve, according to the poll. That is a drop of 7 percentage points from the prior survey.
The poll surveyed 1,741 respondents — most of whom were registered voters — and has a margin of error of 3.1%.
— Kevin Breuninger
The escalating trade war could ultimately dent the U.S. mortgage market — if China, Japan or other foreign nations choose to sell U.S. mortgage-backed securities in response to Trump's tariffs.
At the end of January, more than $1.3 trillion worth of the securities was held by foreign countries, according to Ginnie Mae. That amounts to 15% of the outstanding total.
Should those countries choose to sell, mortgage rates would rise.
"If China wanted to hit us hard, they could unload treasuries. Is that a threat? Sure it is," said Guy Cecala, executive chair of Inside Mortgage Finance.
— Sara Salinas and Diana Olick
Chinese imports will generate $1.24 billion in tariffs collected each day after Trump's new duties take full effect, global trade data company ImportGenius estimates.
Imports from Vietnam will generate $94.86 million in tariffs collected each day, according to ImportGenius, which shared its estimates with CNBC.
Tariffs on imports from the European Union will generate $12.2 million in duties collected daily, the company said.
Total annual tariffs collected on imports from China, Vietnam and the EU will top $640 billion, the company estimates.
- Lori Ann LaRocco and Dan Mangan
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says that a "market crash" spurred by Trump's tariffs is lighting Americans' retirement accounts "on fire."
The plummeting market has "vaporized a whopping $104,000 from the average retirement account," Schumer says from the Senate floor.
"That's when you factor in a 17% drop in the Standard and Poor's 500 since the middle of February," he says.
"That's years, sometimes decades, of people's savings gone in a flash."
For Americans retiring soon, Trump's tariffs are "like a brick over the head," Schumer says.
— Erin Doherty
An "on the water clause" will allow cargo entering U.S. ports today or already in transit at sea to avoid being subject to reciprocal tariffs that took effect today and Saturday.
The clause was contained in updated guidance on tariffs of Chinese imports released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The guidance says that cargo already on its way to the U.S. will be subject to a base tariff rate of 10% that Trump announced in more than 180 countries last week — but not to extra, reciprocal rates of varying levels imposed on scores of those countries in recent days.
Any cargo "loaded onto a vessel at the port of loading and in transit on the final mode of transport on or after 12:01 a.m. EDT April 5, 2025, and before 12:01 a.m. EDT April 9, 2025, and (2) are entered for consumption, or withdrawn from warehouse for consumption, before 12:01 a.m. EDT on May 27 2025, are subject to the 10% additional rate in lieu of the country-specific rate of duty," the guidance says.
The May 27 date gives ocean freight sufficient time to arrive in North America once on the water.
— Dan Mangan and Lori Ann LaRocco
China issued an alert warning its citizens and students of the potential risk of traveling in the U.S. and attending schools there.
"Recently, due to the deterioration of China-US economic and trade relations and the domestic security situation in the United States, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism reminds Chinese tourists to fully assess the risks of traveling to the United States and be cautious," the ministry said in an alert.
China's Education Ministry issued a similar alert to students studying in the U.S.
In 2024, approximately 1.6 million Chinese tourists visited the United States and more than 250,000 students enrolled in U.S. schools.
— Dan Mangan
Google is trying to determine its response to tariffs that will increase the cost of goods imported to the U.S., the search engine company's cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian, said in an interview with CNBC's Deirdre Bosa on Tuesday.
"The tariff side is so fluid," he said. "I don't want to comment on it, because it's changing by the minute. We're working similar to every other company to look at what we should do."
Google has taken steps to lower the cost of sending requests to its artificial intelligence models, Kurian said. In addition to renting out Nvidia graphics processing units, the company also offers its own Tensor Processing Units.
"We co-engineer the model and the infrastructure," he said. "We're able to do an exceptional job with quality and cost and latency, and the customers who use it love it."
— Jordan Novet
Pharmaceutical stocks are reeling after Trump reiterated that he is planning to impose "major" tariffs on drug imports with the stated goal of bringing more manufacturing back to the U.S.
Amgen and Merck shares were down about 2%, while AbbVie shed 3%.
Trump's remarks at an event in Washington did not provide many details on how these levies would be structured, but Bank of America analyst Tim Anderson speculates Trump will use a "Section 232 Investigation."
If this is true, Anderson said it could take some time to execute, based on past examples. With this strategy, an investigation is launched to determine if importing specific goods is a threat to national security. If it is, then action can be taken.
Medical products were excluded from the "reciprocal" tariffs announced April 2. This was in keeping with long-standing trade agreements that have exempted drugs from tariffs.
— Christina Cheddar Berk
Canada's 25% auto tariffs took effect on U.S.-produced vehicles and many parts in American cars and trucks.
The new levies differ in important ways from Trump's tariffs implemented last week.
Canadian officials purposely carved out individual auto parts from the tariffs and are taking into account the United States-Canada-Mexico Agreement, or USMCA, trade deal with the new levies. There's also a remissions process that could allow companies some relief from the duties, according to Canadian officials.
Canada's response includes 25% tariffs on vehicles from the U.S. that are not compliant with USMCA — or CUSMA, as Canada refers to it — as well as non-Canadian and non-Mexican content of USMCA-compliant fully assembled vehicles imported into Canada from the U.S.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada's new levies are expected to generate 8 billion Canadian dollars ($5.6 billion), which will be used to help workers and companies affected by Trump's tariffs. Vehicle imports from the U.S. totaled CA$35.6 billion in 2024, according to the Department of Finance Canada.
Read the full story.
— Michael Wayland
The European Union voted to approve retaliatory countermeasures against 25% tariffs imposed by the U.S. on steel and aluminum.
The European Commission, the bloc's executive arm, said collection on the duties would start April 15.
The tariffs were set to target a wide range of goods, including poultry, grains, clothing and metals, according to a draft document seen by CNBC in March.
The EU has not released a final list of affected products and declined to comment when asked what it would include.
The EU also faces tariffs of 20% on almost all U.S. imports.
— Jenni Reid
Trump Media shares popped on the heels of Trump using his initials — DJT — at the end of a social media post telling people, "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!"
DJT is also the stock ticker symbol for Trump Media, which owns the Truth Social app that the president uses.
Trump often signs his Truth Social posts "DJT" when the topic of those posts does not relate to stocks or the market.
— Dan Mangan
Trump is urging people to relax as trading restarts after four straight days of U.S. stock market declines.
"BE COOL! Everything is going to work out well," Trump wrote on Truth Social three minutes after markets opened in the red, again.
"The USA will be bigger and better than ever before!" he wrote.
In a follow-up post, he insisted, "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!"
— Kevin Breuninger
Trump is pressuring House Republicans to immediately pass a massive reconciliation bill that enshrines the president's campaign wish list of tax breaks and spending cuts.
"It is IMPERATIVE that Republicans in the House pass the Tax Cut Bill, NOW!" Trump wrote on Truth Social.
"Our Country Will Boom!!!" he wrote.
Trump has repeatedly urged Congress to pass what he calls a single "big, beautiful bill," claiming it is essential to the success of his economic agenda.
Senate Republicans over the weekend approved a framework for the bill.
— Kevin Breuninger
Trump's tariffs on China are already hampering Christmas sales.
About 87% of Christmas items sold in the U.S. were imported from China in 2024, amounting to roughly $4 billion in goods, Reuters reports.
Orders for those year-end items typically get finalized by mid-April, producers told the news service. This year, the U.S. orders aren't coming in.
"So far this year, none of my American customers have placed any orders," Qun Ying, who runs an artificial Christmas tree factory in China, told Reuters. "Of course it's about the tariffs."
Read the full report by Reuters.
— Sara Salinas
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer says her state is already hurting from Trump's tariff regime, even as she expresses support for the president's goal of reshoring U.S. manufacturing jobs.
"I'm not going to sugarcoat it: These last few days have been really tough for Michigan," the Democratic governor said in a speech on the economy.
The Great Lakes State is highly dependent on the steady flow of goods from trading partners that fuel its auto industry, which comprises 20% of the state's economy, she said.
Whitmer described a cascade of economic consequences as a result of Trump's tariffs, as carmakers stockpile parts, suppliers face higher costs and dealerships raise prices.
"It really is a triple whammy: Higher costs, fewer jobs and more uncertainty," she said.
Whitmer has been discussed as a possible contender for the 2028 presidential cycle.
— Kevin Breuninger
Sen. Elizabeth Warren moved to force a vote on a resolution to repeal Trump's tariffs by canceling the emergency declaration used to justify them.
"By putting across-the-board tariffs with virtually every nation, on virtually every product, with no planning and no rhyme or reason to the numbers, is just creating economic chaos," she said on CNBC's "Squawk Box."
Warren said the emergency law was designed for far greater scenarios, calling for more Republicans to join in the bipartisan legislation.
"I think tariffs are a very important tool in our economic toolbox, but they have to be used in a way that is targeted," Warren said.
Warren added that her most serious concern about tariffs is price increases and inflation, creating an environment for businesses to raise costs.
– Laya Neelakandan
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says a recession in the U.S. is "a likely outcome" of the Trump tariffs.
He was asked by Fox Business Network's Maria Bartiromo whether he personally expects a recession.
"I think probably that's a likely outcome," he replied.
— Erin Doherty
Air France-KLM CEO Ben Smith said the company currently sees demand holding up, despite tariff uncertainty.
"We would like more certainty, more clarity, for sure," Smith said on CNBC's Squawk Box. "So far, we're not seeing anything at this point."
The company will report earnings on April 30 and has thus far not lowered its forecasted guidance, Smith added.
Airline stocks dipped after Delta said the company won't expand flying in the second half of the year because of the shifting trade policies.
– Laya Neelakandan
Walmart pulled its first-quarter operating income outlook to help it "maintain flexibility to invest in price as tariffs are implemented."
"Clearly, our environment has changed, so that makes this really exciting for us," Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said ahead of an investor presentation in Dallas. The remark drew a laugh from the room of investors, bankers and reporters.
"It's clearly a fluid environment," he said. "And while we don't know everything that's going to happen, of course, we do know what our priorities are, and we know what our purpose is, and we'll be focused on keeping prices as low as we can. We'll be focused on managing our inventory and our expenses well."
"We've learned how to manage through turbulent periods," he said.
— Jacob Pramuk and Melissa Repko
Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., says that the tariffs are a "high risk move" by Trump that should have congressional oversight.
"I'm not anti-tariff across the board," he just said on CNBC, noting that China and other nations with adversarial trade relationships with the U.S. should have tariffs.
"But I don't really think a trade war with the world is a smart way forward," he says.
Bacon has introduced a bipartisan bill to curb the president's authority over tariffs. He says that he likely has the support of a "handful of Republicans" in the House on the measure.
"I'm not trying to tell the president how to negotiate, but he has to come to Congress and request approval, when he wants to do tariffs," he says.
— Erin Doherty
Bessent is calling for China to come to the negotiating table over tariffs, singling out the fentanyl issue as a potential basis for reciprocity.
"I think it's unfortunate that the Chinese actually don't want to come and negotiate, because they are the worst offenders in the international trading system," Bessent told Fox Business.
"They have the most imbalanced economy in the history of the modern world, and I can tell you that this escalation is a loser for them."
Bessent said Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping have "a very good personal relationship, and I am confident that this will be resolved at the highest level."
"A very good start would be for them to make a gesture on the precursor fentanyl, because distributing drugs in China is punishable by death. Why don't they apply the same standards to the people who are exporting these chemicals to the US?" Bessent said.
—Jeff Cox
Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said Trump's shifting trade policy is the "wrong approach" and is hurting domestic leisure and corporate bookings alike.
The carrier said it is too early to update its 2025 forecast, which Bastian in early January said was going to be the airline's "best financial year in our history."
Bastian's comments are a stark change from the optimism many CEOs had before the Trump administration took office. Bastian said in November the Trump administration's approach to regulation would likely be a "breath of fresh air."
In addition to market turmoil, concerns about higher prices from tariffs and mass government layoffs, airline CEOs have noted they're seeing declining international travel demand into the U.S., particularly from Canada, which threatens to drive up the $50 billion deficit in international tourism spending.
— Leslie Josephs
Trump is urging CEOs to move their businesses to the U.S.
"This is a GREAT time to move your COMPANY into the United States of America, like Apple, and so many others, in record numbers, are doing," Trump posted on social media.
"ZERO TARIFFS, and almost immediate Electrical/Energy hook ups and approvals. No Environmental Delays. DON'T WAIT, DO IT NOW!"
— Christina Wilkie
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Google has reversed a policy forbidding employees from discussing its antitrust woes following a settlement with workers.
The company sent a notice to U.S. employees last week saying it rescinded "the rule requesting that workers refrain from commenting internally or externally about the on-going antitrust lawsuit filed against Google by the U.S. Department of Justice," according to correspondence viewed by CNBC.
Google settled with the Alphabet Workers Union, which represents company employees and contractors, according to the U.S. National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB. The settlement and policy reversal mark a major victory for Google staffers, who have seen increased censorship on subjects such as politics, litigation and defense contracts by the search giant since 2019.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google in 2020, alleging that the company has kept its share of the general search market by creating strong barriers to entry and a feedback loop that sustained its dominance.
Google said it "will not announce or maintain overbroad rules or policies that restrict your right to comment, internally or externally, about whether and/or how the on-going antitrust lawsuit filed against Google by the U.S. Department of Justice may impact your terms and conditions of employment," according to last week's notice.
The policy change was first reported by The New York Times.
The reversal comes as Google and the DOJ prepare to return to the courtroom for their scheduled remedies trial on April 21. The DOJ has said it is considering structural remedies, including breaking up Google's Chrome web browser, which it argues gives Google an unfair advantage in the search market.
A U.S. District Court judge ruled in August that Google illegally held a monopoly in the search market. Google said it would appeal the decision. The DOJ doubled down on its calls for a breakup in a March filing.
Following the August ruling, Kent Walker, Google's president of global affairs, sent a companywide email directing employees to "refrain from commenting on this case, both internally and externally."
Shortly after, the Alphabet Workers Union filed an unfair labor practice charge against Google with the NLRB. The union alleged that Walker's message was an "overly broad directive" and said that a breakup could impact workers' roles. The NLRB in March ruled that Google must allow workers to speak on such topics.
Google's settlement states that the National Labor Relations Act gives employees the right to form, join or assist a union. It notes that Google is not rescinding its prior clarification that states employees may not speak on behalf of Google on this matter without approval from the company. The settlement also adds that Google will not interfere with, restrain or coerce workers in the exercise of their rights.
Despite the settlement, spokesperson Courtenay Mencini said Google did not agree with the NLRB's ruling.
"To avoid lengthy litigation, we agreed to remind employees that they have the right to talk about their employment, as they've always been free to and regularly do," Mencini said in a statement to CNBC.
The settlement by Google comes at a "crucial moment" ahead of the remedies trial, the Alphabet Worker's Union said Monday.
"We think the potential remedies from this trial could have impact on our wages, working conditions and terms of employment," said Stephen McMurtry, communications chair of the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA, told CNBC.
WATCH: Google's cloud strategy amid tariff turmoil
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Wednesday's jaw-dropping stock-market rally on President Donald Trump's surprising tariff reversal is one for the history books.
The S&P 500 skyrocketed 9.52% in a kneejerk reaction to Trump's announcement to put a 90-day pause on some of the lofty 'reciprocal' tariffs. The one-day gain ranks as the third biggest since World War II for the main stock market benchmark, according to FactSet.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average advanced 2,962.86 points, or 7.87% and posted its biggest advance since March 2020.
The Nasdaq Composite jumped 12.16%, notching its largest one-day jump since January 2001 and second-best day ever.
"This is the pivotal moment we've been waiting for," said Gina Bolvin, president of Bolvin Wealth Management Group. "The immediate market reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, as investors interpret this as a step toward much-needed clarity."
The market was a coiled spring after a brutal four-day stretch that briefly pushed the S&P 500 into bear-market territory. Over the course of the previous four trading sessions, the S&P 500 suffered a 12% loss, a decline not seen since the pandemic. The Dow lost more than 4,500 points during the four-day stretch, while the Nasdaq was down more than 13%.
While stocks managed to recoup much of the losses, investors are not completely out of the woods as Trump vows to reorient global trade. The president said more than 75 countries contacted U.S. officials to negotiate after he unveiled his new tariffs last week.
"It's still too early to signal an all clear," said Dave Sekera, Morningstar's chief U.S. market strategist. "Trade negotiations have yet to start and once they do, there will be positive and negative headlines as each party positions itself to extract the maximum amount of concessions possible."
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Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former Meta Platforms Inc. executive-turned-whistleblower, testified before Congress that the social media giant threatened US interests while cozying up to China — claims the company said are false.
Wynn-Williams, who served as director of global public policy for the company until she left in 2017, told the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism on Wednesday that she witnessed executives undermining US national security. The testimony included allegations that Meta, formerly called Facebook, offered censorship tools to China and helped the country advance in an artificial intelligence arms race.
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In this article
United Airlines and Microchip Technology were among the stocks showing the largest intraday reversals in their share prices in Wednesday afternoon's furious rally following President Donald Trump's decision to pause most of the largest tariff increases for 90 days.
In afternoon trading, the Atlanta-based airline and the semiconductor manufacturer soared 26.9% and 26.8%, respectively, from the session lows seen earlier in the day.
The moves came alongside a roaring rally in stocks after Trump temporarily dropped the highest new tariff rates on most U.S. imports to 10% for 90 days, while raising those imposed on Chinese imports to 125%, "effective immediately."
United Airlines, Microchip and others would suffer under a global trade war that has dampened consumer confidence and curtailed spending. Delta Air Lines recently said it would not reaffirm its financial guidance for the full year, citing uncertainty caused by higher U.S. tariffs on imports.
Microchip and rivals such as ON Semiconductor, which soared 21.8% from its lows of the day, have slumped since the market peaked in February, despite semiconductors being excluded from the tariff increases, hurt by concern that the economy would slow and demand for chips would weaken.
In Wednesday's historic afternoon rally, the S&P 500 soared as much as 10%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average advanced 3,100 points, or about 8.1%, while the Nasdaq Composite jumped as much as 12.7%, its second-largest gain ever.
"The market's move upward is violent, and speaks to how badly the market was looking for clarity" on tariff policy, said Chris Brigati, chief investment officer at investment firm SWBC. "It appears President Trump's motivation to get trade counterparts to the negotiating table is bearing fruit and that is a constructive development for the ongoing trade war."
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The wild trade war saga is causing recession forecasts to swing at one of Wall Street's top banks.
Goldman Sachs reversed its recession call on Wednesday. Analysts raised the probability of a recession for the third time before slashing their new forecast in the afternoon after President Donald Trump announced a 90-day tariff pause and walked back most of his recently unveiled reciprocal levies.
The bank now sees a 45% probability of a recession in the next year, the same chance analysts predicted last week.
Trump isn't pausing all his tariffs. During the 90-day reprieve, the White House will keep a 10% across-the-board tariff in place, the president said Wednesday on Truth Social. The administration is also raising China's tariff rate to 125%, he added.
Still, the newest tariff plan is more in line with what Goldman originally anticipated for Trump's trade policy, the bank said in a note, explaining why it was cutting its recession probability from 65% back to 45%.
"As a result, we are reverting to our non-recession baseline forecast with GDP growth of 0.5% and a 45% probability of recession," analysts wrote an hour after most tariffs were paused.
Last week, Goldman raised its 12-month probability of a recession from 35% to 45%. Analysts said the bank intended to change its baseline forecast to a recession if Trump implemented his new tariffs on Wednesday.
Early Wednesday, as Trump's new tariffs went into effect, the bank raised its 12-month recession probability to 65%, saying it believed it was unlikely that the White House would quickly reverse most of the tariffs.
The bank said it expected the overall US tariff rate to rise by at least 20 percentage points, given the tariffs Trump originally implemented on Wednesday. With the reduced 10% tariff, it now expects the overall US tariff rate to rise 15 percentage points, it added.
Goldman isn't the only one feeling the whiplash. Stocks were in choppy waters Wednesday before staging a stunning reversal after Trump announced the tariff reprieve. The Dow rose more than 2,700 points, and the Nasdaq composite was up 12%, its biggest gain since 2008. The S&P 500 jumped as much as 9%.
Correction: April 9, 2025 — An earlier version of this story misstated when the 10% across-the-board tariff would be in place. It's set to stay in place during the 90-day pause on most tariffs, not go into effect after it.
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This was CNBC's live coverage of how U.S. trade partners, the White House and employers responded to President Donald Trump's historic tariffs.
What you need to know
CNBC's reporters are covering the tariffs and their effects, live on air and online from our bureaus in Washington; London; Singapore; San Francisco; and Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.
Canada and Mexico will not face an additional 10% tariff as a result of Trump's announcement revising his so-called reciprocal tariff policy, a White House official tells CNBC.
The existing U.S. tariff structure on imports from Canada and Mexico — a 25% duty on goods not covered by the trilateral trade deal known as USMCA — remains unchanged, the official says.
— Kevin Breuninger
The president for days has insisted that his tariffs would not be lifted, despite turmoil in the markets and backlash from investors, voters and allies.
Here are three examples of Trump digging in, just days before reversing course:
— Erin Doherty
Trump says he watched Jamie Dimon's interview earlier in the day, in which the JP Morgan CEO said a recession is a "likely outcome" as a result of the tariffs.
Trump says that Dimon was "very good" during the interview and that he said "something had to be done with the tariffs and trade."
"He's very smart and ... a genius financially, he's done a fantastic job at the bank," Trump says.
— Erin Doherty
The White House tells NBC News that it will not be releasing a list of the countries that have so far reached out to start negotiating with the U.S. over Trump's so-called reciprocal tariffs.
Trump, in his Truth Social post announcing the 90-day tariff pause, said that "more than 75 Countries" have called U.S. officials seeking to strike new trade deals.
— Garrett Haake and Kevin Breuninger
Trump said he paused the imposition of higher tariffs on many countries because people "were getting a little bit yippy."
"Well, I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line," Trump told reporters at the White House.
"They were getting yippy, you know, they were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid, unlike these champions, because we have a big job to do," the president said while standing with auto racing champions.
"No other president would have done what I did. No other president," he said. "And it had to be done."
Trump later said, "You have to have flexibility" in policies.
— Dan Mangan
Trump's political operation is amplifying a Truth Social post the president sent just hours before he suspended most tariffs, in which he announced that it was "a great time to buy."
"Did the Panicans listen to @POTUS's advice this morning?" Trump War Room posted on X, just after the tariff pause announcement.
— Erin Doherty
A range of retail stocks spiked after Trump's tariff policy reversal.
Some of the top performers make a significant share of their products in Vietnam. The country's imports will now face a 10% tariff for 90 days, as opposed to the 46% Trump had proposed.
Wayfair shares spiked nearly 20%, while Levi Strauss spiked more than 18%. Deckers and Crocs shares jumped 14% and 12%, respectively.
Nike's stock rose 10%, while shares of Walmart and Target climbed more than 8% each.
— Jacob Pramuk
U.S. crude oil futures jumped more than 4% after Trump announced a lower tariff rate for countries except China, their best day since October 2024.
The U.S. benchmark rose $2.77, or 4.65%, to close at $62.35 per barrel, while global benchmark Brent was up $2.48, or 3.95%, to $65.30 per barrel.
U.S. crude hit an intraday low of $55.12 earlier in the session after Beijing announced tariffs of 84% on U.S. goods in response to Trump's levies. China's tariffs take effect April 10.
But the oil market turned around, swinging more than 13% from its low after Trump dramatically reversed course on his trade war. The president said lower tariff rates of 10% would apply to countries for 90 days with the exception of China.
— Spencer Kimball
The Nasdaq Composite jumped nearly 10% and headed for its best day since 2008 as technology stocks rallied after Trump postponed some tariffs for 90 days.
Tesla, Nvidia and Apple surged more than 10% each, while the VanEck Semiconductor ETF popped more than 14% as chipmaking stocks gained. The bounce comes after a rocky few trading sessions after the White House announced wide sweeping tariffs.
— Samantha Subin
Rep. Steven Horsford grilled Trump's trade representative, Jamieson Greer, about his knowledge of the tariff pause.
"So the trade representative hasn't spoken to the president of the United States about a global reordering of trade, but yet he announced it on a tweet?" the Nevada Democrat said to Greer during a hearing.
"WTF! Who is in charge?" he asked.
"It looks like your boss just pulled out the rug from under you," he added. "This is amateur hour, and it needs to stop."
— Erin Doherty
As tariffs are set to drive up prices for many goods, Walmart may be able to attract new customers and more frequent visits from shoppers, Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey said Wednesday.
At an investor event in Dallas, he said the retail giant sees an opportunity to gain market share.
"If you look back two years ago when we saw inflation, we invited a lot of new customers to Walmart with high prices," he said. "And what we saw over those two years is they stayed with us."
Walmart executives made the comments before Trump said he would temporarily lower tariffs on dozens of trading partners to 10%, and raise duties on Chinese imports to 125%.
Earlier in the day, the retail giant stuck by its full-year forecast yet it scrapped its first-quarter operating income guidance and did not provide an updated range for that metric. In a news release, the discounter said it wants to "maintain flexibility to invest in price as tariffs are implemented."
CEO Doug McMillon said the discounter is committed to keeping prices low.
"We like where our price gaps are. We want to keep them," he said.
He added, "we're not going to let them narrow."
— Melissa Repko
Shares of Truth Social operator Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. are rocketing nearly 19% higher, just minutes after the president temporarily backed off his so-called reciprocal tariffs for dozens of countries.
— Kevin Breuninger
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says Trump was always planning to pull back his sweeping tariff plans for dozens of countries just days after announcing it.
"This was his strategy all along," Bessent tells reporters at the White House.
"You might even say he goaded China into a bad position," Bessent says, referring to the fact that China, which imposed retaliatory tariffs, now faces higher U.S. duties while others get a reprieve.
— Kevin Breuninger
Bessent says Trump wants to be "personally involved" in negotiations over the tariffs, which is why the White House is announcing the 90-day pause.
"Each one of these is going to be a separate, bespoke negotiation," Bessent says.
— Erin Doherty
The White House is clarifying that Trump's announcement of a 90-day tariff "pause" means that the "tariff level will be brought down to a universal 10% tariff" during that time, while "negotiations are ongoing."
That respite does not apply to China, which will see U.S. tariffs on its goods rise to 125%.
— Kevin Breuninger
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says on X that he and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent "sat with the President while he wrote one of the most extraordinary Truth posts of his Presidency."
"The world is ready to work with President Trump to fix global trade, and China has chosen the opposite direction," Lutnick writes.
— Kevin Breuninger
Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said the carrier will defer deliveries of new aircraft if they are hit with tariffs.
The airline is a major customer of European manufacturer Airbus. While the company has been also assembling narrow-body aircraft out of its Mobile, Alabama, factory, tariffs on products from Europe could hit many of the hundreds of components that go into a plane.
"We'll work very closely with Airbus, who are great partners, and they understand our perspective," Bastian said in an earnings call.
Earlier, in an interview with CNBC, Bastian called Trump's tariffs the "wrong approach."
He also noted that the U.S. exports more aerospace products than it brings in.
"That's a really important fact to know and I hope our leaders in Washington are paying attention to that," Bastian said on the earnings call.
— Leslie Josephs
Markets ripped higher on Trump's announcement of a 90-day tariff "pause."
Read CNBC's full markets coverage here.
— Kevin Breuninger
Trump in a Truth Social post says he is "immediately" raising U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports to 125% "based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World's Markets."
But Trump in the same post says he has "authorized a 90 day PAUSE" for other countries and that more than 75 nations have reached out to negotiate.
That pause, and "a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%," are both "effective immediately," Trump writes.
Read the full post:
Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World's Markets, I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125%, effective immediately. At some point, hopefully in the near future, China will realize that the days of ripping off the U.S.A., and other Countries, is no longer sustainable or acceptable. Conversely, and based on the fact that more than 75 Countries have called Representatives of the United States, including the Departments of Commerce, Treasury, and the USTR, to negotiate a solution to the subjects being discussed relative to Trade, Trade Barriers, Tariffs, Currency Manipulation, and Non Monetary Tariffs, and that these Countries have not, at my strong suggestion, retaliated in any way, shape, or form against the United States, I have authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
— Kevin Breuninger
Trump's job approval rating fell sharply after the rollout of his sweeping global tariff policy a week ago, a new Economist/YouGov poll shows.
The survey found that 51% of respondents disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president, versus 43% who view his efforts positively.
Trump's disapproval gap widened by 5 percentage points from the pollster's prior survey, conducted from March 30 to April 1 — a day before he unveiled his so-called reciprocal tariffs.
The new poll found 56% of Americans said that Trump's efforts to slap tariffs on imports have "gone too far." Just 27% say they've "been about right."
Respondents' views of Trump's handling of jobs and the economy also soured: 51% disapprove and 41% approve, according to the poll. That is a drop of 7 percentage points from the prior survey.
The poll surveyed 1,741 respondents — most of whom were registered voters — and has a margin of error of 3.1%.
— Kevin Breuninger
The escalating trade war could ultimately dent the U.S. mortgage market — if China, Japan or other foreign nations choose to sell U.S. mortgage-backed securities in response to Trump's tariffs.
At the end of January, more than $1.3 trillion worth of the securities was held by foreign countries, according to Ginnie Mae. That amounts to 15% of the outstanding total.
Should those countries choose to sell, mortgage rates would rise.
"If China wanted to hit us hard, they could unload treasuries. Is that a threat? Sure it is," said Guy Cecala, executive chair of Inside Mortgage Finance.
— Sara Salinas and Diana Olick
Chinese imports will generate $1.24 billion in tariffs collected each day after Trump's new duties take full effect, global trade data company ImportGenius estimates.
Imports from Vietnam will generate $94.86 million in tariffs collected each day, according to ImportGenius, which shared its estimates with CNBC.
Tariffs on imports from the European Union will generate $12.2 million in duties collected daily, the company said.
Total annual tariffs collected on imports from China, Vietnam and the EU will top $640 billion, the company estimates.
- Lori Ann LaRocco and Dan Mangan
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says that a "market crash" spurred by Trump's tariffs is lighting Americans' retirement accounts "on fire."
The plummeting market has "vaporized a whopping $104,000 from the average retirement account," Schumer says from the Senate floor.
"That's when you factor in a 17% drop in the Standard and Poor's 500 since the middle of February," he says.
"That's years, sometimes decades, of people's savings gone in a flash."
For Americans retiring soon, Trump's tariffs are "like a brick over the head," Schumer says.
— Erin Doherty
An "on the water clause" will allow cargo entering U.S. ports today or already in transit at sea to avoid being subject to reciprocal tariffs that took effect today and Saturday.
The clause was contained in updated guidance on tariffs of Chinese imports released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The guidance says that cargo already on its way to the U.S. will be subject to a base tariff rate of 10% that Trump announced in more than 180 countries last week — but not to extra, reciprocal rates of varying levels imposed on scores of those countries in recent days.
Any cargo "loaded onto a vessel at the port of loading and in transit on the final mode of transport on or after 12:01 a.m. EDT April 5, 2025, and before 12:01 a.m. EDT April 9, 2025, and (2) are entered for consumption, or withdrawn from warehouse for consumption, before 12:01 a.m. EDT on May 27 2025, are subject to the 10% additional rate in lieu of the country-specific rate of duty," the guidance says.
The May 27 date gives ocean freight sufficient time to arrive in North America once on the water.
— Dan Mangan and Lori Ann LaRocco
China issued an alert warning its citizens and students of the potential risk of traveling in the U.S. and attending schools there.
"Recently, due to the deterioration of China-US economic and trade relations and the domestic security situation in the United States, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism reminds Chinese tourists to fully assess the risks of traveling to the United States and be cautious," the ministry said in an alert.
China's Education Ministry issued a similar alert to students studying in the U.S.
In 2024, approximately 1.6 million Chinese tourists visited the United States and more than 250,000 students enrolled in U.S. schools.
— Dan Mangan
Google is trying to determine its response to tariffs that will increase the cost of goods imported to the U.S., the search engine company's cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian, said in an interview with CNBC's Deirdre Bosa on Tuesday.
"The tariff side is so fluid," he said. "I don't want to comment on it, because it's changing by the minute. We're working similar to every other company to look at what we should do."
Google has taken steps to lower the cost of sending requests to its artificial intelligence models, Kurian said. In addition to renting out Nvidia graphics processing units, the company also offers its own Tensor Processing Units.
"We co-engineer the model and the infrastructure," he said. "We're able to do an exceptional job with quality and cost and latency, and the customers who use it love it."
— Jordan Novet
Pharmaceutical stocks are reeling after Trump reiterated that he is planning to impose "major" tariffs on drug imports with the stated goal of bringing more manufacturing back to the U.S.
Amgen and Merck shares were down about 2%, while AbbVie shed 3%.
Trump's remarks at an event in Washington did not provide many details on how these levies would be structured, but Bank of America analyst Tim Anderson speculates Trump will use a "Section 232 Investigation."
If this is true, Anderson said it could take some time to execute, based on past examples. With this strategy, an investigation is launched to determine if importing specific goods is a threat to national security. If it is, then action can be taken.
Medical products were excluded from the "reciprocal" tariffs announced April 2. This was in keeping with long-standing trade agreements that have exempted drugs from tariffs.
— Christina Cheddar Berk
Canada's 25% auto tariffs took effect on U.S.-produced vehicles and many parts in American cars and trucks.
The new levies differ in important ways from Trump's tariffs implemented last week.
Canadian officials purposely carved out individual auto parts from the tariffs and are taking into account the United States-Canada-Mexico Agreement, or USMCA, trade deal with the new levies. There's also a remissions process that could allow companies some relief from the duties, according to Canadian officials.
Canada's response includes 25% tariffs on vehicles from the U.S. that are not compliant with USMCA — or CUSMA, as Canada refers to it — as well as non-Canadian and non-Mexican content of USMCA-compliant fully assembled vehicles imported into Canada from the U.S.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada's new levies are expected to generate 8 billion Canadian dollars ($5.6 billion), which will be used to help workers and companies affected by Trump's tariffs. Vehicle imports from the U.S. totaled CA$35.6 billion in 2024, according to the Department of Finance Canada.
Read the full story.
— Michael Wayland
The European Union voted to approve retaliatory countermeasures against 25% tariffs imposed by the U.S. on steel and aluminum.
The European Commission, the bloc's executive arm, said collection on the duties would start April 15.
The tariffs were set to target a wide range of goods, including poultry, grains, clothing and metals, according to a draft document seen by CNBC in March.
The EU has not released a final list of affected products and declined to comment when asked what it would include.
The EU also faces tariffs of 20% on almost all U.S. imports.
— Jenni Reid
Trump Media shares popped on the heels of Trump using his initials — DJT — at the end of a social media post telling people, "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!"
DJT is also the stock ticker symbol for Trump Media, which owns the Truth Social app that the president uses.
Trump often signs his Truth Social posts "DJT" when the topic of those posts does not relate to stocks or the market.
— Dan Mangan
Trump is urging people to relax as trading restarts after four straight days of U.S. stock market declines.
"BE COOL! Everything is going to work out well," Trump wrote on Truth Social three minutes after markets opened in the red, again.
"The USA will be bigger and better than ever before!" he wrote.
In a follow-up post, he insisted, "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!"
— Kevin Breuninger
Trump is pressuring House Republicans to immediately pass a massive reconciliation bill that enshrines the president's campaign wish list of tax breaks and spending cuts.
"It is IMPERATIVE that Republicans in the House pass the Tax Cut Bill, NOW!" Trump wrote on Truth Social.
"Our Country Will Boom!!!" he wrote.
Trump has repeatedly urged Congress to pass what he calls a single "big, beautiful bill," claiming it is essential to the success of his economic agenda.
Senate Republicans over the weekend approved a framework for the bill.
— Kevin Breuninger
Trump's tariffs on China are already hampering Christmas sales.
About 87% of Christmas items sold in the U.S. were imported from China in 2024, amounting to roughly $4 billion in goods, Reuters reports.
Orders for those year-end items typically get finalized by mid-April, producers told the news service. This year, the U.S. orders aren't coming in.
"So far this year, none of my American customers have placed any orders," Qun Ying, who runs an artificial Christmas tree factory in China, told Reuters. "Of course it's about the tariffs."
Read the full report by Reuters.
— Sara Salinas
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer says her state is already hurting from Trump's tariff regime, even as she expresses support for the president's goal of reshoring U.S. manufacturing jobs.
"I'm not going to sugarcoat it: These last few days have been really tough for Michigan," the Democratic governor said in a speech on the economy.
The Great Lakes State is highly dependent on the steady flow of goods from trading partners that fuel its auto industry, which comprises 20% of the state's economy, she said.
Whitmer described a cascade of economic consequences as a result of Trump's tariffs, as carmakers stockpile parts, suppliers face higher costs and dealerships raise prices.
"It really is a triple whammy: Higher costs, fewer jobs and more uncertainty," she said.
Whitmer has been discussed as a possible contender for the 2028 presidential cycle.
— Kevin Breuninger
Sen. Elizabeth Warren moved to force a vote on a resolution to repeal Trump's tariffs by canceling the emergency declaration used to justify them.
"By putting across-the-board tariffs with virtually every nation, on virtually every product, with no planning and no rhyme or reason to the numbers, is just creating economic chaos," she said on CNBC's "Squawk Box."
Warren said the emergency law was designed for far greater scenarios, calling for more Republicans to join in the bipartisan legislation.
"I think tariffs are a very important tool in our economic toolbox, but they have to be used in a way that is targeted," Warren said.
Warren added that her most serious concern about tariffs is price increases and inflation, creating an environment for businesses to raise costs.
– Laya Neelakandan
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says a recession in the U.S. is "a likely outcome" of the Trump tariffs.
He was asked by Fox Business Network's Maria Bartiromo whether he personally expects a recession.
"I think probably that's a likely outcome," he replied.
— Erin Doherty
Air France-KLM CEO Ben Smith said the company currently sees demand holding up, despite tariff uncertainty.
"We would like more certainty, more clarity, for sure," Smith said on CNBC's Squawk Box. "So far, we're not seeing anything at this point."
The company will report earnings on April 30 and has thus far not lowered its forecasted guidance, Smith added.
Airline stocks dipped after Delta said the company won't expand flying in the second half of the year because of the shifting trade policies.
– Laya Neelakandan
Walmart pulled its first-quarter operating income outlook to help it "maintain flexibility to invest in price as tariffs are implemented."
"Clearly, our environment has changed, so that makes this really exciting for us," Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said ahead of an investor presentation in Dallas. The remark drew a laugh from the room of investors, bankers and reporters.
"It's clearly a fluid environment," he said. "And while we don't know everything that's going to happen, of course, we do know what our priorities are, and we know what our purpose is, and we'll be focused on keeping prices as low as we can. We'll be focused on managing our inventory and our expenses well."
"We've learned how to manage through turbulent periods," he said.
— Jacob Pramuk and Melissa Repko
Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., says that the tariffs are a "high risk move" by Trump that should have congressional oversight.
"I'm not anti-tariff across the board," he just said on CNBC, noting that China and other nations with adversarial trade relationships with the U.S. should have tariffs.
"But I don't really think a trade war with the world is a smart way forward," he says.
Bacon has introduced a bipartisan bill to curb the president's authority over tariffs. He says that he likely has the support of a "handful of Republicans" in the House on the measure.
"I'm not trying to tell the president how to negotiate, but he has to come to Congress and request approval, when he wants to do tariffs," he says.
— Erin Doherty
Bessent is calling for China to come to the negotiating table over tariffs, singling out the fentanyl issue as a potential basis for reciprocity.
"I think it's unfortunate that the Chinese actually don't want to come and negotiate, because they are the worst offenders in the international trading system," Bessent told Fox Business.
"They have the most imbalanced economy in the history of the modern world, and I can tell you that this escalation is a loser for them."
Bessent said Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping have "a very good personal relationship, and I am confident that this will be resolved at the highest level."
"A very good start would be for them to make a gesture on the precursor fentanyl, because distributing drugs in China is punishable by death. Why don't they apply the same standards to the people who are exporting these chemicals to the US?" Bessent said.
—Jeff Cox
Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said Trump's shifting trade policy is the "wrong approach" and is hurting domestic leisure and corporate bookings alike.
The carrier said it is too early to update its 2025 forecast, which Bastian in early January said was going to be the airline's "best financial year in our history."
Bastian's comments are a stark change from the optimism many CEOs had before the Trump administration took office. Bastian said in November the Trump administration's approach to regulation would likely be a "breath of fresh air."
In addition to market turmoil, concerns about higher prices from tariffs and mass government layoffs, airline CEOs have noted they're seeing declining international travel demand into the U.S., particularly from Canada, which threatens to drive up the $50 billion deficit in international tourism spending.
— Leslie Josephs
Trump is urging CEOs to move their businesses to the U.S.
"This is a GREAT time to move your COMPANY into the United States of America, like Apple, and so many others, in record numbers, are doing," Trump posted on social media.
"ZERO TARIFFS, and almost immediate Electrical/Energy hook ups and approvals. No Environmental Delays. DON'T WAIT, DO IT NOW!"
— Christina Wilkie
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A pumpjack at an oilfield in Kazakhstan.
Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg
Saudi Arabia's oil supply shock has set up a standoff with OPEC+ members who keep busting their quotas, but the biggest of the offenders has yet to flinch.
Kazakhstan — whose persistent floutingBloomberg Terminal of production limits triggered Riyadh's ire — continues to pump as usual at the biggest oil fields run by its international oil partners, according to people familiar with the matter. The Tengizchevroil joint venture that includes Chevron Corp. and Exxon Mobil Corp. will stick with plans to boost production this year and has no intention of cutting back, the people said. Another operator said they hadn't received any formal request to reduce.
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In this article
Companies including Amazon, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Alphabet's Waymo are helping to usher in major changes across Phoenix, Arizona.
Mayor Kate Gallego, speaking at the 2025 CNBC Changemakers Summit on Tuesday in Los Angeles, told CNBC's Julia Boorstin the impact of the tech projects is being felt across the city in a variety of ways, perhaps even a few that might be unexpected.
"The quality of dumplings," Gallego said with a laugh. "Between Japanese, South Korean and Taiwanese food, it's been incredible," she said, in a reference to the new workers that have arrived in the city as a result of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's plans to invest more than $165 billion to build advanced chips in the U.S., a huge investment that has brought to Phoenix employees of the chip giant and its supplier network from Asia.
Gallego, who was named to this year's CNBC Changemakers list that highlights women who are making a major mark on business, has aimed to position "Phoenix to be known for innovation."
She is helping Phoenix lean into innovation through robotaxis, via the Alphabet-owned Waymo service. The city is one of three where Waymo operates, and Gallego said that there is "one airport in the world where you can take an autonomous vehicle to the airport, and that is Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport."
The city is also working with Amazon on drone delivery. Last year, Amazon soft launched Prime Air in the West Valley of the Phoenix Metro Area, a service that recently resumed after a two-month pause, and Gallego said that she expects the program to expand to serve more customers later this month.
"Eighty percent of [Amazon] packages have a chance to be drone delivery," Gallego said.
According to Amazon, there are more than 50,000 items that can be delivered by drone to customers living near the designated area in under an hour.
Gallego, who has served as mayor of Phoenix since 2019 and was re-elected to her third and final term last fall, has led several other tech-driven upgrades in the city, one uniquely shaped by her background prior to public office when she worked for a corporate strategy and innovation group. While in that role, Gallego said her boss was killed in a traffic accident, which has led to her to try to find innovative ways to improve pedestrian safety — for example, Phoenix has invested in AI-powered traffic signals that can trigger a stop signal if someone were to fall in an intersection.
"Cities are living laboratories," Gallego said. "We're trying to take innovation and look at all our challenges."
There is perhaps no bigger bet around innovation happening in Phoenix than by TMSC and the $165 billion to build advanced chips in the city, the largest private sector investment in the entire U.S. and one of the U.S.'s biggest manufacturing wins in the last several years.
Gallego, who said the effort to bring TSMC to Phoenix started with her first international trip as mayor, noted that the deal required several adaptations for TMSC, including converting the water system plans into metric and adapting to a different type of voltage system that is unlike others used in the city. It's also reshaping the city, from the food to Mandarin now being taught in school systems and spoken at hospitals.
It's also bringing new high-paying jobs to under-served communities, like Navajo women who previously worked in the coal industry now doing iron work at the semiconductor plant and making more than $100,000. Gallego said the city is working to get more students engaged with advanced tech jobs through advanced apprenticeship programs, and teaching even elementary school students about the potential opportunities that now exist in their community.
"It's really changed the city for the better in many ways and that's been very exciting, and we want it to continue to be a success," she said.
Gallego said while the city is still trying to understand exactly how President Donald Trump's new tariff policies will impact investments, especially for chips that travel back and forth around the world, "We're trying to be a little more flexible with our budget [and] leave some breathing room because we're thinking there's going to be huge, huge changes in our economy."
Regardless Gallego said the city's focus on innovation will continue.
"We're hoping to make Phoenix as future ready as possible," she said.
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President Donald Trump on Wednesday dropped new tariff rates on imports from most U.S. trade partners to 10% for 90 days to allow trade negotiations with those countries.
Trump announced the pause hours after goods from nearly 90 nations became subject to stiffer, so-called reciprocal tariffs imposed by the United States.
The president also said in a social media post that he was raising the tariffs imposed on imports from China to 125% "effective immediately" due to the "lack of respect that China has shown to the World's Markets."
China, which is the U.S.'s third-largest trading partner, earlier Wednesday said it would increase its tariff rate for imports from the U.S. to 84%.
Trump said "more than 75 Countries" contacted U.S. officials to negotiate after he unveiled his new tariffs last week.
Stock market indices rocketed sharply higher Wednesday on Trump's announcement, reversing four days of losses. The benchmark S&P 500 index leapt by 7%, which puts it on track for its largest single-day gain in five years.
When asked later about the reason for his decision, Trump told reporters, "Well, I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line."
"They were getting yippy, you know, they were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid," Trump said at the White House.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessett claimed to reporters that Trump had always intended to put the brakes on the wide-ranging tariffs the president announced last week.
"This was his strategy all along," Bessent said at the White House, where officials, including him, had denied for days that the tariffs would be suspended.
On April 2, Trump had said he would impose a baseline rate of 10% for tariffs on imports from more than 180 countries.
A subset of 90 countries' imports would be subject to reciprocal tariffs that took effect Wednesday. Those enhanced levies ranged from a low of 11% to a high of 50%.
Financial markets have been in turmoil since Trump announced with plan, with U.S. stock markets suffering four straight days of declines as of Tuesday.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, criticized Trump on Wednesday,, saying the president "is feeling the heat from Democrats and across America about how bad these tariffs are."
"He is reeling, he is retreating, and that is a good thing," said Schumer.
"This is government by chaos," Schumer said, "He keeps changing things from day to day. His advisers are fighting among themselves, calling each other names, and you cannot run a country with such chaos, with such unpredictability, with such lack of understanding of what's going on in the world and the facts.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, in a tweet, said that he and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sat with Trump while he wrote out the announcement on Truth Social, "one of the most extraordinary Truth posts of his Presidency."
"The world is ready to work with President Trump to fix global trade, and China has chosen the opposite direction," Lutnick wrote.
Read Trump's full Truth Social announcement:
Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World's Markets, I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125%, effective immediately. At some point, hopefully in the near future, China will realize that the days of ripping off the U.S.A., and other Countries, is no longer sustainable or acceptable.
Conversely, and based on the fact that more than 75 Countries have called Representatives of the United States, including the Departments of Commerce, Treasury, and the USTR, to negotiate a solution to the subjects being discussed relative to Trade, Trade Barriers, Tariffs, Currency Manipulation, and Non Monetary Tariffs, and that these Countries have not, at my strong suggestion, retaliated in any way, shape, or form against the United States, I have authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
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In this article
Businesses both large and small tell CNBC that the latest round of President Donald Trump's tariffs, targeting countries all over the world and taking the trade levies up to the highest rates in a century, could result in freight being abandoned at ports as cash-strapped owners and CEOs reject incoming goods that could financially wipe them out.
Rick Muskat, president of the family-owned shoe retailer Deer Stags, which imports around two million shoes a year — with about 98% of their men's and boy's shoes made in China and sold in Macy's, Kohl's, JCPenney, and on Amazon — is among the business owners preparing to take on exponentially increased import duties, but says the financial pain and split of the pain between his firm and retailers will be difficult.
His once $50 pair of men's shoes and $35 little boys' shoes have already gone up $80 to $65, respectively, after recent trade war moves by the U.S., with Deer Stags set to pay more than a 104% new tariff on Chinese goods being stacked atop previous tariffs.
Prior to the tariff increases in 2025, his company was paying a 6% duty on their shoes.
"Then the tariffs were raised by 10% two times, bringing my tariffs up to 26%. Then last week Trump put on an additional 34% and now the 50% levied today. All of these tariffs bring my tariff total to 110% on my non-leather shoes. My leather shoes now have a tariff of 120%. How do you budget that?" Muskat said.
He estimates that the cost of freight orders subject to the new tariffs will rise from $60,000 to between $600,000 and $1 million.
"The cash flow burden is the immediate problem," he said. "We don't have the capital to grapple with this. There is only one pile of money and I will pay for this, but that means I'm not paying for something else. We are going to pay the duty because we have no choice."
Muskat said he won't reject the containers at the port which would force the supplier to take the freight back, but he has told one factory to pause shipping for a week or two, to see how things unfold. Conversations with retailers are ongoing.
Other U.S. importers are expected to abandon goods at ports, which can then either go back to the manufacturer or it can be auctioned or destroyed in the U.S.
On Wednesday, Trump added another change to the fluid situation, saying some countries other than China would receive a 90-day pause in the implementation of tariffs, but new tariffs on China would rise to 125%. According to one estimate, more than half of the $2 billion in daily import tariffs to be charged by the U.S. are to be on Chinese goods and the tariffs on those goods will reach over $1 billion per day.
"The major trend we see is shippers looking to not accept their freight," said Joseph Esteves, CEO of Maine Pointe, a global supply chain consultant. "A lot of these companies are levered financially. They don't have the working capital requirements and they don't have the cash. So they simply cannot just take on this and hope to see what happens. They don't have the liquidity to do that," he said. Balance sheets and cash levels were more sensitive to major changes in costs, as consumer demand slowed, "before all this nonsense," he said. "Every CEO we're talking to seems to just be waiting. They're just not accepting at this moment."
Right now, many companies are telling their manufacturing facilities to delay shipment and not have freight loaded onto a vessel. If the goods arrive to port and they can't pay the import tariffs, the goods sit at port and the company is billed with costly detention charges.
Bruce Kaminstein, an angel Investor with New York Angels and founder and former CEO of cleaning products company Casabella, knows the challenges of manufacturing in China. Kaminstein was able to navigate the tariffs in the first trade war with China but he warns start-up companies do not have the coffers of big companies to withstand the capital crunch.
"Products will be left in containers because retailers won't take them," said Kaminstein.
For now, any freight on the water will not face the new tariffs. In updated guidance on the China tariffs released by U.S. Customs on Tuesday, an "on the water clause" explained the cargo coming into the ports today or in the coming weeks will not be subject to the tariffs, which won't be tacked on to any goods arriving until May 27.
But Kaminstein says it takes years for manufacturing supply chains to be established.
"The average size houseware company, for example, is $20 million. They don't have the capital to open up a factory. ... There are no companies, no factories out there that make products for other brands," he said. "That's the real point here. If you have a great idea, where do you go to make the product? There are no factories here in the United States making products for other brands."
Mary Rollman, KPMG US organizational strategist & partnership executive, said companies have more sophisticated and better analytics to value the cost of moving a supply chain today, but added it does take years to find and qualify a supplier.
"Companies need to evaluate the cost of restoring a supply chain," Rollman said. "They will review the hard data on fixed costs, looking at the labor pool to see if there are enough workers to fill the demand. They also need to see if it is still cost-effective to keep manufacturing outside of the U.S. or move to other countries with fewer tariffs because it is still cheaper than coming back."
The other option, she said, is staying in the country where manufacturing takes place currently and banking on a new administration in four years which might rescind the tariffs.
"We use components from all over," Kaminstein said. "Very rarely are products just made in one place. We're used to a global supply chain. At Casabella, we brought products in from all over the world, and we made products in the United States."
The Small Business Administration told CNBC in an email that Trump's trade plan will ultimately support U.S. business owners.
In an email, an SBA spokesman wrote, "The SBA fully supports President Trump's efforts to restore fair trade, which will bring back American jobs and revitalize American industry, empowering entrepreneurs with the level playing field to compete and win. Combined with SBA's new manufacturing initiative, including our effort to cut $100 billion in red tape, this administration will unleash historic opportunity for small businesses and workers alike."
Deer Stags' "razor-thin margins" prohibited it from frontloading products, and consumers may ultimately have to pay. Muskat says difficult price talks with retailers are underway.
"We had one conversation with a retailer who agreed to split the increase but they did not think they could go up in price. Most of the retail community is still trying to figure out what to do," he said. "It is so fluid. How do you plan? Hope is not a strategy, but most people are hoping Trump and Xi will talk. Both are talking tough but this will be damaging to both countries."
"Tariffs on goods that consumers buy every day like clothes or that cannot be grown here like coffee or bananas just tripled or more," said Josh Teitelbaum, senior counsel of Akin. "We should expect that will ripple through the economy."
"It's important to remember the new tariffs will be paid for by U.S. importers," said Jon Gold, vice president of supply chain and customs policy at the National Retail Federation. "While retailers will mitigate as best they can, they unfortunately won't be able to absorb all of the increased costs. With some tariff rates near 50% and others more than 100%, many retailers will be forced to raise prices. We encourage the administration to quickly negotiate agreements with countries that we are engaged with trade."
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The World Travel & Tourism Council's CEO says her industry is poised to grow in 2025, even in the face of a global recession.
Tourists visiting the basilica in Bouches-du-Rhone, Marseille, France on March 8, 2025.
The price of nearly every good you consume may be on the verge of skyrocketing, and global markets are teetering on the edge of a recession. Yet the travel industry is predicting record growth in the months ahead: The leading forecast for its contribution to the global economy in 2025 is $11.7 trillion, or 10.3% of the world's gross domestic product. Travelers are projected to spend more than ever on international trips this year, to the tune of $2.1 trillion, which surpasses the prior high of $1.9 trillion in 2019.
As a whole, the tourism industry has experienced sustained growth since pandemic lockdowns lifted, putting the sector on a trend line that could reach $2.9 trillion in spending by 2035. Considering the indirect contributions of tourism to the global economy—such as hotels' purchases of supplies from nearby businesses and the local spending power of hospitality staff—that would make the travel industry a $16 trillion powerhouse, responsible for 11.5% of global GDP.
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Shares of some drugmakers rose on Wednesday after President Donald Trump said he would pause steep tariff rates on dozens of countries, temporarily easing fears about the impact of potential tariffs on pharmaceuticals imported into the U.S.
Trump on Wednedsay announced he would reduce tariffs on most countries to 10% for 90 days, but would immediately hike tariffs on China to 125%. But the pause does not appear to apply to sector-specific tariffs.
Pharmaceutical stocks fell earlier on Wednesday on Trump's comments a day earlier that doubled down on plans to impose pharmaceutical-specific tariffs.
Shares of most U.S.-based companies turned positive Wednesday after Eli Lilly, AbbVie, Bristol Myers Squibb, Regeneron, Merck, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Amgen all dropped at least 2% to 4% earlier in the day. Some shares of foreign-based companies, such as AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk and Novartis, were also positive, while British drugmaker GSK was still down 5%.
Trump on Tuesday said his administration will be announcing a "major" tariff on pharmaceuticals "very shortly," despite market fallout from his global levies, according to several reports. He exempted pharmaceuticals from his sweeping tariffs unveiled last week in a temporary relief for drugmakers.
The president has said tariffs will incentivize drug companies to move manufacturing operations to the U.S. – an effort that Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson and others are already pursuing. It comes as the pharmaceutical industry's domestic manufacturing has shrunk dramatically in recent decades, with key parts of the production process moving to China, India and other countries where labor and other costs are cheaper.
U.S. imports of pharmaceuticals reached almost $213 billion in 2024, more than two-and-a-half times the total a decade earlier, according to the United Nations COMTRADE database on international trade.
However, Wall Street analysts and companies have raised concerns that it will be difficult to reshore production in the country, which will be costly, could take several years and could disrupt the pharmaceutical supply chain and drive up drug costs for patients. Drugmakers rely on a complex network of manufacturing sites, sometimes in different countries for different steps of the production process.
"Global supply chains are complex, with Pharma among the most–it's not as simple as moving where someone screws in little screws to make an iPhone," BMO Capital Markets analyst Evan Seigerman said in a note on Wednesday.
He said the tariffs will "likely do little to shift manufacturing" back to the U.S. since companies already have robust operations in the country.
Seigerman said he expects most large pharmaceutical companies will likely set a goal of "waiting until the end of Trump's presidency to consider more permanent manufacturing decisions."
A group of House Democrats is also reportedly calling on the administration to protect medical supply chains from what they called the "devastating consequences" the trade war could inflict on U.S. patients.
"The supply disruptions of critical medical products will unavoidably hurt U.S. patients, force providers to make impossible rationing decisions, and potentially even result in death as treatments are delayed, or more effective medicines and products are swapped for less effective alternatives," the lawmakers wrote in the letter, the Hill reported.
Some companies that have invested billions to boost U.S. manufacturing and build goodwill with Trump have pushed back on the tariffs, warning about their potential impact on research and development in the industry and patients.
"We can't breach those agreements, so we have to eat the cost of the tariffs and make trade-offs within our own companies," Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks told BBC in an interview, just over a month after the company announced $27 billion in new domestic manufacturing.
"Typically, that will be in reduction of staff or research and development, and I predict R&D will come first. That's a disappointing outcome," Ricks said.
J&J in March also announced a new $55 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing, research and development and technology over the next four years. The company has not commented on tariffs.
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Shares of some drugmakers rose on Wednesday after President Donald Trump said he would pause steep tariff rates on dozens of countries, temporarily easing fears about the impact of potential tariffs on pharmaceuticals imported into the U.S.
Trump on Wednedsay announced he would reduce tariffs on most countries to 10% for 90 days, but would immediately hike tariffs on China to 125%. But the pause does not appear to apply to sector-specific tariffs.
Pharmaceutical stocks fell earlier on Wednesday on Trump's comments a day earlier that doubled down on plans to impose pharmaceutical-specific tariffs.
Shares of most U.S.-based companies turned positive Wednesday after Eli Lilly, AbbVie, Bristol Myers Squibb, Regeneron, Merck, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Amgen all dropped at least 2% to 4% earlier in the day. Some shares of foreign-based companies, such as AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk and Novartis, were also positive, while British drugmaker GSK was still down 5%.
Trump on Tuesday said his administration will be announcing a "major" tariff on pharmaceuticals "very shortly," despite market fallout from his global levies, according to several reports. He exempted pharmaceuticals from his sweeping tariffs unveiled last week in a temporary relief for drugmakers.
The president has said tariffs will incentivize drug companies to move manufacturing operations to the U.S. – an effort that Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson and others are already pursuing. It comes as the pharmaceutical industry's domestic manufacturing has shrunk dramatically in recent decades, with key parts of the production process moving to China, India and other countries where labor and other costs are cheaper.
U.S. imports of pharmaceuticals reached almost $213 billion in 2024, more than two-and-a-half times the total a decade earlier, according to the United Nations COMTRADE database on international trade.
However, Wall Street analysts and companies have raised concerns that it will be difficult to reshore production in the country, which will be costly, could take several years and could disrupt the pharmaceutical supply chain and drive up drug costs for patients. Drugmakers rely on a complex network of manufacturing sites, sometimes in different countries for different steps of the production process.
"Global supply chains are complex, with Pharma among the most–it's not as simple as moving where someone screws in little screws to make an iPhone," BMO Capital Markets analyst Evan Seigerman said in a note on Wednesday.
He said the tariffs will "likely do little to shift manufacturing" back to the U.S. since companies already have robust operations in the country.
Seigerman said he expects most large pharmaceutical companies will likely set a goal of "waiting until the end of Trump's presidency to consider more permanent manufacturing decisions."
A group of House Democrats is also reportedly calling on the administration to protect medical supply chains from what they called the "devastating consequences" the trade war could inflict on U.S. patients.
"The supply disruptions of critical medical products will unavoidably hurt U.S. patients, force providers to make impossible rationing decisions, and potentially even result in death as treatments are delayed, or more effective medicines and products are swapped for less effective alternatives," the lawmakers wrote in the letter, the Hill reported.
Some companies that have invested billions to boost U.S. manufacturing and build goodwill with Trump have pushed back on the tariffs, warning about their potential impact on research and development in the industry and patients.
"We can't breach those agreements, so we have to eat the cost of the tariffs and make trade-offs within our own companies," Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks told BBC in an interview, just over a month after the company announced $27 billion in new domestic manufacturing.
"Typically, that will be in reduction of staff or research and development, and I predict R&D will come first. That's a disappointing outcome," Ricks said.
J&J in March also announced a new $55 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing, research and development and technology over the next four years. The company has not commented on tariffs.
Got a confidential news tip? We want to hear from you.
Sign up for free newsletters and get more CNBC delivered to your inbox
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Bank CEO Pay:
Andrew Bednar, CEO of Perella Weinberg Partners
Source: Bloomberg Television
While investment-banking executives stare into a deals abyss, a $27 million pay package may ease the pain for one executive, whose award tripled after he led his firm to record revenue last year.
Andrew Bednar, chief executive officer of New York boutique Perella Weinberg Partners, received a $22.9 million cash bonus and $3.6 million in stock awards on top of his base salary for 2024, according to a proxy filing.
In the days since President Donald Trump unveiled his "reciprocal" tariffs on dozens of trading partners, affected nations have announced a range of reactions.
Some countries, like China, have already set countermeasures to Trump's tariffs, while others are looking to negotiate exemptions.
Here's how governments around the world are reacting to Trump's tariffs now that they've officially started.
Two days after Trump announced his tariffs, China struck back, announcing it would implement 34% retaliatory tariffs on all US imports.
China's Ministry of Commerce also placed 11 US companies on an "unreliable entities" list, effectively blocking them from conducting business in the country.
"China urges the United States to immediately lift its unilateral tariff measures and resolve its trade differences through consultations in an equal, respectful, and mutually beneficial manner," the ministry said in a statement.
On Monday, Trump said he'd impose an additional 50% tariff on Chinese goods in response to China's retaliatory tariffs.
Trump has so far imposed 104% tariffs on China since he took office.
And on Wednesday, China once again pushed back against the president by raising levies on US goods to 84%.
In February, China implemented a 10% tariff on crude oil, agricultural machinery, pickup trucks, and some large cars. China also imposed a 15% levy on coal and liquefied natural gas.
For months, Trump has threatened to annex Canada as part of his push to make it the 51st US state. He's threatened Canada with an array of tariffs, stunning government officials and residents who have long enjoyed a mostly conciliatory relationship with the US.
In March, Trump set 25% tariffs on Canadian goods that weren't compliant with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, prompting an outcry from Canada, which retaliated by placing a 25% tariff on select US goods.
On April 3, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced his country would impose a 25% tariff on vehicles imported from the US that aren't USMCA-compliant.
Canada was spared further levies from the US last week.
Trump announced last week that Australia would be subject to the administration's 10% baseline tariff rate. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese responded swiftly.
"The [US] administration's tariffs have no basis in logic — and they go against the basis of our two nations' partnership," he told reporters on April 3. "This is not the act of a friend."
Albanese said Australia didn't plan to retaliate with reciprocal tariffs on US goods.
"We will not join a race to the bottom that leads to higher prices and slower growth," he said.
On Tuesday, Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia forcefully pushed back against Trump's tariff on Australia during a hearing with US trade representative Jamieson Greer.
"We have a trade surplus with Australia," Warner said during the heated exchange. "They are an incredibly important national security partner. Why were they whacked with a tariff?"
Trump imposed 20% tariffs on imports from the EU.
The EU on Wednesday responded to the administration by approving tariffs on roughly $23 billion worth of US goods.
"These countermeasures can be suspended at any time, should the US agree to a fair and balanced negotiated outcome," the European Commission said in a statement.
On April 5, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the face of the White House DOGE Office and a political ally of Trump, said he wanted to see a "zero-tariff" system between the United States and Europe.
Trump announced 32% tariffs on Southeast Asia's biggest economy.
Indonesia's chief economic minister said on Sunday that the country would focus on diplomacy and negotiations to find mutually beneficial solutions rather than retaliating against the tariffs.
"The approach was taken by considering the long-term interest of bilateral trade relation, as well as to maintain the investment climate and national economic stability," Airlangga Hartarto said.
He also said that Indonesia would support sectors likely to be hit by the tariffs, such as the apparel and footwear industries. Indonesia's main exports to the US include electronics, apparel and clothing, and footwear.
Japan has been hit with a 24% tariff on its exports to the US.
"We had been requesting that the US government review its unilateral tariff measures at various levels and we are extremely disappointed and regret that such measures have been implemented nonetheless," Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba told reporters shortly after Trump's April 2 announcement.
Trade Minister Yoji Muto later said his ministry had created a task force to examine the impact of the tariffs.
When asked about the potential for retaliation, Muto replied: "We need to decide what is best for Japan, and most effective, in a careful but bold and speedy manner."
Malaysia will see its exports to the US get hit by a 24% tariff.
The country is not considering retaliatory tariffs and will "seek solutions that will uphold the spirit of free and fair trade," its Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry said on Thursday.
In a Sunday night video address posted to social media, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said Malaysia will "prepare a coordinated ASEAN response" toward Trump's tariffs.
Malaysia currently chairs the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a grouping of ten countries in the region, including Vietnam and Cambodia.
The prime minister also said the nation's response will be "calm, firm, and guided by Malaysia's strategic interests."
Mexico dodged a baseline tariff from Trump last week.
Trump came into office promising to slap a 25% tariff on all imports from Mexico, but he later paused the levies on products that fell under the USMCA on free trade. Non-compliant USMCA products continue to be subject to a 25% tariff.
Trump had earlier threatened Mexico with tariffs over his concerns regarding fentanyl smuggling and illegal immigration. The White House said that for now, any USMCA-compliant imports can continue to enter the United States without added tariffs.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum lauded her "good relationship" with the Trump administration for avoiding any additional levies from the president last week.
Trump has imposed a 46% tariff on Vietnamese goods.
It's one of the highest tariff rates put into place by Trump against any country.
And it's prompted the country to take quick action.
Vietnam is "ready" to negotiate with the Trump administration to undo all tariffs on US imports, according to a senior official.
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The European Union on Wednesday voted to approve its first set of retaliatory measures to counter tariffs imposed by the U.S. on steel and aluminum.
The European Commission, the bloc's executive arm, said duties would start being collected on a first tranche of tariffs on U.S. imports from April 15, with a second set of measures following on May 15. According to a draft document seen by CNBC in March, the tariffs target a wide range of goods, including poultry, grains, clothing and metals. The EU has not released a final list of impacted products, and declined to comment further on Wednesday.
The 27-nation bloc had warned it would act to protect European business and consumers after U.S. President Donald Trump imposed 25% duties on the metals.
"The EU considers US tariffs unjustified and damaging, causing economic harm to both sides, as well as the global economy. The EU has stated its clear preference to find negotiated outcomes with the US, which would be balanced and mutually beneficial," the European Commission said.
"These countermeasures can be suspended at any time, should the US agree to a fair and balanced negotiated outcome," the EC said in a statement.
The EU also faces tariffs of 20% on almost all its U.S. imports, as part of Trump's targeting of more than 180 countries and territories, as announced by the White House leader on April 2.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at the time said the EU was ready to retaliate unless negotiations with the U.S. administration were successful.
"We are prepared to respond," she said, adding that the EU was preparing for further countermeasures to protect its interests and businesses. But, von der Leyen also called for talks with the U.S., saying it was "not too late to address concerns through negotiations."
Maros Sefcovic, the EU's commissioner for trade and economic security, said Monday that the U.S. tariffs are impacting 380 billion euros ($420.45 billion) worth of Europe's exports to the United States, amounting to around 70% of total exports.
"To put it in perspective, that's over 80 billion euros in duties, an eleven-fold jump from the 7 billion [euros] the U.S. currently collects," he added.
Countries around the world are scrambling to formulate their response to the duties, which have sparked global market chaos. China — slapped with a total tariff on its goods of 104% — on Wednesday announced tariffs on U.S. goods entering China would rise to 84% from 34% starting April 10.
— CNBC's Silvia Amaro contributed to this report.
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JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said Wednesday he sees the U.S. economy likely headed to recession as President Donald Trump's tariffs roil financial markets.
With the trade war between the U.S. and China intensifying, stocks and bonds sold off aggressively again in morning trade. Stock market futures slumped and bond yields spiked amid concerns over financial and economic stability brought on by the tit-for-tat exchange between the two nations.
"I think probably [a recession is] s a likely outcome, because markets, I mean, when you see a 2,000-point decline [in the Dow Jones Industrial Average], it sort of feeds on itself, doesn't it," Dimon said on Fox Business' "Mornings With Maria" show. "It makes you feel like you're losing money in your 401(k), you're losing money in your pension. You've got to cut back."
Recession fears have been rising on Wall Street as the Trump tariffs spur uncertainty about how far the trade war will escalate.
In the latest development, China said it will slap an 84% tariff on all U.S. goods, up 50 percentage points from the previous level, as U.S. reciprocal duties take effect around the world. Dow futures were off more than 800 points while the 10-year Treasury yields soared nearly 20 basis points, or 0.2 percentage point.
JPMorgan economists expect U.S. gross domestic product to contract 0.3% this year, a mild recessionary call but coming after a strong year for growth.
"Markets aren't always right, but sometimes they are right," Dimon said. "I think this time they are right because they're just pricing uncertainty [at] the macro level and uncertainty [at] the micro level, at the actual company level, and then how it affects consumer sentiment. It's hard to tell."
In the past, Dimon has been a supporter of tariffs.
During a January interview with CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the executive said people should "get over it" regarding tariffs and said a little inflation would be worth it to preserve national security.
On Wednesday, he encouraged the U.S. to make deals with its trading partners while cautioning that market reaction could get worse if that doesn't happen.
"Take a deep breath, negotiate some trade deals. That's the best thing they can do," he said. "I'm taking a calm view. But I think it could get worse if we don't make some progress here."
Separately, Dimon encouraged the Senate to confirm Fed Governor Michelle Bowman as vice chair for supervision, the chief overseer of the banking and finance system. Bowman is up for a confirmation hearing Thursday.
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Alphabet's Waymo sells a miniature scale model of its white Jaguar I-PACE robotaxi, which has become a fixture on urban motorways in California.
Unfortunately, it's unavailable for sale — unless you work for Waymo.
The miniature model is just one of the exclusive merchandise Waymo sells in its internal store for employees, according to Sophia Tung, an autonomous vehicle-focused content creator, who told Business Insider that she purchased several other items through a friend at the company.
A Waymo spokesperson confirmed the existence of the store to Business Insider.
That Waymo has an employee-only store is not unique to the company, especially in the tech world. Still, it's only so often that the product tech workers are focused on lends itself to the kind of physical merch Waymo has, Tung, a former software engineer at Twitter, told BI.
"Twitter had one, but it was sort of boring stuff. There wasn't anything cool," she said. "I feel like if you're shipping a physical product like Waymo, there's more opportunity for it to look good."
According to Tung and screenshots of the employee website she shared with BI, the store also sells branded clothing, including baby onesies. Some go beyond the usual tech merch, like a company logo slapped on a T-shirt or hoodie.
Some of Waymo's tees and jackets, for example, feature a cartoon version of its robotaxis. Other clothing gets more creative, such as a shirt that recalls Andy Warhol's signature four-panel canvases.
There are also enamel pins, mugs, hats, and beach towels, according to Tung.
"I really only got the stuff that looked more design-y and interesting," she said, adding that she felt the clothing she purchased didn't immediately look like company merch.
The star of the show is undoubtedly the mini Waymo car, which Tung said is a 1:43 scale of the Jaguar I-PACE.
Tung said the model appears to be made by TrueScale Miniatures based on the packaging. The company makes small-scale models of cars for OEMs, according to its website.
A TSM spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
With Waymo's partnership with other OEMs for future configurations of its robotaxis, including Hyundai and China's Zeekr, Tung said she hopes Waymo will continue making small-scale versions of its cars.
"I want to collect them all," she said.
Do you have a story to share about Waymo? Contact this reporter at lloydlee@businessinsider.com.
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U.S. crude oil futures jumped more than 4% on Wednesday, booking its best day since October of 2024 after President Donald Trump announced a lower tariff rate for countries except China.
The U.S. benchmark rose $2.77, or 4.65%, to close at $62.35 per barrel, while global benchmark Brent gained $2.66, or 4.23%, to settle at $65.48 per barrel.
U.S. crude hit an intraday low of $55.12 earlier in the session after Beijing announced tariffs of 84% on U.S. goods in response to Trump's levies. China's tariffs take effect on April 10.
But the oil market turned around, swinging more than 13% from its low after Trump dramatically reversed course on his trade war. The president said lower tariff rates of 10% would apply to countries for 90 days with exception of China. He increased rates on China to 125% effective immediately.
Traders have been worried the world is descending into a full-blown trade war that will trigger a recession, hitting crude oil demand. OPEC+, meanwhile, has agreed to accelerate output in May, which will bring more oil to a market that was already facing a surplus.
The collision of recession fears and growing oil supply is a "toxic cocktail," Helima Croft, global head of commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, told CNBC on Tuesday.
The U.S. and Iran are scheduled to hold talks in Oman on Saturday to discuss the Islamic Republic's nuclear program. Successful negotiations could result in more Iranian oil entering the global market.
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Microsoft is considering another round of job cuts that could come as soon as May, according to people familiar with the matter.
Leaders on some Microsoft teams are specifically discussing cuts to middle managers and how to increase the ratio of coders versus non-coders on projects, the sources told Business Insider.
Some Microsoft organizations want to increase their "span of control," or the number of employees who report to each manager, these people said.
The sources, who hold senior positions at the company, asked not to be identified discussing sensitive topics that are still in the planning stages. It's unclear how many jobs will be cut, but one of the people said it could be a significant portion of their team. A spokesperson for Microsoft declined to comment.
In the tech industry, there's already a culling of middle managers underway. Amazon has been trying to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers. And in December, CEO Sundar Pichai told staff that Google cut vice president and manager roles by 10% as part of an efficiency drive.
Inside Microsoft, the discussions focus on decreasing the "PM ratio" on some teams, which is the ratio of product managers or program managers to engineers.
Charlie Bell, Microsoft's security boss, brought this concept from Amazon, where he was a cloud pioneer. There, it's called the "builder ratio," and tracks the ratio of software engineers to "non-builders," such as program managers and project managers.
Microsoft is considering increasing these targets in some organizations. For example, Bell's security organization currently has around 5½ engineers to one PM, and his goal is to reach a 10-to-1 ratio, according to a person familiar with Bell's plans.
One of the people familiar with the matter said this ratio is basically a proxy for how many people code. The company is discussing cuts that would require managers to meet a certain budget and a specific team-based ratio, the person said.
Earlier this year, Microsoft ousted about 2,000 employees it deemed to be low performers.
The potential cuts could come in a month or so and also include lower performers. One person said that at least some Microsoft leaders are considering terminating those who received an "Impact 80" or lower score in performance reviews for two consecutive years.
Microsoft evaluates employees on a scale of 0 to 200 called the "ManageRewards slider." Those ratings influence how much an employee receives in stock awards and cash bonuses.
The middle of the range is 100, while 0, 60, and 80 are lower performers and 120, 140, and 200 are higher performers. "Impact 80" gives employees 60% of their normal stock award and 80% of their maximum bonus.
Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at astewart@businessinsider.com or Signal at +1-425-344-8242. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.
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President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he threatened Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company with a "big tax" of up to 100% if the chipmaker didn't build its plants in America.
Trump was speaking at a dinner event organized by the National Republican Congressional Committee when he criticized the bipartisan CHIPS Act, which President Joe Biden signed in 2022.
"These chip companies are loaded. They give these companies billions of dollars to build a plant in the United States. They don't build them in the US," Trump said Tuesday.
The Biden administration said in November that it had awarded TSMC up to $6.6 billion in funding to build three chip factories in Phoenix. TSMC's first factory in Phoenix faced construction delays initially but started producing chips last year.
Last month, TSMC said it would invest $100 billion to build five new chip factories in the US. The company said the investment was on top of the $65 billion it announced in April 2024.
Trump said on Tuesday that he'd convinced TSMC to deepen its manufacturing footprint in the US without offering more funding.
"All I did is say, 'If you don't build your plant here, you are going to pay a big tax. Twenty-five, maybe 50, maybe 75, maybe 100%,'" Trump said.
TSMC declined to comment when approached by Business Insider.
Trump has threatened companies with tariffs in the past. While on the campaign trail in September, Trump said he'd impose a 200% tariff on John Deere if the agriculture equipment company moved its manufacturing to Mexico.
Last week, Trump announced a slate of reciprocal tariffs on more than 180 countries. The tariffs, which start at a baseline rate of 10%, took effect on Wednesday.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on Thursday that while the tariffs didn't apply to semiconductors, Trump was still thinking about how he could restore the US's foothold in chip making.
"Donald Trump's going to deeply study those. And those are going to come later on how to reshore from Taiwan all that semiconductor manufacturing," Lutnick said. "We have to protect ourselves at some point. America has to be able to protect itself."
Representatives for the White House didn't respond to a request for comment.
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Paul Atkins is just one oath away from taking over the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as President Donald Trump's pick to oversee the nation's securities sector — including whatever role the crypto sector plays in that.
A swearing-in ceremony will soon put the former SEC commission in charge of the high-profile regulator — a matter cheered on by the digital assets sector that sees him as a strong ally after his significant background advising crypto firms as a financial-services consultant in Washington. Atkins' Senate confirmation was easily cleared on Wednesday in a 52-44 vote.
The longtime figure in U.S. financial policy — both in government and as an outside adviser — was generally expected to easily move through confirmation, though the Senate Banking Committee approved Atkins along party lines, with all the panel's Democrats opposing the nominee.
Atkins' confirmation took the usual months to emerge from the Senate, and in the time between the departure of predecessor Gary Gensler and Atkins' arrival, Trump's interim agency chief, Mark Uyeda, carried out an ambitious and rapidly deployed crypto overhaul. The SEC has thrown out almost all of its high-profile digital assets enforcement actions, and its staff quickly outlined a number of segments of the industry that it considers outside its jurisdiction — including some stablecoins, memecoins (such as the president's own $TRUMP) and proof-of-work mining.
Many of the areas in which the agency has already demonstrated policy shifts overlap with Trump's family crypto businesses, including the family's memecoins and its ties to World Liberty Financial, which has pursued its own stablecoin. Atkins will be taking over those issues to apply permanent standards, potentially directed by future legislation that's now a priority in Congress.
Atkins' tenure will begin with an incomplete commission, which is meant to have five members and whose sole Democrat — Caroline Crenshaw — is occupying an already expired term. The White House hasn't yet moved to fill the two Democratic positions on the commission.
Jesse Hamilton is CoinDesk's deputy managing editor on the Global Policy and Regulation team, based in Washington, D.C. Before joining CoinDesk in 2022, he worked for more than a decade covering Wall Street regulation at Bloomberg News and Businessweek, writing about the early whisperings among federal agencies trying to decide what to do about crypto. He's won several national honors in his reporting career, including from his time as a war correspondent in Iraq and as a police reporter for newspapers. Jesse is a graduate of Western Washington University, where he studied journalism and history. He has no crypto holdings.
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World Food Program USA Accepts Bitcoin and Dogecoin Donations After Funding Cuts
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$104.15
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$1,614.09
$3,089.60
$0.208651
$20.78
$2.67
$1.058
$1.015
$0.00041266
$1,642.33
$81,069.00
$0.434942
$0.489039
$0.544501
$0.242973
$0.999795
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$21.57
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$2.58
$0.999852
The World Food Program USA is now accepting donations in more than 80 cryptocurrencies. That includes the likes of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USDC, but also allows for donations in ApeCoin, BONK, and Dogecoin.
The partnership is part of WFP USA's wider ambitions to raise $25 million through the Emergency Hunger Relief Fund—and plug gaps in initiatives "that provide lifelong assistance to 58 million people on the brink of starvation."
This nonprofit was established in 1995—and while it has close ties to the UN Food Programme, it serves as a separate entity.
The push for new donations comes after the Trump administration ended funding for urgent UN food aid initiatives in 14 impoverished countries—including Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen.
Officials from the WFP have urged the White House to reconsider, warning it "could amount to a death sentence for millions of people."
WFP USA's chief philanthropy and partnerships officer Dorota Amin says the nonprofit is seeking to modernize, adding: "Traditional aid systems are under immense pressure. Embracing new technologies like blockchain and cryptocurrency isn't just a choice—it's necessary."
She says shrinking global humanitarian budgets have come at a time when hunger crises are deepening—and by accepting crypto donations, the organization is "tapping into a growing community of mission-driven individuals eager to create change."
The WFP USA added that there are benefits for crypto donors, too.
Lower transaction fees mean a greater proportion of a contribution goes toward aid, with the speed of blockchain networks enabling funds to be processed in minutes rather than days. Donations are also tax deductible, the WFP noted, enabling investors to offset capital gains.
The wider UN World Food Programme has long embraced blockchain through its Building Blocks initiative, which delivers aid directly to refugees through digital wallets. Officials say this reduces transaction costs by up to 98%, reduces fraud, and eliminates the need for local banks.
On Wednesday, the White House said that it planned to reinstate some UN World Food Programme funding, as reported by Reuters, but that it wants the organization to modify some of its programs in certain countries.
Edited by Stacy Elliott.
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ByCharles Lloyd Bovaird II
ByCharles Lloyd Bovaird II,
Senior Contributor.
Bitcoin prices climbed sharply today as markets processed the latest tariff updates.
Bitcoin prices rallied today, climbing over 10% in under 24 hours after President Donald Trump's announcement that he would “pause” tariffs caused an “amazing jump” in the global asset markets, according to analyst Tim Enneking.
The digital currency rose to roughly $83,000 this afternoon, according to Coinbase data from TradingView. The benchmark S&P 5oo index and the Dow Jones Industrial average also experienced sharp gains, rising more than 9% and 7% during the day, according to data from Google Finance.
In addition, many altcoins underwent notable price increases, rising between 10% and 30% in the space of 24 hours, CoinMarketCap figures show. The TikTok influencer who goes by Wendy O commented on the situation, emphasizing “across the board” gains in these cryptocurrencies.
When asked whether Trump's policy change triggered the latest gains in bitcoin, Enneking, managing partner of Psalion, stated via email that “Yes, the 90-pause was hugely important and the sole proximate cause of the amazing jump across almost all markets in two ways.”
“The first was what we just witnessed: immediately concerns regarding the absurdly high tariffs have now been removed (with the major exception of China, where the tariffs actually got worse),” Enneking said after Trump posted via social media network Truth Social that while he would start imposing a tariff of 125% on China, tariffs on other countries would drop to 10%.
“More importantly, however, was the fact that Trump and most (but not all) of his administration's representatives have insisted that the tariffs were immutable and not a bargaining tool,” he stated.
“No one really believed that in their heart of hearts, knowing Trump's negotiating ‘style,' but the fear that tariffs were ‘here to stay come may' was starting to gain traction – and markets were pummeled as a result," Enneking added.
“Now we know it is possible to persuade Trump to back down, which means that we're back to tariffs as a bargaining tool. The sign of relief from seeing a solid example of that fact can literally be heard around the world!” he said.
When asked whether Trump's tariff announcement was the cause today's bitcoin gains, Joe DiPasquale, CEO of cryptocurrency hedge fund manager BitBull Capital, offered a similar take.
“Yes, we agree that Bitcoin's rally reflects the broader risk-on mood sparked by Trump's tariff pause, which markets interpreted as a temporary easing of trade tensions," he said via email.
However, he emphasized that bitcoin has been displaying a high correlation to other risk assets like stocks. This development contrasts with earlier times, when the digital currency didn't follow the price movements of assets like stocks.
“Despite being touted as a hedge or store of value, Bitcoin continues to behave like a high-beta risk asset—often outperforming during bursts of macro optimism," said DiPasquale.
"Today's move was less about crypto fundamentals and more about a broad shift in sentiment across equities and digital assets.”
Brett Sifling, wealth manager for Gerber Kawasaki Wealth & Investment Management, also offered his perspective on the situation, offering his views via email.
“Earlier today, Trump announced a 90 day pause on most of the tariffs besides China. This caused an immediate spike in risk-on assets across most markets, including Bitcoin, that resulted in one of the 10 best percentage returns day in the history of the S&P 500,” he stated.
“This is likely a combination of short-term oversold conditions, short covering, and reassessment after the worst-case scenario was already being priced in,” said Sifling.
“We expect the volatility is likely to continue, as this story is continuing to develop," he concluded.
After a slight rebound on Tuesday to the $1,600 threshold, Ethereum‘s price was faced with notable resistance, which led to a sudden breakdown to $1,450. ETH's persistent weak performance this year has impacted investor conviction in the market, triggering significant selling pressure in the past few weeks.
The bearish sentiment toward Ethereum has increased in crypto exchanges, especially on Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. Verified author and on-chain expert for CryptoQuant, Darkfost, revealed that ETH's Open Interest (OI) on Binance continues to see a steady decline.
The persistent drop in open interest on the crypto exchange indicates that ETH‘s derivatives market is cooling down. It also reflects rising caution among investors and traders as the altcoin battles to sustain its bullish momentum.
Darkfost highlighted that the open interest on Binance continues to drop without stopping and is now changing under its 365 Simple Moving Average (SMA). This movement implies that speculative activity is pulling back as investors might be waiting for more certain signals before making a forceful comeback to the market.
After hitting an all-time high of $7.78 billion in December, the open interest on Binance has decreased by almost 50% between December and April, wiping out nearly $4 billion within the period. The chart shows that ETH's open interest on Binance is now valued at $3.1 billion, suggesting a massive shift in investor sentiment on the platform.
According to the on-chain expert, Ethereum's price has been significantly impacted by this sharp drop, and there are no indications that the ongoing downward trend will be stopping anytime soon. Furthermore, it reflects the magnitude of recent liquidations as well as a heightened aversion to risk among investors.
In the event that the trend continues, Darkfost noted that “Ethereum's price is still far from entering a period of stability.” Thus, Darkfost has urged traders to monitor investors' behavior on Binance, which remains a valuable indicator since the largest trade volumes across the market are regularly captured by the crypto platform.
With ETH's open interest decreasing on the largest crypto exchange and the market extremely volatile, this raises concerns about its price stability. Nonetheless, many crypto analysts are confident that a rebound could be on the horizon, which is likely to push the altcoin toward new highs.
Market expert and trader Milkybull Crypto shared a post on the X platform, outlining Ethereum's potential to surge significantly in the upcoming weeks. At the time of the post, ETH was trading at $1,585, and the expert stated that the altcoin typically marks a macro bottom at this level. Should this level hold, Milkybull anticipates a huge rally, putting his next target at the $10,000 milestone.
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Ethereum (ETH) gained 13% on Wednesday after President Trump announced a 90-day tariff pause on 75 countries. Following the announcement, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved Fidelity, BlackRock, Bitwise and Grayscale applications to allow options trading on their spot Ether ETFs.
Ethereum has seen increased buying pressure in the past few hours since President Donald Trump announced a 90-day tariff pause on 75 countries. The top altcoin jumped from a two-year low of $1,400 to above $1,650 at press time.
The announcement follows the SEC approving NYSE, Nasdaq and Cboe applications to list and trade options contracts on Bitwise and Grayscale, BlackRock and Fidelity spot Ether ETFs, respectively.
Option trading could make an ETF product attractive as it introduces regulated risk management and hedging strategies that are important to institutional investors — especially during periods of market uncertainty like the current trading environment.
“SEC has approved options trading on spot eth ETFs…Like w/ btc ETFs, expect to see a bunch of new launches from issuers — Covered call strategy eth ETFs, buffer eth ETFs, etc,” wrote Nate Geraci, President of The ETF Store in an X post on Wednesday.
The approval comes at a time when ETH ETF holders are seeing increased losses — down over 50% YTD — following the global risk-off sentiment across financial markets. This has largely affected flows in Ethereum ETFs, which have only recorded four days of inflows since February 20, per Farside Investors data.
While ETH ETF holders lament, products betting against it have been among the top gainers across the global ETF market since January.
Two -2x ETH ETFs — which represent a 2x leverage short positioning on ETH ETFs — are the best-performing ETFs so far in 2025, according to Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas. The products have seen gains above ETFs tracking volatility despite increased market uncertainty in the past months.
The best performing ETF this year is the -2x Ether ETF $ETHD, up 247%. #2 is the other -2x Ether ETF. I was sure it would be $UVIX (2x VIX), but that's #3. Brutal. pic.twitter.com/e49QOPtgmb
Ethereum saw $169.04 million in futures liquidations in the past 24 hours, per Coinglass data. The total amount of liquidated long and short positions accounted for $63.28 million and $105.76 million respectively.
ETH recovered the support level near $1,500 after bouncing near a descending channel's lower boundary and surging over 13%. If the rally isn't short-lived, ETH could also reclaim $1,800 and go on to test the descending channel's upper boundary resistance. On the downside, the $1,500 support is a key level to watch if ETH retraces.
ETH/USDT daily chart
The Relative Strength Index (RSI) and Stochastic Oscillator (Stoch) are trending upward but below their neutral levels. A firm cross into the upper region will strengthen the bullish momentum.
A daily candlestick close below $1,500 will invalidate the thesis.
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TRON DAO facilitates $1.2 billion in USDT exchange inflows over the past seven days as on-chain volume hits $72 billion. An increase in USDT exchange inflows suggests that traders are either preparing to buy the dip or could be covering long positions.
Bitcoin price stabilizes around $76,000 at the time of writing on Wednesday after falling 3.59% the previous day. BTC could face volatility as US President Donald Trump announced tariffs go live on Wednesday, with China's retaliatory duties on Thursday.
Cryptocurrencies are enduring progressive market carnage from the US President Donald Trump administration's incessant tariffs on its trade partners, with some selected altcoins like NEO, Plume and Story (IP) leading the bullish brigade on Wednesday.
Cardano (ADA) price hovers around $0.56 on Wednesday after falling 13% the previous week. Token Terminal data shows that ADA's fee collection has constantly fallen in 2025, indicating lower blockchain usage and activity.
Bitcoin (BTC) price remains under selling pressure and trades near $84,000 when writing on Friday after a rejection from a key resistance level earlier this week.
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President Donald Trump has announced a 90-day pause on his reciprocal tariffs, and the stock market is already bouncing back — from the damage caused last week when Trump announced his reciprocal tariffs.
Tech stocks, like Apple, Sony, and Microsoft, shot up quickly following Trump's announcement, with Tesla rising particularly fast. As of this writing, Tesla stock was up 22.69 percent for the day. Meanwhile, Intel gained more than 17 percent; Nvidia was up by over 15 percent; and Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, and more stocks were spiking as well.
Trump made the announcement in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.
"I have authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately," Trump announced.
However, according to the president, the pause only affects countries who are engaged in negotiations with the White House. Tariffs put on goods from countries like China, who responded with their own new reciprocal tariffs, have not been paused. In fact, Trump announced a new 125 percent tariff with China. A global 10 percent tariff, announced over the weekend, will also remain in effect.
The slapdash tariff rollout has led to an extremely volatile market. Still, the news of a pause on levies for countries like South Korea and Vietnam was enough to send Apple stock flying upward. Trump's tariffs resulted in the worst 4-day stretch on the stock market for Apple since 2000.
The crypto markets also reacted positively to Trump's tariff suspension announcement. Bitcoin was back up over $82,000 as of publication after spending days floundering in the mid-to-upper $70k range. Ethereum also spiked 8 percent after Trump's tariff announcement.
The tariffs that Trump implemented last week wreaked havoc on the global economy. The market looked so bleak over the weekend that some analysts expected a "Black Monday" scenario. On Monday, April 7, rumors spread on Elon Musk's X that Trump was considering a pause on the tariffs, which helped avoid that worse case scenario. According to the White House, those posts were untrue.
Despite a temporary reprieve on most reciprocal tariffs, the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China rages on. So, while Trump's tariff pause was welcome news on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley for the moment, the fallout remains impossible to predict.
How will President Trump's tariffs affect you? Keep checking Mashable for our latest tariff news and explainers, from delayed Nintendo Switch 2 preorders to reports of iPhone 16 panic buying.
Topics
Apple
Cryptocurrency
Donald Trump
Politics
Tariffs
Crypto, Bitcoin Mining Stocks Spike Amid Historic Markets Rebound
$83,165.00
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The price of various crypto-linked stocks soared on Wednesday after U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled a 90-day pause on implementing most of his “reciprocal” tariffs.
Strategy, Coinbase and major Bitcoin miners were well into positive territory as U.S. markets closed, reversing more than a week of steep losses.
The president said over 180 countries would see temporary relief “effective immediately,” although Chinese goods would still be subject to stiff levies, raising the total rate on the country to 125%. For weeks, stocks and cryptocurrencies have been battered by Trump's on-again, off-again tariffs, as investors weigh how his sweeping measures could stunt economic growth and bolster inflation
The White House's about-face on Wednesday provided instant relief.
Strategy's stock surged 23% to $292 per share, according to Nasdaq. After the company's share price slipped as low as $236 on Monday, hitting its lowest point in nearly a month, Wednesday's move pushed Strategy's stock into positive territory on the year.
The Tysons, Virginia-based company, which pivoted its focus from software to become the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, has inspired several leveraged exchange-traded funds that delivered outsized returns. The T-Rex 2X Long MSTR Daily Target ETF (MSTU), for example, jumped 46% to around $5.20, according to Yahoo Finance.
Tesla, which also has large Bitcoin holdings, was up more than 20% amid a dramatic upswing in major equity indexes, including the tech-heavy Nasdaq, which rose more than 11%.
Crypto exchange Coinbase saw its stock jump over 18% on Wednesday, rising to $179 per share, according to Nasdaq. Over the past three trading days, Cathie Wood's Ark Invest had scooped up $31 million in Coinbase shares, according to Cathie's Ark.
Toronto, Canada-based Bitfarms was among Bitcoin miners that jumped highest, rising over 26% to $0.85, according to Yahoo Finance. However, its stock price remains down 45% over the past year.
The stock prices of many Bitcoin mining firms also climbed upwards of 10% on Wednesday, including Cipher Mining (18%), TeraWulf (12%), Riot Platforms (13%), CleanSpark (15%), and Marathon Holdings (18%).
The trading platform Robinhood, whose crypto-related revenue soared 700% in the fourth quarter of last year, saw its stock price jump as well. The firm's shares were recently changing hands around $42, cruising 23% higher on the day.
Edited by James Rubin
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Global Blockchain Acquisition Corp (Nasdaq: GBBK) has announced its imminent dissolution and redemption of public shares. The company will cease operations on April 14, 2025, following its inability to consummate an initial business combination by April 12, 2025.
Key actions include:Trading of public shares will cease on April 13, 2025Redemption of all outstanding public shares within 10 business daysRedemption amount will equal trust account funds (including interest, less taxes) divided by outstanding public sharesCompany warrants and rights will expire worthless
Following these events, GBBK will proceed with delisting from Nasdaq and terminating its securities registration with the SEC. The company will handle redemption payments directly for registered shareholders, while beneficial owners holding shares in 'street name' need not take action.
Global Blockchain Acquisition Corp (Nasdaq: GBBK) ha annunciato la sua imminente dissoluzione e il rimborso delle azioni pubbliche. L'azienda cesserà le operazioni il 14 aprile 2025, dopo la sua incapacità di completare una combinazione aziendale iniziale entro il 12 aprile 2025.
Le azioni principali includono:La negoziazione delle azioni pubbliche cesserà il 13 aprile 2025Il rimborso di tutte le azioni pubbliche in circolazione avverrà entro 10 giorni lavorativiIl valore del rimborso sarà pari ai fondi del conto fiduciario (inclusi gli interessi, al netto delle tasse) divisi per le azioni pubbliche in circolazioneI warrant e i diritti dell'azienda scadranno senza valore
Dopo questi eventi, GBBK procederà con la cancellazione dalla Nasdaq e la terminazione della registrazione dei suoi titoli presso la SEC. L'azienda gestirà i pagamenti di rimborso direttamente per gli azionisti registrati, mentre i proprietari beneficiari che detengono azioni in 'street name' non devono intraprendere alcuna azione.
Global Blockchain Acquisition Corp (Nasdaq: GBBK) ha anunciado su inminente disolución y el canje de acciones públicas. La empresa cesará operaciones el 14 de abril de 2025, tras su incapacidad para concretar una combinación de negocios inicial antes del 12 de abril de 2025.
Las acciones clave incluyen:La negociación de acciones públicas cesará el 13 de abril de 2025El canje de todas las acciones públicas en circulación se realizará dentro de 10 días hábilesEl monto del canje será igual a los fondos de la cuenta fiduciaria (incluidos los intereses, menos impuestos) dividido por las acciones públicas en circulaciónLas garantías y derechos de la empresa caducarán sin valor
Tras estos eventos, GBBK procederá a ser deslistada de Nasdaq y a terminar su registro de valores con la SEC. La empresa gestionará los pagos de canje directamente para los accionistas registrados, mientras que los propietarios beneficiarios que poseen acciones a nombre de 'street name' no necesitan tomar ninguna acción.
글로벌 블록체인 인수 주식회사 (Nasdaq: GBBK)는 임박한 해산과 공공 주식의 상환을 발표했습니다. 회사는 2025년 4월 14일에 운영을 중단하며, 2025년 4월 12일까지 초기 사업 조합을 완료할 수 없었기 때문입니다.
주요 조치는 다음과 같습니다:공공 주식의 거래는 2025년 4월 13일에 중단됩니다모든 유통 중인 공공 주식의 상환은 10영업일 이내에 이루어집니다상환 금액은 신탁 계좌의 자금(이자 포함, 세금 차감)에서 유통 중인 공공 주식으로 나눈 금액과 같습니다회사의 보증서와 권리는 무효로 만료됩니다
이러한 사건 이후, GBBK는 Nasdaq에서 상장 폐지하고 SEC에 대한 증권 등록을 종료할 것입니다. 회사는 등록된 주주를 위해 직접 상환 지급을 처리하며, 'street name'으로 주식을 보유한 유익한 소유자는 아무런 조치를 취할 필요가 없습니다.
Global Blockchain Acquisition Corp (Nasdaq: GBBK) a annoncé sa dissolution imminente et le remboursement des actions publiques. L'entreprise cessera ses activités le 14 avril 2025, après son incapacité à réaliser une combinaison commerciale initiale d'ici le 12 avril 2025.
Les principales actions comprennent:La négociation des actions publiques cessera le 13 avril 2025Le remboursement de toutes les actions publiques en circulation sera effectué dans les 10 jours ouvrablesLe montant du remboursement sera égal aux fonds du compte fiduciaire (y compris les intérêts, moins les impôts) divisé par les actions publiques en circulationLes bons de souscription et les droits de l'entreprise expireront sans valeur
À la suite de ces événements, GBBK procédera à son retrait de Nasdaq et à la résiliation de son enregistrement de titres auprès de la SEC. L'entreprise gérera directement les paiements de remboursement pour les actionnaires enregistrés, tandis que les propriétaires bénéficiaires détenant des actions au nom de 'street name' n'ont pas besoin de prendre de mesures.
Global Blockchain Acquisition Corp (Nasdaq: GBBK) hat seine bevorstehende Auflösung und Rückzahlung der öffentlichen Aktien angekündigt. Das Unternehmen wird am 14. April 2025 den Betrieb einstellen, nachdem es bis zum 12. April 2025 keine erste Unternehmenszusammenführung abschließen konnte.
Wichtige Maßnahmen umfassen:Der Handel mit öffentlichen Aktien wird am 13. April 2025 eingestelltDie Rückzahlung aller ausstehenden öffentlichen Aktien erfolgt innerhalb von 10 GeschäftstagenDer Rückzahlungsbetrag entspricht den Mitteln des Treuhandkontos (einschließlich Zinsen, abzüglich Steuern) geteilt durch die ausstehenden öffentlichen AktienDie Unternehmenswarrants und -rechte verfallen wertlos
Nach diesen Ereignissen wird GBBK mit der Delistung von Nasdaq und der Beendigung seiner Wertpapierregistrierung bei der SEC fortfahren. Das Unternehmen wird die Rückzahlungszahlungen direkt für registrierte Aktionäre abwickeln, während begünstigte Eigentümer, die Aktien im 'Street Name' halten, keine Maßnahmen ergreifen müssen.
Orlando, Fla., April 09, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Global Blockchain Acquisition Corp. (the “Company”) (Nasdaq: GBBK) today announced that it will cease its operations as of April 14, 2025 (the first business day following the end of the business combination period, the “Record Date”), and as promptly as reasonably possible but not more than ten business days thereafter, will redeem all of its outstanding shares of common stock that were included in the units issued in its initial public offering (the “public shares”), effective as of the close of business on the Record Date, as the Company will not consummate an initial business combination on or prior to April 12, 2025.
Pursuant to the Amended and Restated Certificate of Incorporation, if the Company does not complete its initial business combination by April 12, 2025 (subject to the Board's election to contribute funds to the trust account in order to extend monthly), then the Company will: (i) cease all operations except for the purpose of winding up, (ii) promptly redeem the public shares within ten business days thereafter, at a per-share price, payable in cash, equal to the aggregate amount then on deposit in the Company's trust account including interest earned on the funds held in the trust account (less taxes payable), divided by the number of then outstanding public shares, which redemption will completely extinguish public shareholders' rights as shareholders (including the right to receive further liquidation distributions, if any), subject to applicable law, and (iii) thereafter, subject to the approval of the Company's remaining shareholders and its board of directors, dissolve and liquidate, subject in each case to the Company's obligations under Delaware law to provide for claims of creditors and the requirements of other applicable law.
The public shares will cease trading on April 13, 2025. As of the close of business on April 13, 2025, the public shares will be deemed cancelled and will represent only the right to receive the redemption amount.
The redemption amount will be payable to the holders of the public shares upon delivery of their shares. Beneficial owners of public shares held in “street name,” however, will not need to take any action in order to receive the redemption amount.
There will be no redemption rights or liquidating distributions with respect to the Company's warrants or rights, which will expire worthless.
The Company expects that the Nasdaq Stock Exchange will file a Form 25 with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (the “Commission”) to delist the Company's securities. The Company thereafter expects to file a Form 15 with the Commission to terminate the registration of its securities under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended.
Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements
Certain information contained in this press release may be deemed to constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements relate to expectations or forecasts for future events, including, without limitation, the redemption of the Company's public shares and the Company's subsequent dissolution and liquidation and its delisting from the Nasdaq Stock Exchange and its termination of registration with the Commission. These statements may be preceded by, followed by or include the words “may,” “might,” “will,” “will likely result,” “should,” “estimate,” “plan,” “project,” “forecast,” “intend,” “expect,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “seek,” “continue,” “target” or similar expressions. Such statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results in the future to differ materially from the Company's historical results and those presently anticipated or projected. The Company wishes to caution investors not to place undue reliance on any such forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements speak only as of the date on which such statements are made, and the Company undertakes no obligation to update such statements to reflect events or circumstances arising after such date. The Company assumes no obligation to update forward-looking statements except to the extent required by applicable securities laws. If the Company does update one or more forward-looking statements, no inference should be drawn that the Company will make additional updates with respect to those or other forward-looking statements.
Global Blockchain Acquisition Corp.Jonathan Morrisjonathan@globalblockchainpartners.com(407) 720-9250
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Bitcoin BTCUSD staged a sharp rebound after US President Donald Trump announced a pause on tariffs for non-retaliating countries, reigniting bullish momentum and raising hopes for a potential surge toward the $100,000 mark.
On April 9, BTCUSD surged by approximately 9%, reversing most of the losses it incurred earlier in the week, to retest $83,000. In doing so, the pair came closer to validating a falling wedge pattern that has been forming on its daily chart since December 2024.
A falling wedge pattern forms when the price trends lower inside a range defined by two converging, descending trendlines.
In a perfect scenario, the setup resolves when the price breaks decisively above the upper trendline and rises by as much as the maximum distance between the upper and lower trendlines.
As of April 9, Bitcoin's price was confined within the falling wedge range while eyeing a breakout above its upper trendline at around $83,000. If it is confirmed, BTC's main upside target by June could be around $100,000.
Conversely, a rejection from the upper trendline could raise the likelihood of Bitcoin retreating deeper within the wedge pattern, potentially sliding toward the apex near $71,100.
If a breakout occurs after testing the $71,100 level, the most conservative upside target for BTC could still be as high as $91,500.
Onchain data supports $100,000 Bitcoin outlook
Bitcoin's rebound appears just before testing a critical onchain support zone between $65,000 and $71,000, reinforcing the cryptocurrency's bullish outlook toward the 100,000 mark.
Notably, the $65,000-71,000 range is based on two important Bitcoin metrics—active realized price ($71,000) and the true market mean ($65,000).
These metrics estimate the average price at which current, active investors bought their Bitcoin. They filter out coins that haven't moved in a long time or are likely lost, giving a relatively accurate picture of the cost basis for those still participating in the market.
In the past, Bitcoin has spent about half the time trading above this price range and half below, making it a good indicator of whether the market is feeling positive or negative, according to Glassnode analysts.
“We now have confluence across several onchain price models, highlighting the $65k to $71k price range as a critical area of interest for the bulls to establish long-term support,” they wrote in a recent weekly analysis, adding:
Bitcoin's worst-case scenario is a decline toward $50,000
Breaking below the $65,000-71,000 range could worsen Bitcoin's probability of retesting $100,000 anytime soon. Such declines would also lead to the price breaking below its 50-week exponential moving average (50-week EMA; the red wave).
The 50-week EMA—near $77,760 as of April 9—has historically acted as a dynamic support during bull markets and a resistance during bear markets, making it a crucial trend-defining level.
Losing this support could open the door for a steeper pullback toward the 200-week EMA (the blue wave) at around $50,000. Previous breakdowns below the 50-week EMA have resulted in similar declines, namely during the 2021-2022 and 2019-2020 bear cycles.
A rebound, on the other hand, raises the likelihood of a $100,000 retest.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.
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Whatever the trade
ByBilly Bambrough
ByBilly Bambrough,
Senior Contributor.
Bitcoin and crypto prices have been rocked by U.S. president Donald Trump's chaotic global trade war—forcing Michael Saylor's Strategy into a shock bitcoin “sell” warning.
Front-run Donald Trump, the White House and Wall Street by subscribing now to Forbes' CryptoAsset & Blockchain Advisor where you can "uncover blockchain blockbusters poised for 1,000% plus gains!"
The bitcoin price has bounced back over $80,000 per bitcoin, though well down from a January peak of almost $110,000 that's seen $1.3 trillion wiped from the price of ethereum, XRP and the combined crypto market as fears of a looming “crisis scenario” swirl.
Now, after Treasury secretary Scott Bessent issues a surprise bitcoin prediction, the BlackRock-powered, crypto-based tokenisation of assets has been forecast to grow "exponentially” from $600 billion now to $19 trillion by 2033.
Sign up now for the free CryptoCodex—A daily five-minute newsletter for traders, investors and the crypto-curious that will get you up to date and keep you ahead of the bitcoin and crypto market bull run
“For financial institutions, tokenisation is no longer a side project. It is increasingly emerging as a strategic path and a likely next step in the evolution of finance,” the report, written by analysts with XRP developer Ripple and global management consulting company Boston Consulting Group and titled “Approaching the tokenisation tipping point," read.
Wall Street giants, led by the world's largest asset manager BlackRock, have embraced tokenisation in recent years.
"Global adoption is poised to grow exponentially," Yue Hong Zhang, managing director and partner at BCG Hong Kong, wrote in the report.
“With the recent growth of real-world assets, people outside the crypto industry are increasingly asking about the potential of tokenised assets to address historically under-penetrated segments."
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BlackRock, which manages over $10 trillion globally on behalf of clients, led the campaign last year to bring a fully-fledged spot bitcoin ETF to the U.S., winning approval for its IBIT and a fleet of other spot bitcoin ETFs in January.
In July, BlackRock's chief executive Larry Fink said he had been "wrong" about bitcoin when he'd previously dismissed it as "an index of money laundering," admitting bitcoin is "digital gold” and a "legitimate" financial instrument.
The arrival of a fleet of spot bitcoin ETFs on Wall Street was the first step in what Fink branded a digital "revolution" when he revealed his crypto ambitions for BlackRock in 2023—which includes a radical new, blockchain-based alternative to the U.S. dollar.
Fink revealed in 2023 year that he believes the crypto-based tokenisation of assets on blockchains will drive a "revolution" on Wall Street, as everything—from stock markets, pre-IPO stocks, hedge funds, infrastructure projects, commodities, alternate investment instruments and private credit—becomes tokenised.
"At BlackRock, we believe that tokenization has the potential to drive a significant transformation in capital markets infrastructure," BlackRock's global head of strategic ecosystem partnerships Joseph Chalom told Fortune last year. "Our investment in Securitize is another step in the evolution of our digital assets strategy."
NBA legend Shaquille O'Neal has agreed to pay $11 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over his promotion of the failed Astrals NFT project. A Florida federal judge approved the settlement on April 1, with the order becoming public just this week on April 8, according to court documents.
The lawsuit, first filed in May 2023, claimed O'Neal promoted the sale of unregistered securities through the Solana-based Astrals NFT collection. Investors who bought Astrals NFTs or the project's GLXY tokens between May 2022 and January 15, 2024, will now be eligible for compensation from the settlement fund.
Judge Federico Moreno previously acknowledged that plaintiffs had made a plausible case that the former NBA star acted as a seller under securities law. The settlement comes after months of legal back-and-forth, with O'Neal reaching an agreement with plaintiffs last November.
The next shot – Shaquille O'Neal and #Astrals NFTs + $GLXY tokens.
Shaq actively promoted the tokens, calling himself “Astrals Chief Astronaut.” But after the FTX collapse in November 2022, the project's reputation took a hit, and token sales slowed significantly.$GLXY is down… pic.twitter.com/quHziiGCdA
— 11th.com (@11thestate) March 28, 2025
The court approved $2.9 million in attorney fees and related costs as part of the settlement package. Judge Moreno ruled these fees were “fair and reasonable,” and noted that none of the plaintiffs objected to the amount lawyers would receive.
The lawyers were able to convince the court that investors lost their money because of O'Neal's marketing campaigns for the project.
Court papers indicate that O'Neal urged potential investors to “hop on the wave before it's too late,” something that came to haunt him in court.
Astrals were released in April 2022, providing 10,000 one-of-a-kind 3D avatars designed by artist Damien Guimoneau. The venture presented itself as a fully immersive metaverse experience through which users would be able to interact with other users as well as with O'Neal himself.
Despite the star power behind it, the collection has shown zero signs of activity over the past two years based on data from NFT marketplace OpenSea.
O'Neal reportedly continued to support the project publicly even after the major cryptocurrency exchange FTX collapsed in November 2022.
The court did throw O'Neal one small victory, dismissing claims that he was a “control person” within the project—a designation that would have suggested he held actual power over its operations rather than just serving as its famous face.
Shaquille O'Neal to Face Legal Action Over Astrals NFT Project and FTX Involvement
TLDR
Shaquille O'Neal faces a class action lawsuit over his involvement in the Astrals NFT project
The court dismissed allegations that O'Neal was a “control person” but found he could be cons… pic.twitter.com/tslw52EwOw
— 🛑 BREAKING NEWS 🛑📢🔔⚠💥❗💬 (@NotAnotherTip) August 19, 2024
The settlement comes as the broader NFT market struggles to regain its former glory. Total NFT sales volume stood at just $27 million for the week ending April 7, 2025, a dramatic drop from the $2 billion-plus weekly volumes recorded during the market's peak in 2021.
This downward trend has been ongoing, with trading volumes falling by more than 60% in February alone. The drop continues a slide that began in early 2024, suggesting the once-hot digital collectibles market remains in a prolonged slump.
Featured image from Megan Briggs/Getty, chart from TradingView
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Wrestling star Ric Flair, widely known by fans as the "Nature Boy," started his professional wrestling career in the 1970s.
Legendary professional wrestler Ric Flair launched a tokenized sticker collection on Telegram on April 9, becoming the latest celebrity to launch a tokenized social project.
Spokespeople for the project told Cointelegraph they are considering rewarding early sticker holders with future perks, though no specifics were shared. Flair told Cointelegraph that the project was launched to drive community engagement and added:
The wrestler's tokenized sticker launch follows mixed-martial arts champion and Irish political candidate Conor McGregor's memecoin launch on April 5, which failed and highlights the struggle of risk-on investments and digital assets amid the recent macroeconomic downturn.
Flair, who retired from wrestling in 2022, has previously ventured into the crypto space. In 2024, he introduced the "Wooooo!" coin (WOOOOO), a memecoin inspired by his iconic catchphrase. The token has no trading activity as of April 9, 2025, with only one address controlling over 70% of the supply, according to CoinMarketCap.The legendary wrestler has a history of merchandising his brand through various collectibles, including physical stickers available on his official online store and Amazon.
Wrestling icon Ric Flair joins Telegram and touts new project. Source: Ric Flair
Related: Melania Trump's memecoin team ‘quietly sold' $30M, says Bubblemaps
Memecoins were one of the biggest narratives of 2024 and one of the highest-performing asset classes, with top-performing memecoins returning four-figure percentage gains to investors during the year.
The market for memecoins and other social tokens peaked in December 2024 amid a historic rally in the crypto markets. However, since then, memecoin prices have plummeted, with many top-tier memecoins such as Dogecoin (DOGE) and Pepe (PEPE) shedding approximately 70-80% of their value over the period.
The macroeconomic uncertainty from the ongoing trade war has also damped the appetite for riskier assets as investors flee into more stable investments like cash, government bonds, and stablecoins.
Crypto markets bleed amid macroeconomic downturn, particularly altcoins, memes, and other social tokens. Source: TradingView
Conor McGregor's REAL token launched amid the macroeconomic crash and failed to meet its $1 million minimum funding requirement.
The project only managed to raise $392,315 during its April 5-6 sealed-bid auction presale — well under the $3 million goal set by the team and the Real World Gaming decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).
REAL's developers announced a full refund to bidders after failing to reach the minimum funding target. Despite this, the Real World Gaming DAO signaled that this would not be the end of the project.
Magazine: Memecoins: Betrayal of crypto's ideals… or its true purpose?
The first quarter of 2025 completely erased the effect of the US Presidential Elections. Bitcoin (BTC) retained its positions and market depth, while Ethereum (ETH) and altcoins saw an outflow of liquidity.
The first quarter of 2025 erased the price gains and liquidity from the last months of 2024. In three months, the market deflated to the levels of September 2024, losing both price action and liquidity.
On the positive side, Q1 arrived with a trend of improved policy climate for crypto, especially for the US market. The past three months saw the end of long-running lawsuits from the US Securities and Exchange Commission against several high-profile crypto companies. Despite the improved regulatory climate, most assets did not revisit their all-time highs.
Bitcoin retained its 1% market depth liquidity for the entire quarter, even ending the period slightly higher at $500M. BTC liquidity remained unaffected by the biggest events of the quarter, including the February crash, the Bybit hack, and the announcement of aggressive US tariffs.
The Bitcoin market earned its support from US-based platforms. US-based exchanges made up to 58% of available BTC liquidity, with the rest spread among global exchanges. Cex.IO, Kraken, and Coinbase made up to 60% of available BTC liquidity.
Ethereum (ETH) liquidity lost 27% for the same period, reacting more to negative events. As of April 6, 1% ETH liquidity had fallen to $243M, with ongoing selling from whales.
The altcoin market also shrank significantly, losing 30% of its 1% market depth. During the first three months of the year, the hopes of an altcoin market were lost, as those assets abandoned hopes of rallying as a whole. A basket of some of the most active altcoins and tokens, made up of the top 50 assets based on market cap, erased 300M in liquidity.
Those top 50 assets started the year with $1B in available liquidity, losing 30% on average. Some sectors and narratives saw a more significant outflow. The market depth for SHIB, PEPE, RNDR, and FIL decreased by nearly 50%, while some funds flowed into TAO, ONDO, and XRP. The outflow from the altcoin markets came from US-based traders, who also focused more closely on BTC.
Meme tokens saw the biggest outflow of liquidity, caused by a general outflow from risky assets, as well as from negative events linked to highly volatile tokens. The crash of LIBRA and the volatility of Official Trump (TRUMP) also erased confidence in the meme token market.
The crypto market reacts quickly and tracks closely any statements coming from the US administration. As a result, volatility increased, and traders quickly repriced risk. Announcements on tariffs were one of the strongest factors for market shifts. The market in 2025 has no markers such as the halving of the block reward, or an election season. For that reason, the market may continue to react to short-term news linked to the global trade war.
According to Kaiko analysts, the market will keep tracking the new batch of ETF applications. As of April 2025, around 40 applications for new products are in various stages of revision by the SEC.
The slowdown of the altcoin market did not affect the trend for institutional attempts to offer legacy altcoins. The most awaited ETF are for Solana (SOL) and XRP, but new products have been proposed for LTC, DOGE, as well as legacy networks like Avalanche (AVAX).
Stablecoins may continue growing in Q2, on track to expand to their predicted level of $400B by the end of the year. Stablecoins are expanding liquidity, but mostly serve as a way to quickly lock in gains.
The uncertainties of trade policies may also revive the narrative of BTC as a store of value and digital gold. So far, BTC has lagged behind actual gold, but a weakening US dollar may boost the digital gold narrative.
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Bitcoin's cooling futures market has paved the way for a strong price recovery.
Bitcoin's (BTC) futures market reflects a possible price cooldown after the cryptocurrency's multiple weeks of correction. Data from CryptoQuant indicated that the BTC-USDT futures leverage ratio with respect to open interest (OI) has halved since peaking in early 2025.
Bitcoin estimated futures leveraged ratio. Source: CryptoQuant
This significant de-leveraging has occurred because of massive liquidations over the past few weeks, which has effectively taken a majority of traders out of the market. Thus, the current market conditions indicate a healthier market reset, which is not overheated and could potentially pave the way for a steady price recovery.
Bitcoin's open interest dropped 28% from $71.8 billion on Dec. 18 to $51.8 billion on April 8. This underscores the magnitude of the current deleveraging event. Although this may induce short-term volatility, as few market players might control the price, it also positions BTC for stability in the long term, offering an advantage in the current uncertain trend.
Related: Bitcoin futures divergences point to transitioning market — Are BTC bulls accumulating?
In an X post, Sina, the co-founder of 21st Capital, presented an update on his Bitcoin Quantile Model and said that “Bitcoin is getting significantly de-risked here.”
Bitcoin Quantile Model. Source: X.com
The analyst explained that Bitcoin might have already completed 75-80% of its correction, declining from $109,000 to $74,500. Historically, prices have fallen by as much as 34% during the six-to-eight-week span of such trends. Currently, Bitcoin has dropped 31% from its all-time high, and a further decline to $72,000-$70,000 would bring it to approximately 34%. Sina added,
However, the likelihood of an immediate recovery remains low, as Bitcoin researcher Axel Adler Jr. expects BTC to move sideways in the “volatility corridor.”
Bitcoin support and resistance level. Source: X.com
The volatility corridor identified a price range of $75,000 to $96,000, outlined with the help of short-term holders' realized prices over different time periods.
Adler Jr. said that it was possible that BTC would consolidate between these levels over the next few weeks but warned that the price must hold a position above the 365-day simple moving average. A break below the key indicator could potentially lead to a new yearly low below the $74,500 level, with the ideal price being $70,000, as noted earlier.
Related: Trump tariffs reignite idea that Bitcoin could outlast US dollar
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Virgil Griffith, a former Ethereum developer jailed for attending a crypto conference in North Korea in 2019, was released from prison and is on his way to a halfway house, according to his lawyer, Alexander Urbelis.
Urbelis, general counsel of the Ethereum Name Service who has also been serving as Griffith's outside counsel, posted a photo of the newly released Griffith and his parents on X on Wednesday, standing in front of FCI Milan, the low-security Michigan prison where Griffith served a portion of his 56-month sentence.
“I am so pleased to report that VIRGIL IS OUT!” Urbelis wrote. “Happy day indeed.”
Griffith was arrested in November 2019, seven months after returning from the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, where he had attended a crypto conference. While at the conference, Griffith gave a presentation on Ethereum and explained how cryptocurrency could be used to evade sanctions against the country. Though he initially fought the charge, Griffith pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to violate international sanctions in 2021.
The New York judge overseeing the case sentenced him to a $100,000 fine and 63 months, or a little over five years, imprisonment — a fraction of the possible 20 year sentence he faced if he went to trial and lost. Last year, Griffith's lawyers were successfully able to get his sentence reduced to 56 months, citing his status as a first-time offender.
Griffith has been imprisoned since mid-2021. Though he was initially released on bail following his arrest, a judge sent him back to jail in New York to await trial after he violated his bail conditions by attempting to access one of his cryptocurrency accounts in order to pay his lawyers.
Urbelis told CoinDesk that Griffith's legal team has hopes he will soon be moved from his halfway house in Baltimore to home confinement.
“But the long-term consequences persist: Virgil will have to endure burdensome probation for several years, the conditions of which are not yet known," Urbelis said. "And on top of that, the Department of Commerce placed severe export restrictions on Virgil that will extend until 2032 and which would make his life very difficult.”
The Department of Commerce's restrictions prohibit Griffith from participating either directly or indirectly in any transaction involving software or technology that will be exported from the U.S., Urbelis said, making a return to working in the crypto industry difficult, if not impossible.
Griffith is seeking a pardon from President Donald Trump's administration, which Urbelis said was an “ongoing process” they had made “great progress” on.
“We are seeking a pardon to bring justice to a prosecution that we believe was wrongheaded and fundamentally un-American from the outset, to better Virgil's life, and to make sure that Virgil has [the] ability to contribute to a world that so desperately needs thinkers and doers like him,” Urbelis said.
Trump has pardoned a number of people convicted on crypto-related criminal charges, including Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht and former BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes and three people convicted of violating the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). Still more convicted crypto criminals, including former FTX CEO and fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, are hopeful for pardons of their own.
On the news team at CoinDesk, Cheyenne focuses on crypto regulation and crime. Cheyenne is originally from Houston, Texas. She studied political science at Tulane University in Louisiana. In December 2021, she graduated from CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, where she focused on business and economics reporting. She has no significant crypto holdings.
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By Isabella Flores
Key Takeaways:
With technology continuing to revolutionize how governments operate, New York is leading the charge in modernizing elections. Introduced by Assemblyman Clyde Vanel is Assembly Bill A7716, legislation that suggests promoting the use of blockchain technology to enhance the state's electoral process to be more secure, transparent, and reliable.
The bill, which is currently pending in the New York State Assembly, seeks to call for a comprehensive study on the application of blockchain in voter registration, vote counting, and election result verification.
Securing the Vote: New York Bill Seeks to Modernize Election with Blockchain
Rather than hurrying to use blockchain in upcoming elections, the bill suggests a measured approach:
The legislation is a reaction to more profound concerns regarding the instability of public trust in election facilities. Foreign tampering, disinformation, aging infrastructure, and nail-biters have all contributed to a climate in which even verified results are disputed.
By recognizing newer technology, A7716 aims to restore trust in voters with election results that cannot be disputed.
If passed, the bill would require the New York State Board of Elections to work with technologists and industry experts to assess blockchain's potential application to several priority areas:
The ensuing report should include:
Such a report would be a blueprint for future legislative action, deciding whether or not to proceed with the actual rollout of blockchain technologies in election systems.
Though the idea of blockchain in elections is controversial, governments across the globe are increasingly exploring its use:
A7716, though, is not aimed at the distant internet voting that raises security red flags with most experts. Instead, it's aimed at using blockchain to support back-end security in an effort to modernize internal mechanisms, not replace in-person voting.
The bill has made it into early stages of legislative review, including possible committee hearings and budgetary review. If the bill passes both the Assembly and Senate and is signed into law by them, the subsequent feasibility study could set the stage for a multi-year implementation plan to computerize New York's elections.
More News: Crypto's $134 Million Investment in the 2024 Elections Are Shaping US Politics
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Isabella specializes in tracking how blockchain technology is transforming industries worldwide. She previously worked as a business analyst for a fintech startup before pivoting to journalism. Her pieces explore the real-world applications of blockchain, from supply chain to healthcare. Isabella is passionate about highlighting underrepresented use cases in the crypto space.
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WLFI sells Ethereum at a loss amid tariff tensions and market volatility.
Cover art/illustration via CryptoSlate. Image includes combined content which may include AI-generated content.
World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the DeFi project partly owned by US President Donald Trump‘s family, has begun offloading some Ethereum holdings amid the top asset's recent price struggles.
On April 9, blockchain analysis platform Lookonchain, citing data from Arkham Intelligence, reported that a wallet linked to the DeFi venture sold 5,471 ETH for approximately $8.01 million at an average price of $1,465.
The sale marks a significant setback for the firm, considering WLFI previously spent $210 million to accumulate 67,498 ETH at an average of $3,259 per coin.
Based on current prices, Lookonchain stated that the firm is staring at an unrealized loss of about $125 million.
World Liberty Financial has yet to comment publicly on these sales.
Meanwhile, the sell-off reflects broader concerns in the Ethereum market.
Over the past week, ETH dipped below the $1,500 mark amid a 56% year-to-date correction. ETH's current price now sits below its realized price, causing concerns for its investors
Market analysts have attributed the slump in part to geopolitical tensions, including the ongoing Trump tariff dispute, which has triggered uncertainty in traditional and crypto markets.
Despite ETH's downturn, WLFI secured a significant vote of confidence from DWF Labs.
Onchain data shared by the pseudonymous crypto analyst ai_9684xtpa revealed that the Web3 market maker subscribed to 250 million WLFI tokens for $25 million USDC.
According to the analyst, this valuation is nearly seven times higher than the original offering price of $0.015 and double the second-round rate of $0.05.
Notably, this comes a few days after Lookonchain reported that DWF Labs had received 1 million USD1, the stablecoin launched by the Trump-backed project, for market-making purposes.
USD1 is designed to be a fully collateralized stablecoin, maintaining a 1:1 peg with the US Dollar.
The digital asset has drawn considerable attention since its launch, with WLFI recently submitting a proposal to airdrop USD1 to its token holders. This initiative aims to test WLFI's distribution model and reward early adopters ahead of the stablecoin's public rollout.
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A new bill introduced in the State of New York could mark a significant turning point for the integration of blockchain technology in democratic processes.
On April 8, State Representative Clyde Vanel introduced bill A07716, a legislative initiative that pushes to explore the use of blockchain to enhance the security of registri elettorali and risultati delle elezioni.
This is a decisive step that could redefine the relationship between technology and democracy in the United States.
Summary
The heart of the proposal is the task assigned to the New York State Election Commission, which will have to initiate an in-depth study on the applicability of blockchain in the electoral context.
Objective: understand if, and to what extent, this technology can improve the reliability and security of the State's voting system.
The blockchain, known for its decentralized structure and the ability to make data immutable entered within the ledger, brings evident advantages in terms of cybersecurity.
The bill requires that, within a year, a rapporto conclusivo be drafted on the possible benefits of its application to the electoral system.
The study, furthermore, must be supported by the contribution of experts in blockchain, cybersecurity, electoral fraud, and vote recording: a multidisciplinary approach that aims to accurately assess the potential of the technology.
The interest in blockchain applications for voting is not an absolute novelty. In the past, systems capable of using decentralized networks have already been experimented with to ensure transparency, traceability, and trust in the entire electoral process.
A recent example comes from Williamson County, Tennessee, where the results of the Republican Party Convention elections were securely stored through the Bitcoin network.
Even overseas, the topic has sparked debate. About a year ago, Brian Rose, former independent mayoral candidate of London, stated that voting on blockchain could represent a true revolution for modern democracy.
His idea is based on the possibility of verifiably associating the identity of the voter with the vote cast, authorizing the creation of an immutable register that is accessible at any time:
“Wouldn't we all sleep better at night if that identity and that vote could really be proven?”
However, experts warn against excessive enthusiasm. On one hand, the introduction of blockchain in electoral processes promises greater reliability, but on the other hand, there is a fundamental limitation.
That is, the blockchain is only as efficient as the data that is entered into it. A concept summarized in the English phrase “garbage in, garbage out,” meaning “if you input garbage, you get garbage.”
In other words, technology can protect data from tampering after recording, but it cannot guarantee that the original data, once entered, is correct, authentic, or free from human or digital manipulations.
Deputy Clyde Vanel has now built a reputation as one of the most active supporters of regulation and technological promotion in the State of New York.
He is not new to legislative proposals regarding cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology, and protection of digital investors.
Last March, Vanel proposed another bill to establish criminal penalties against fraud in the crypto field. Like the famous “rug pull”, where the creators of a project digitalize funds and then disappear with the investments.
The deputy's vision has also been felt in public policies. In fact, as early as January of the same year, Vanel recalled how New York had become the first state to establish a task force dedicated to criptovalute.
This is aimed at delving into the use, regulation, and definitions related to the world of digital finance.
According to Vanel, who in the past has urged for greater participation of the blockchain industry in discussions with legislators, the sector needs to educate the regulators to promote a greater balance between technological innovation and public interest.
An idea that today is reflected in its latest proposal on electronic voting, in search of a more secure, transparent, and futuristic model.
If the bill is approved, New York could become the pioneer state of a digital transformation in American electoral systems.
The adoption of blockchain would offer a new way to ensure the integrity of elections. Consequently making any attempts at fraud more difficult and increasing citizens' trust in democratic mechanisms.
However, in-depth analyses, rigorous testing, and expert opinions will be needed to transform a technological promise into a solid and widely adoptable solution.
The report expected from the Electoral Commission in the next 12 months will be decisive in understanding whether blockchain will truly represent the future of electronic voting.
Or if it will remain, for a little while longer, a technology waiting for its opportunity. One thing is certain: the path towards the modernization of electoral processes is now set. And New York seems intent on leading the way.
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The chase for Alexander Ovechkin collectibles remains hot after his record-setting 895th goal Sunday, which moved him ahead of Wayne Gretzky as the NHL's all-time leading goal-scorer.
But it isn't all sticks, jerseys and pucks.
NHL Breakaway, the official digital collectible (NFT) platform of the NHL (much in the same vein as NBA TopShot), has created a 1/1 NFT in honor of Ovechkin's landmark goal and is selling it via auction at Heritage.
The pre-sale estimate for the NFT is $25,000, and bidding has topped $7,500 with two weeks remaining.
The platform launched in 2023 and is also selling digital packs dubbed “The Gr8 Chase” for $8.95.
As of early Wednesday, the platform had sold 3,000 of the 8,888 total packs created.
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct, the premier company for collectible culture.
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The odds of an emergency Federal Reserve interest rate cut have jumped sharply on Polymarket and Kalshi as Donald Trump's trade war intensifies.
A Polymarket poll with over $360,000 in assets shows that these odds have surged to 31%, up from 15% on April 1. A similar prediction market on Kalshi places the odds at 41%, the highest level since November last year.
These expectations have climbed as multiple analysts downgraded their economic outlook for the U.S. amid the expanding trade war. Notably, the U.S. recently imposed a 104% tariff on all Chinese goods, a sweeping measure likely to significantly impact both economies. China exports roughly $432 billion worth of goods to the U.S. annually, out of a total trade volume of $582 billion between the two nations.
We are green lit for Fed intervention. pic.twitter.com/RgwiBTPJz3
The U.S. has also enforced broad-based tariffs on several key trade partners, including the European Union, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam.
Top Wall Street firms like JPMorgan, BlackRock, and Goldman Sachs have all raised their recession forecasts. for the year. As a result, an emergency interest rate cut by the Federal Reserve is increasingly viewed as a likely response to ease borrowing costs and inject liquidity into the economy.
Bitcoin (BTC), Cardano (ADA), and Ripple (XRP) have entered a bear market this year, mirroring the broader downturn in equities. The Dow Jones, S&P 500, and Nasdaq 100 indices have all fallen over 20% from their 2024 highs, officially entering bear territory.
History shows that risky assets like stocks and crypto do well whenever the Federal Reserve implements an emergency interest rate cut. A good example happened in March 2020 when the fear and greed index dropped to the extreme fear zone as the pandemic started.
A series of interest rate cuts, quantitative easing, and fiscal stimulus helped to boost crypto and stock prices. Bitcoin soared from below $4,000 in March 2020 to over $69,000 a year later. Similarly, XRP price jumped from $0.12 to almost $2, while Cardano's meteoric rise pushed it to $3 and its market cap to $91 billion.
Donald Trump has already started talking about fiscal stimulus. According to the Wall Street Journal, the administration is considering a bailout for farmers and a tax credit to help exporters navigate the new normal.
Therefore, a combination of easy money policies by the Fed and more fiscal stimulus would help push Bitcoin, Cardano, and XRP prices higher.
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Tortola, British Virgin Islands, April 9th, 2025, Chainwire
Jackson.io is thrilled to announce the groundbreaking launch of its AI-driven NFT collection, Jackson Sharkz, on April 15, 2025. Featuring a unique shark-inspired design, this limited series of 9,999 NFTs will be distributed for free through an innovative community campaign. These NFTs will serve as the ultimate Web3-AI integration pass, becoming the cornerstone of Jackson.io's global ecosystem. Holders will benefit from zero royalty trading, exclusive access to AI-powered features, and early access to ecosystem-wide benefits.
Free Ownership, Jackson.io's WAGMI Philosophy
Breaking traditional NFT norms, the Jackson Sharkz collection will be distributed for free. Users can claim their NFTs by participating in the exclusive launch event on April 15, 2025. To foster seamless community-driven trading, Jackson.io guarantees zero royalties on all secondary transactions, giving holders complete control over their assets.
This bold approach eliminates barriers to entry and underscores Jackson.io's core philosophy of "We're All Gonna Make It", ensuring everyone can participate in the ecosystem.
Powered by Sui Blockchain: High Performance, Low Cost
The Jackson Sharkz collection is minted on the Sui blockchain, known as the "next-generation blockchain standard." Sui offers instant transaction confirmations and near-zero fees, resolving the high costs and congestion challenges of traditional blockchains.
Built on Sui's scalable architecture, the collection is future-proofed for innovations like cross-chain AI data exchange and dynamic NFT upgrades, setting the stage for long-term integration of AI and blockchain technologies.
Exclusive Perks for the Sharkz Community
Jackson Sharkz is more than an NFT collection—it's a community symbol. Owning one means becoming part of the Jackson.io story, with benefits that extend beyond the digital world:
1. Physical Products and Brand Merch
Jackson Sharkz NFTs will be tied to exclusive shark-themed merchandise, such as hats, toys, and hoodies. Certain limited editions will be exclusively available to NFT holders, adding real-world value and further enhancing the uniqueness of the collection.
2. Airdrops and Exclusive Rewards
Holders will receive regular airdrops, including new NFTs, platform tokens, and other exclusive rewards. In addition, holders will enjoy discounts on future Jackson.io products and services, ensuring a growing suite of benefits.
3. Access to Exciting Real-Life Events
Jackson Sharkz NFTs double as a pass to VIP events, online forums, live community sessions, and even in-person gatherings. From brand collaborations to exclusive meetups, holders will always be at the heart of the action.
Creating a Sustainable NFT Ecosystem
The Jackson Sharkz collection is among the first NFTs to seamlessly combine artificial intelligence with real-world utility. Each NFT unlocks AI-powered features within the Jackson.io ecosystem, transforming it from a mere collectible into a practical tool.
Unlike many NFTs that rely solely on hype, Jackson Sharkz sets out to create a sustainable ecosystem by merging AI innovation with tangible applications.
Revenue Sharing for Long-Term Value
Jackson.io pledges to share a portion of future AI product revenues with Jackson Sharkz holders, ensuring they directly benefit from the ecosystem's growth. This innovative model strengthens the bond between holders and the Jackson.io ecosystem while enhancing the long-term value of the NFTs.
Users interested in Jackson Sharkz can keep an eye on Jackson's x.com on April 15th for additional information. Also, users can learn more at the official website.
Save the Date: April 15, 2025
Don't miss your chance to claim a piece of Web3 history. Join us on April 15, 2025, as we launch the Jackson Sharkz collection and redefine the future of NFTs at the intersection of AI and blockchain.
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About Jackson.io
Jackson.io, a decentralized GameFi platform, leverages the high-performance Sui blockchain to deliver a transparent and equitable ecosystem for players and liquidity providers.
Users can learn more at Jackson.io, and connect with the team on X
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9th April 2025 – (New York) Cryptocurrency expert Joao, known for accurately predicting significant market movements, has turned his attention to XRP, suggesting that the altcoin may face further declines following its recent crash below the $2 mark. Joao's insights come as part of a broader examination of XRP's potential trajectory, warning that the price might slip below $1, inducing further pain for holders.
On his TradingView platform, Joao shared an ominous outlook, describing a potential long-term distribution phase that could be the most turbulent scenario for XRP. His accompanying chart detailed a “radical distribution scheme” that could extend into late 2025, demonstrating the analyst's concern about the altcoin's current market dynamics.
Joao explained that XRP could first exhibit signs of weakness, potentially dropping below levels last seen during the COVID-19 market plunge, with the price possibly approaching $0.10. He outlined two possible scenarios for this downward trend. In the first scenario, dubbed Scheme 1, Joao predicts that XRP could dip to $0.10 before staging a bounce back to around $0.40, which he identifies as the final point of significant selling pressure.
Conversely, in Scheme 2, Joao suggested a more dramatic outcome, where XRP could experience a rally between $5 and $6.80, with an average peak anticipated around $5.5 to $5.7. Such an outcome would likely incite a wave of euphoria among traders. However, Joao cautioned that this scenario is just one of several extreme possibilities, emphasising that XRP's future price movements will heavily depend on various factors, including Bitcoin's performance, the activities of market makers, overall supply and demand, public interest in digital assets, and broader macroeconomic conditions.
Adding to the chorus of caution, fellow crypto analyst John highlighted a bearish trend for XRP. He noted that the retracement of the altcoin's price could extend to levels not seen since mid-2024, predicting a drop to the Fibonacci price level of $0.3827. John pointed out a bearish engulfing pattern that appeared on XRP's weekly chart in late March, which has reinforced his outlook for a potential decline.
In a more nuanced assessment, Egrag Crypto, another prominent voice in the crypto analysis community, stated that an ascending broadening wedge formation suggests a 70% chance of a downside breakout for XRP. He indicated that should this scenario unfold, the predicted move for XRP could see it fall to approximately $0.65, further exacerbating current concerns among investors.
As the market grapples with these ominous forecasts, $1.90 has emerged as a critical resistance level for XRP. Analyst CasiTrades noted in a post on X that following the significant market downturn on Black Monday, April 7, where the price dipped to around $1.61, this level has become a formidable barrier. This drop not only established new extremes on the Relative Strength Index (RSI) but also narrowly missed major support levels, raising concerns among traders.
CasiTrades reported that although XRP has rebounded to test the $1.90 resistance, the next support level is identified at $1.55, coinciding with the golden .618 Fibonacci retracement level. She posited that this price action aligns with the development of a Wave 3 pattern, which could set the stage for a break through all-time highs (ATHs).
Interestingly, CasiTrades asserted that if XRP can manage to establish a bottom near the $1.55 mark, it could significantly strengthen the bullish case for a rally this month, potentially elevating the price to between $8 and $13. If the altcoin were to achieve such a rally, it would not only signify a critical breakthrough of its ATH resistance but could also propel XRP to unprecedented heights.
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The department won't pursue cases it feels are better left to financial regulators, focusing instead on crimes committed with cryptocurrency.
The Justice Department has directed prosecutors to limit their pursuit of certain cryptocurrency crimes, the latest example of the Trump administration pulling back on white-collar criminal enforcement.
In a memo sent to staff members Monday night, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the department will no longer pursue cases that he described as better left to financial regulatory agencies. Instead, prosecutors should focus on investigating people who commit crimes using cryptocurrency, such as defrauding investors, dealing narcotics and enabling human trafficking, Blanche said.
Blanche also announced the disbandment of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, a group of cryptocurrency, cybercrime and money-laundering experts established in 2022 to “address the challenge posed by the criminal misuse of cryptocurrencies and digital assets.” The team played a leading role in some of the government's largest investigations of players in the crypto sector.
“The Department of Justice is not a digital assets regulator,” Blanche wrote.
The Trump administration has taken multiple steps to legitimize and loosen regulation of the relatively nascent cryptocurrency industry, a sector in which the president and his family have expanded their own financial interests within the past year.
President Donald Trump vowed as a candidate to ease restrictions on crypto companies, shoring up his support and donations from tech investors and digital assets executives who said they had been persecuted by Biden administration efforts to regulate the market.
The Biden administration ramped up scrutiny of the industry after a series of collapses that harmed consumers — including the implosion of the fraudulent cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2022, which resulted in the loss of more than $8 billion in customer deposits.
At the first-ever White House crypto summit in March — co-hosted by the president's artificial intelligence and crypto czar, tech investor David Sacks — Trump pledged to end the Biden administration's “war on crypto.”
Since then, the Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped more than a dozen cases against crypto firms. Last month, both the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency pledged to stop evaluating banks based on “reputational risk” — a practice that some venture capitalists have claimed unfairly “de-banked” founders of cryptocurrency start-ups.
Meanwhile, the president and first lady Melania Trump have begun selling meme coins, a speculative venture that some industry insiders see as a conflict of interest.
And in September, Trump and his sons announced the launch of World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture. The business plans to sell a stablecoin, even as the White House works with lawmakers to develop legislation that would regulate these forms of cryptocurrencies that are backed by the dollar.
In his memo to the Justice Department, Blanche sharply criticized crypto regulatory efforts under President Joe Biden's attorney general, Merrick Garland. “The prior Administration used the Justice Department to pursue a reckless strategy of regulation by prosecution,” Blanche wrote, calling that push “ill conceived and poorly executed.”
Blanche said the Justice Department would largely move away from pursuing litigation against crypto companies accused of violating securities, commodities or banking secrecy laws. Those statutes were used to secure the convictions of three founders of the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX in 2022. Trump has issued pardons to all three.
It was in 2022 that the Justice Department launched the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team with a goal of dismantling cryptocurrency exchanges and “mixers” that were used by criminals to hide the ownership and source of their ill-gotten funds.
As he disbanded the team Monday, Blanche said that rather than target those platforms for “the acts of their end users,” prosecutors should now prioritize the criminals themselves.
Officials had already transferred the founding head of the enforcement team — national security prosecutor Eun Young Choi — to a newly created “sanctuary cities” division of the Justice Department in the first days of the Trump administration.
Choi's team played a leading role in some of the department's most significant crypto cases, including against the owners of Tornado Cash — a cryptocurrency “mixer” alleged to have scrambled funds to obscure their true owners — and the prosecution of Avraham Eisenberg, who was convicted last year in a $110 million market-manipulation case in Manhattan.
“It's hard to underestimate the importance this task force has had … in pursuing some really huge crypto hacks and cases,” said Yesha Yadav, a Vanderbilt University law professor who closely follows cryptocurrency and financial markets.
Without this team in place, Yadav said, intelligence regarding potential cryptocurrency crimes could become “more diffuse,” making it more difficult for the government to pursue “incredibly nimble, very opportunistic actors in this space.”
The Eisenberg case was the Justice Department's first prosecution involving an open-market cryptocurrency manipulation scheme. It was prosecuted with attorneys from the department's Market Integrity and Major Frauds Unit. Blanche's memo ordered that unit to cease enforcement of digital currency cases and focus instead on immigration-related crimes and procurement fraud.
The case against Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm is set for trial later this year. Prosecutors have accused Storm of knowingly profiting from criminals, including North Korean hackers. But Storm has drawn support from cryptocurrency advocates who say he is being unfairly targeted for crimes committed by others using the platform he developed.
Storm's attorney, Brian Klein, said he read Blanche's memo Tuesday “as supporting the dismissal of the case.”
“As we've said all along,” Klein said in an email. “It should never have been brought.”
Justin D. Weitz, a Morgan Lewis partner and former Justice Department lawyer who oversaw cryptocurrency cases, called Blanche's announcement an abandonment of cases in the digital asset space.
“What I see them doing here is recentering focus to be about victims and fraud instead of these technical violations,” Weitz said. “The overall goal should have always been: How are we protecting consumers who are getting ripped off in this Wild West? If DOJ devotes resources to protect victims of cryptocurrency-related fraud and manipulation, that's going to be a good thing that will make the industry better.”
Aaron Schaffer, Nitasha Tiku and Lisa Bonos contributed to this report.
Manish Chhetri
FXStreet
Bitcoin (BTC) price hovers around $76,200 on Wednesday after falling 3.59% the previous day. Ethereum (ETH) and Ripple (XRP) followed BTC's footsteps and continued their downward trend. The technical outlook suggests a correction, targeting $73,000 BTC, $1,300 ETH, and $1.30 XRP.
Bitcoin price was rejected from its resistance of $85,000 on April 2 and declined 10.55% until Tuesday. It reached a yearly low of $74,508 on Monday. At the time of writing on Wednesday, it hovers around $76,000.
If BTC continues its downward trend, it could extend the decline to test its next daily support level at $73,072.
The daily chart's Relative Strength Index (RSI) is around 33, indicating strong bearish momentum and backs the negative outlook.
BTC/USDT daily chart
However, if BTC recovers and closes above its daily resistance at $85,000, it could extend the recovery rally to the key psychological level of $90,000.
Ethereum price declined nearly 13% last week after failing to close above the daily level of $1,861. As of this week, it continues its downward momentum and declined nearly 7% until Tuesday. At the time of writing on Wednesday, it falls below its daily support level of $1,449, reaching levels not seen since October 2023.
If ETH closes below its daily support level of $1,449, it could extend the decline to retest its important psychological level of $1,300.
The RSI reads 23, below its oversold level of 30, indicating that Ethereum may be undervalued and could be due for a price recovery to the upside. However, the RSI could remain below the oversold level and continue its downward spiral.
ETH/USDT daily chart
Conversely, if ETH recovers, it could extend the recovery to retest its important psychological level of $1,700.
XRP price was rejected from its 200-day Exponential Moving Average (EMA) at $1.94 on Monday and declined by 6.5% until the next day. Moreover, XRP reached a new yearly low of $1.61 earlier this week. At the time of writing on Wednesday, it hovers around the $1.77 level.
If XRP continues its downward trend and closes below the $1.77 level, it could extend the decline to test its new yearly low of $1.61. A successful close below this level could extend an additional decline to retest its weekly support level at $1.30.
The RSI on the daily chart reads 30, approaching its oversold level of 30, indicating strong bearish momentum and supporting the negative outlook. Moreover, if the RSI slips below its oversold level, XRP may be undervalued and could be due for a price recovery to the upside. However, the RSI could remain below the oversold level and continue its downward spiral.
XRP/USDT daily chart
On the other hand, if XRP recovers, it could extend the recovery to test its daily level at $1.96.
Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, a virtual currency designed to serve as money. This form of payment cannot be controlled by any one person, group, or entity, which eliminates the need for third-party participation during financial transactions.
Altcoins are any cryptocurrency apart from Bitcoin, but some also regard Ethereum as a non-altcoin because it is from these two cryptocurrencies that forking happens. If this is true, then Litecoin is the first altcoin, forked from the Bitcoin protocol and, therefore, an “improved” version of it.
Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies designed to have a stable price, with their value backed by a reserve of the asset it represents. To achieve this, the value of any one stablecoin is pegged to a commodity or financial instrument, such as the US Dollar (USD), with its supply regulated by an algorithm or demand. The main goal of stablecoins is to provide an on/off-ramp for investors willing to trade and invest in cryptocurrencies. Stablecoins also allow investors to store value since cryptocurrencies, in general, are subject to volatility.
Bitcoin dominance is the ratio of Bitcoin's market capitalization to the total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies combined. It provides a clear picture of Bitcoin's interest among investors. A high BTC dominance typically happens before and during a bull run, in which investors resort to investing in relatively stable and high market capitalization cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. A drop in BTC dominance usually means that investors are moving their capital and/or profits to altcoins in a quest for higher returns, which usually triggers an explosion of altcoin rallies.
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TRON DAO facilitates $1.2 billion in USDT exchange inflows over the past seven days as on-chain volume hits $72 billion. An increase in USDT exchange inflows suggests that traders are either preparing to buy the dip or could be covering long positions.
Bitcoin price stabilizes around $76,000 at the time of writing on Wednesday after falling 3.59% the previous day. BTC could face volatility as US President Donald Trump announced tariffs go live on Wednesday, with China's retaliatory duties on Thursday.
Cryptocurrencies are enduring progressive market carnage from the US President Donald Trump administration's incessant tariffs on its trade partners, with some selected altcoins like NEO, Plume and Story (IP) leading the bullish brigade on Wednesday.
Cardano (ADA) price hovers around $0.56 on Wednesday after falling 13% the previous week. Token Terminal data shows that ADA's fee collection has constantly fallen in 2025, indicating lower blockchain usage and activity.
Bitcoin (BTC) price remains under selling pressure and trades near $84,000 when writing on Friday after a rejection from a key resistance level earlier this week.
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Four years after the US Department of Justice has established its cryptocurrency scam unit and watchdog, it is now disbanding the team as it tries to align with what the Trump administration wants for blockchain.
Over the past years, this specific unit has focused on going against the use of crypto for different crimes, including fraud, theft, and more.
Moreover, the unit has been successful in several high-profile cases against crypto exchange platforms for their different malpractices in the use of the decentralized finance for nefarious activities.
Reuters reported that a new memo from the DOJ has confirmed that it is disbanding the four-year-old National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET). The news was shared by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, with the Justice department now shifting its focus to a more crypto-friendly direction as is what the Trump administration wants.
Previously, the NCET focused on prosecuting cryptocurrency scams, which includes fraud, money laundering, and theft, with the team able to win several cases against crypto platforms like Binance, Bitfinex, and Tornado Cash.
This also goes alongside the newfound direction of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which has stepped back on its crypto regulations focus, for a more welcoming experience for blockchain.
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Blanche revealed in the memo that the Justice Department will focus on new ways to enforce against illegal crypto operations, which centers on individuals who are victimizing digital asset investors or those that use crypto for crimes. These acts of crime include terrorism, human trafficking, narcotics, hacking, organized crime, gang financing, and more.
It was revealed by the Deputy Attorney General that anything that is outside of the said scope "should be closed."
That being said, there are still massive risks tied to the cryptocurrency industry, particularly crypto scam activities that happen daily, in both domestic and foreign levels, according to Engadget.
One of the most significant promises of Trump's campaign for presidency is his fostering of the cryptocurrency industry for America and its citizens, expressing his desire to make the country the "capital" of the blockchain market.
During his rise to power, the market saw an exponential growth towards new all-time highs, and last month, President Trump unveiled the US "Strategic Reserve" initiative, which also helped prices to skyrocket.
There has been scrutiny against the cryptocurrency industry over the past years, and many companies like Coinbase and more have complained that the lack of regulatory clarity is implicating them for alleged crimes. Thanks to Trump, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has dropped the lawsuit against Coinbase regarding alleged illegal securities exchanges.
Apart from transforming the United States as the crypto capital of the world, Trump has also focused on making Bitcoin, the world's top grossing cryptocurrency, as a "superpower," but he has not yet revealed the plans for it.
Furthermore, Trump has already mobilized certain advancements for crypto, such as his previous executive order for a working committee towards regulations.
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How to Keep Your Crypto Wallet Safe from Phishing Attacks
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Dave Portnoy, the outspoken founder of Barstool Sports, posted a simple question on X last week that hit a nerve in the crypto world: “If the point of Bitcoin is to be independent of the U.S. Dollar and nonregulated, why does it basically trade exactly like the U.S. stock market nowadays?”
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That one line summed up what a lot of casual investors have been wondering, especially as Bitcoin and crypto stocks took a dive following President Donald Trump's new round of tariffs on Wednesday.
Bitcoin had been hovering near $88,000 before Trump's announcement. Not long after the tariff policy was unveiled, it slipped below $83,000. It wasn't alone. Stocks tanked in after-hours trading, with tech-heavy ETFs like Invesco QQQ (NASDAQ:QQQ) falling 4%.
Crypto-linked stocks also followed the same trend. MicroStrategy (NASDAQ:MSTR) dropped 7%, Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN) fell 6%, and Robinhood (NASDAQ:HOOD) lost 9%.
So much for being “independent.”
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Plenty of people chimed in to answer Portnoy's question. Some pointed to institutional involvement, others blamed emotions, and a few leaned on technical analysis.
“Bitcoin trades like a risk asset short term because it's the most liquid, salable, 24/7 asset on Earth,” said MicroStrategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor. “In times of panic, traders sell what they can, not what they want to.”
And then there's plain logic. “If you needed to pay rent what are you selling first? Apple stock or your crypto bags?” one user wrote.
Another replied, “Boom. When you realize big money has already hijacked bitcoin and it's no different than the stock market anymore.”
Others got sarcastic: “Day 1 of the bear market: Portnoy discovers what correlation means.” And: “It used to be a currency before it was hijacked and turned into a collectible.” Prominent analyst Benjamin Cowen also piled on, saying, “How can you be your age and write something like that?”
Some users defended Bitcoin's original intent. “Traders are the froth. Hodlers are the floor,” one said. Another added, “Bitcoin is the best-performing asset over the last 15 years.”
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This latest Bitcoin drop didn't come out of nowhere. Wall Street was already reeling from inflation data and weak consumer sentiment. On Friday, a few days before “Liberation Day,” The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell over 700 points, the S&P 500 slid 2%, and the Nasdaq (NASDAQ:NDAQ) lost nearly 3%.
Then came Trump's tariff announcement, renewing trade war fears. The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow forecast now shows a 2.8% GDP decline for Q1, up from -3.7% on April 1.
While Bitcoin has shown some resilience compared to stocks, it's still moving in the same direction when fear hits.
Some still believe in one of Bitcoin's original promises: a decentralized hedge against economic chaos. But for now, most agree that Bitcoin is still a risk-on asset, and it trades like one.
As Portnoy pointed out, it looks more and more like just another part of the system it was meant to replace—”Market up, bitcoin up. Market down, bitcoin down.” Or, as Ross Gerber, CEO of Gerber Kawasaki, said, “BTC price movements are related to sentiment. Risk on, up. Risk off, down.”
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Solana has faced intense selling pressure over the past week as the broader crypto market reels from the impact of US President Donald Trump's aggressive trade policies. Fears of a prolonged trade war and mounting macroeconomic tensions have triggered a wave of panic selling across risk assets, with Solana among the hardest hit. The altcoin has plunged over 60% from recent all-time highs, reflecting the brutal conditions gripping even the strongest large-cap tokens.
Despite the carnage, there are early signs that a short-term rebound could be on the horizon. Prominent analyst Bluntz shared his outlook on X, noting that he has started bidding on several oversold altcoins like Solana, showing bullish divergence. According to Bluntz, many of these tokens have fallen in a straight line, setting the stage for what he believes could be “sizeable bounces” in the near term.
While he doesn't believe this is the definitive market bottom, the presence of bullish divergence across multiple charts offers a glimmer of hope for traders seeking relief rallies. With Solana hovering at critical support levels, all eyes are on whether this bounce thesis plays out — or if further downside awaits.
Solana At A Critical Juncture As $100 Level Faces Pressure
Solana is now at a crucial technical and psychological crossroads as the $100 level remains a key price to hold. After a brutal selloff that intensified over the weekend, Solana dropped more than 20% in just a few hours, reflecting the panic and uncertainty dominating crypto markets. The breakdown below $120 signaled a major shift in sentiment, and the breach of $100 has left bulls scrambling to defend one of the last major supports before lower demand zones come into play.
Bulls initially lost control as price action turned sharply bearish last week, triggered by broader macroeconomic instability. US President Donald Trump's new wave of tariffs has intensified trade war fears, adding pressure to an already fragile global market. Risk assets like Solana have been hit especially hard, with many altcoins suffering from sharp drawdowns amid growing investor fear.
Still, there's a potential glimmer of hope. Bluntz contrarian view on X notes that he has begun bidding on several altcoins — including SOL and HYPE — that have dropped over 60% in near-vertical moves. He highlighted bullish divergences forming across multiple charts, which often precede relief bounces.
“I definitely don't subscribe to the idea this is ‘THE BOTTOM,'” he added, “but sizeable bounces are highly likely in my opinion.”
While the long-term trend remains under pressure, signs of oversold conditions and hidden strength could offer traders short-term opportunities. For Solana, the ability to reclaim and hold the $100 level could spark a recovery bounce. Otherwise, deeper losses may follow.
Price Action Details: Key Liquidity Levels
Solana (SOL) is currently trading at $108 after several volatile days attempting to hold above the critical $100 support level. This price range has become a major battleground for bulls and bears, as sentiment across the broader crypto market remains fragile. Macroeconomic instability, rising trade tensions, and ongoing selling pressure have pushed risk assets into uncertain territory — and Solana is no exception.
Bulls are now faced with a crucial challenge. To shift the momentum and signal the beginning of a recovery phase, SOL must not only defend the $100 mark but also reclaim the $120 level, which previously acted as support before turning into resistance. A breakout above this zone could open the door for further gains and a potential short-term trend reversal.
However, failure to hold the $100 level would likely lead to a deeper retracement. Analysts warn that a decisive breakdown below this support could send SOL plunging into the $80 range, where the next significant demand zone sits. With price action hanging in the balance, the coming days will be critical for Solana's trajectory — either triggering a recovery bounce or accelerating the current downtrend.
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Van Andel Institute scientists and collaborators have developed a new method for identifying and classifying pancreatic cancer cell subtypes based on sugars found on the outside of cancer cells.
These sugars, called glycans, help cells recognize and communicate with each other. They also act as a cellular "signature," with each subtype of pancreatic cancer cell possessing a different composition of glycans.
The new method, multiplexed glycan immunofluorescence, combines specialized software and imaging techniques to pinpoint the exact mix of pancreatic cancer cells that comprise tumors. In the future, this information may aid in earlier, more precise diagnosis.
The method was described in the journal Science Advances.
Pancreatic cancer often does not cause noticeable symptoms in its early stages. As a result, only 15% of pancreatic cancers are found in time to allow for surgical removal. To make things more complicated, pancreatic tumors can include many different subtypes of malignant cells, each of which respond differently to treatment.
"Our new method allows us to go one step beyond cancer diagnosis by revealing which subtypes of pancreatic cancer cells make up a tumor. The more we know about which cells are present, the better physicians can tailor treatments for each patient," said Brian Haab, Ph.D., a VAI professor and corresponding author of the study.
The glycan signatures were identified by analyzing tumor tissue. The research team then refined their approach to detect glycans secreted into the blood by cancer cells. This is important, Haab said, because blood tests are easier on patients -- they are far quicker, cheaper and less invasive than surgery.
The method is not yet available for use in clinical labs, but Haab is hopeful that in the next few years, it could become a standard step in pancreatic cancer diagnosis. In the meantime, the team continues to validate their method and search for signatures of rarer cell types. They're also exploring if it can be used to better detect and characterize other gastrointestinal cancers.
Braelyn Binkowski and Zachary Klamer, M.S., of VAI are co-first authors of the study. Other authors include ChongFeng Gao, Ph.D., Ben Staal, M.S., Anna Rapesh, Hoang-Le Tran, David M. Brass, Ph.D., and Galen Hostetter, M.D., of VAI; Pamela Bartlett and J. Bradley Morrow, M.D., of Trinity Health; Steven Gallinger, M.D., M.Sc., FRCSC, of the University Health Network and University of Toronto; Maria Blomqvist, Ph.D., of the University of Gothenburg and Sahlgrenska University Hospital; Peter Allen, M.D., and Chanjuan Shi, M.D., Ph.D., of Duke University School of Medicine; Aatur Singhi, M.D., Ph.D., and Randall Brand, M.D., of University of Pittsburgh Medical Center; and Ying Huang, Ph.D., of Fred Hutch Cancer Center.
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You might say it's just a pigment of your imagination
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You might be today years old when you realize there is no purple in the rainbow. There is no P in ROYGBIV.
But wait, what about violet? Well, despite what you may have come to believe, violet is not purple. In fact, violet (along with the rest of the colors in a naturally occurring rainbow) has something purple doesn't—its own wavelength of light. Anyone who ever ended up with a sunburn knows violet wavelengths are real, as the Sun's ultraviolet (UV) radiation is the reason you need to wear sunscreen, even though you can't see those wavelengths (more on that later). Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and indigo are all just as real. But purple? Well, purple is just your brain's way of resolving confusion.
That's right. Red and blue (or violet) wavelengths are two opposite extremes on the spectrum. When you see both of these wavelengths in the same place, you eyes and brain don't know what to do with them, so they compensate, and the clashing wavelengths register as the color we call purple. It doesn't actually exist.
The visible light spectrum detectable by human eyes makes up only a small fraction of wavelengths (0.0035%, to be exact). Those colors are made available to us by millions of densely packed photoreceptor cells known as cones, which respond to light hitting our retina. We can only see colors that have wavelengths of the right sizes (between 350 to 750 nanometers) for our cones to respond to. That's why we cannot make out UV or infrared light—UV wavelengths are too short for our cones to detect, and infrared wavelengths are too long.
Cone cells come in three flavors: short wavelength cones (S), medium wavelength cones (M), and long wavelength cones (L). Approximately 60% of cones are L cones that best absorb reddish wavelengths (as a result of the reddish pigments they contain), 30% are M cones that best absorb greenish wavelengths (and have greenish pigment), and 10% are S cones that best absorb bluish wavelengths (and have bluish pigment). All three types of cones can absorb numerous wavelengths close to their peak—though, that absorption gets weaker the farther you stray from the peak absorption wavelength—and overlap in their ability to detect colors like yellows and teals.
Cones do not actually see colors themselves, but they send electrical signals based on the wavelengths they absorb through the optic nerve to a part of the brain called the thalamus, where the signals are processed. Once those signals are parsed, they are sent to the visual cortex, which makes sense of how many cones were activated by a wavelength of light, and the strength of the signal from each cone (and type of cone). The brain then determines what color you are looking at by comparing the differences in signal strength, allowing us to see up to a million colors.
When you look at in-between colors (like teal, for example), your brain averages out how many cones of which types responded to the detection of that in-between wavelength. Teal light would “light up” most of your S cones pretty strongly, but would also light up some of your M cones. If there is more blue than green, you see what you perceive as a shade of blue, and vice versa.
The problem with purple is that it isn't supposed to be possible to create a color from wavelengths on opposite ends of the spectrum. The shortest wavelength detection made by your S cones (violet light) has no overlap with the longest wavelength detection made by your L cones (red light). To compensate, the brain bends the spectrum into a circle, making the two extremes meet at purple. It's an illusion of physics and neuroscience that makes us think we see a nonspectral color.
Despite the fact that it is technically a figment—more like pigment—of our imaginations, purple has earned a rich reputation as the color of royalty, nobility, power, luxury, devotion, mystery, and magic. Maybe the most appropriate association is that last one.
Elizabeth Rayne is a creature who writes. Her work has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Ars Technica, SYFY WIRE, Space.com, Live Science, Den of Geek, Forbidden Futures and Collective Tales. She lurks right outside New York City with her parrot, Lestat. When not writing, she can be found drawing, playing the piano or shapeshifting.
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A rendering of more than 1,000 brain cells out of the those reconstructed from analysis of a cubic millimetre of brain tissue from a mouse. Credit: Allen Institute
Researchers have created the largest and most detailed wiring diagram of a mammalian brain to date, by mapping cells in a cubic millimetre of a mouse's brain tissue1. In a landmark achievement, the diagram also details the activity of individual neurons on a large scale ― a neuroscience first.
The high-resolution 3D map contains more than 200,000 brain cells, around 82,000 of which are neurons. It also includes more than 500 million of the neuronal connection points called synapses and more than 4 kilometres of neuronal wiring, all found in a tiny block of tissue in a brain region involved in vision. The only brain map of comparable scale is that of a cubic millimetre of human brain, which included 16,000 neurons and 150 million synapses2. The new map also captured the activity of tens of thousands of neurons firing signals and interacting with each other to process visual information.
Read more on the MICrONS project
Read more on the MICrONS project
This brain-activity map, combined with the wiring diagram, marks a milestone in connectomics, a field that aims to show how brains process and organize information. Behind the massive efforts are more than 150 researchers in the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) project, who described their work in a package of eight papers published today in Nature and Nature Methods. The MICrONS project has made its resources available for the neuroscience community online, and other teams are already exploring them in different studies.
“They managed to do something that we haven't done as a neuroscience community in basically all of our history, which is to be able to map the activity of neurons onto the wiring on a very large population of neurons,” says Mariela Petkova, a neuroscientist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who is not involved with the project. “We have never seen it at this scale.”
The data “are really stunningly beautiful,” says Forrest Collman, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, who co-authored the studies. “Looking at it really gives you an awe about the sense of complexity in the brain that is very much akin to looking up at the stars of night.”
To create the breakthrough map, researchers first recorded the firing of almost 76,000 neurons in the visual cortex of a mouse as the animal watched various videos, including clips from The Matrix, for two hours. Then they sliced up a cubic millimetre of the mouse's brain into thousands of tissue slices, each about one four-hundredth the width of a human hair.
Cubic millimetre of brain mapped in spectacular detail
Cubic millimetre of brain mapped in spectacular detail
The scientists imaged each slice and assembled the images into a 3D map. Finally, they used artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms to annotate the neurons, their branching projections and their synapses. The team also matched the neurons in the map with their recordings of brain cells in action.
Moritz Helmstaedter, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, says “the combination of function and structure at that scale” is unprecedented. It's “a very impressive endeavour and success”.
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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-01088-x
Read the related News & Views, ‘A vast brain map links neural activity and wiring'.
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Largest brain map ever reveals fruit fly's neurons in exquisite detail
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The Maltese archipelago is a small island chain that is among the most remote in the Mediterranean. Humans were not thought to have reached and inhabited such small and isolated islands until the regional shift to Neolithic lifeways, around 7.5 thousand years ago (ka)1. In the standard view, the limited resources and ecological vulnerabilities of small islands, coupled with the technological challenges of long-distance seafaring, meant that hunter-gatherers were either unable or unwilling to make these journeys2,3,4. Here we describe chronological, archaeological, faunal and botanical data that support the presence of Holocene hunter-gatherers on the Maltese islands. At this time, Malta's geographical configuration and sea levels approximated those of the present day, necessitating seafaring distances of around 100 km from Sicily, the closest landmass. Occupations began at around 8.5 ka and are likely to have lasted until around 7.5 ka. These hunter-gatherers exploited land animals, but were also able to take advantage of marine resources and avifauna, helping to sustain these groups on a small island. Our discoveries document the longest yet-known hunter-gatherer sea crossings in the Mediterranean, raising the possibility of unknown, precocious connections across the wider region.
The emergence of long-distance seafaring varies considerably around the globe, with an early appearance in Southeast Asia and Sahul seemingly not replicated until later in other regions, such as the islands off the African coast5,6,7,8,9. With a sea crossing of around 100 km from Sicily, and around three times as far to the Maghreb, the Maltese Archipelago is among the most remote groups of islands in the Mediterranean, the world's largest inland sea (Fig. 1). Sea-level rise rapidly submerged the low-lying, now around 95 m deep, hypothesized land bridge from Malta to Sicily around 13 ka. Over the next few thousand years, both Sicily and the Maltese islands reached their current configurations, with Malta now having a combined landmass of just 316 km2 (ref. 10). Like other small Mediterranean islands, and particularly given its semi-arid climate, Malta was inferred to have been too small and remote to support human populations before the adoption of farming and more advanced seafaring technology (see Supplementary Information 1 for discussion). The general consensus has been that hunter-gatherers only journeyed to Mediterranean islands that were large, and/or easy to reach, such as through chains of connecting islands, proximity to the mainland or favourable currents1,2,11 (Supplementary Information 1).
Top, the position of Malta in the Mediterranean. Bottom left, digital elevation model of Latnija, showing the current dripline in dashed lines. Bottom right, the site, showing the sea channel and Gozo in the background, with past sea levels based on a previous study49. LGM, Last Glacial Maximum; MASL, metres above sea level. The edge of Trench 4 is denoted by the hessian sacks. Data from refs. 50,51 and created using ArcMap 10.5.
Previous research has supported this view, with the evidence suggesting that the first people to reach Malta were Neolithic farmers, associated with impressed ware pottery, stemming from the Sicilian ‘Stentinello' phase of the Neolithic12,13,14. These farmers were assumed to have introduced crops and domesticated and commensal fauna into a pristine island ecosystem14. The directly dated and secure evidence for the start of the Neolithic in Malta indicates an age of around 7.4 ka (ref. 15), which is consistent with the regional chronology of the spread of the Neolithic from southern Italy16. It is also consistent with our own chronological model (Methods, Supplementary Information 1 and Extended Data Fig. 1) based on an extensive database of radiocarbon dates with good contextual information, indicating that the earliest Neolithic in southern Italy and Sicily dates to around 7.9–7.5 ka, and later in Malta at around 7.4–7.1 ka. Although occasional claims for an earlier Neolithic in both Sicily and Malta have been suggested, they are problematic because of radiocarbon dates and age models with high levels of uncertainty, in addition to being inconsistent with the regional chronology mentioned above (Supplementary Information 1 and Extended Data Figs. 2 and 3). Although claims of a far earlier Pleistocene human presence on Malta have also been made17,18, they have so far failed to stand up to scrutiny on morphological and chronological grounds (Supplementary Information 1).
Here we provide decisive evidence for a pre-Neolithic human presence on the Maltese islands, in the form of a previously unknown Mesolithic phase characterized by the presence of Holocene hunter-gatherers. This discovery casts new light on the age and extent of Mesolithic sea crossings in the Mediterranean, and on hunter-gatherer interactions with endemic island fauna. Joint investigations led by the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Malta have unravelled a deep archaeological sequence at the site of Latnija (Lat-nee-yuh). The site is located in a large doline in the Mellieħa area of northern Malta (Fig. 1), in the vicinity of several fresh water sources and close to a coastline that has both sandy beaches and rocky shorelines19. Detailed excavations between 2021 and 2023 revealed early-to-mid-Holocene-aged sediments that contain stone tools, hearths, ash-tips and a range of wild flora and fauna, including marine gastropods, fish and marine mammals. These findings reveal the cultural and ecological context of the final stages of the Mesolithic, before the Neolithic transition in the region. Crucially, they also reveal the longest sea crossing yet documented in the Mediterranean by hunter-gatherers, highlighting the considerable seafaring abilities of late European hunter-gatherers. Even in the subsequent Neolithic, there are only occasional indications of such long sea crossings in the Mediterranean20. Our findings upend the established notions that small and remote islands were beyond reach in the Mesolithic world.
We excavated a 5 × 5-m trench (designated Trench 4) beneath an overhang on the north-western edge of the doline, in the lee of the prevailing northwesterly wind (Methods). We divided the trench plan into an alphanumeric grid of 1-m2 squares (J–N, 2–6; Fig. 1) and recorded the position of all artefacts and bones larger than 20 mm in three dimensions using a total station. We describe the excavated sequence in six phases (labelled Phase I–VI from top to bottom), combining distinct differences in depositional processes (Supplementary Information 2) and material culture. The base of our excavated sequence (Phase VI; Fig. 2, Beds 15–13) comprises a naturally formed fine-grained cave sediment, pale orange to pink in colour (dominated by fine sands and silts), on top of sloping boulders. The character of the deposits in Phase VI is in stark contrast to that of the deposits that overlie them in Phases V–III, in which the presence of ash, fauna and shell-rich sediments presents conspicuous evidence for anthropic activity, which we refer to as the Mesolithic Horizon (Fig. 2).
Top, illustration of the key stratigraphic sequence (numbered Beds are described in Supplementary Information 2) highlighting a thick bed of ash (A; bottom left), and a hearth deposit or combustion structure (B; bottom right), with combustion residue (ash on top), thermal impact zone and a natural substrate (Supplementary Information 3), at the base of the Mesolithic Horizon. Note also the Phorcus turbinatus tip line, starting in the mid-right of box A.
The earliest Mesolithic deposit in Phase V (Fig. 2, Beds 12–10) is marked by discrete hearth features, overlain by a bed of grey ash-rich sediment of varying thickness, a rich faunal assemblage and stone tools. The lowest hearth, from N2 (Phase V; Fig. 2 (B)), comprises two superimposed differentiated layers, as described from other sites and identified through experimental archaeology21,22 (Supplementary Information 2 and 3 and Fig. 2). This includes a heterogeneous light-grey ashy combustion residue of varying thickness (typically 6–12 cm) overlying a homogeneous brown-to-black thermally impacted sediment, which are distinct from the underlying Phase VI substrate (Fig. 2). Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) analyses confirmed that combustion residues are composed mainly of pyrogenic calcite (ash), with some thermally altered clay, which might have been introduced between burning episodes; more limited pyrogenic alteration is evident in the thermal impact zone (Supplementary Information 3). Analyses showed that higher concentrations of phytoliths were present in the same samples in which ash has been documented, compared with other parts of the combustion structure (thermal impact) and control samples (Supplementary Information 3). This indicates that the phytoliths (described below) reached the site as a result of an anthropic contribution in the form of fuel or related to use of the combustion structure. Micromorphological analysis of the sediments directly below the hearth feature in N2 show evidence for enhanced reddening and enrichment in iron oxides relative to the natural cave floor sediments (Methods and Supplementary Information 2). This is consistent with this combustion feature being in situ. In L2 and M2, micromorphology and detailed sediment analysis indicate a more complex relationship between deposits that are rich in combustion products and the sediments that underlie them; some show evidence for in situ burning, whereas others indicate erosion or cutting into the underlying sediments and the localized remobilization and redistribution of ash-rich materials (Supplementary Information 2).
The onset of episodes of cave-wall collapse is observed at the top of this ash-rich deposit, marked by a clast-dominant layer closer to the cave wall, grading to finer sediments beyond the dripline, also containing fauna and artefacts (Phase IV; Fig. 2, Bed 3b). A subcircular pit (Phase III; Fig. 2, Beds 9–5) has been dug through this layer, truncating the top of Phase V deposits; this pit contains discrete dumps of marine shells and ashes (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Information 2), as well as stone tools. The Mesolithic Horizon is sealed by more conspicuous episodes of cave-wall collapse, including both clast- and matrix-dominated cave sedimentation that contains artefacts attesting to later prehistoric, historic (Phase II; Fig. 2, Beds 4–1) and modern (Phase I) occupations.
We selected samples for chronometric dating to constrain the age range of key sedimentary deposits, the boundaries of major sediment phases and the shells of edible marine gastropods (Phorcus turbinatus; n = 49) accumulated by humans. A total of 32 dates (obtained using accelerator mass spectrometry) on charcoal were used to constrain the different phases at the site. One additional date was also recovered on bone, whereas insufficient collagen meant that all other attempts to date bone failed (Supplementary Information 4). These dates were then calibrated to estimate the boundaries between depositional phases with a Bayesian phase model (Fig. 3, Methods and Supplementary Information 4). The results show that occupation of the site began by around 8.5 ka, well before the earliest-known dates for the arrival of Neolithic farmers in Malta and the wider region—attesting to the presence of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. The end of the Mesolithic is more difficult to determine without precise dates for the beginning of the Neolithic at the site, but it seems to end with the arrival or establishment of the first farmers (Supplementary Information 4). The P. turbinatus shells were corrected for the marine reservoir effect (MRE) and calibrated ages were calculated (Methods and Supplementary Information 4). The P. turbinatus shells range from around 8.6 ka to 7.5 ka, supporting the charcoal age model. Crucially, the limited variability of these shell ages supports the intact stratigraphic character of the Mesolithic Horizon, a feature particularly visible in the conspicuous tip lines in Phase III (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Information 2). Overall, the consistent chronological data and highly resolved stratigraphy support the integrity and well-dated character of the Latnija sequence.
Model (OxCal 4.4; IntCal20) shows the phase boundaries in the Mesolithic Horizon, Phases III–V. The model indicates that the mean start date of the Mesolithic Horizon is 8.5 ka. Laboratory codes are included in the left box.
A total of 64 lithics (knapped stone tools) were recovered from the Mesolithic Horizon (Phase V–III) deposits (Supplementary Information 5). Except for one chert artefact, all stone tools were made of limestone, much of which was clearly procured in the form of beach cobbles or pebbles, with the remainder sourced from terrestrial outcrops. This contrasts with younger, Neolithic, assemblages from Malta, which are made from chert (both local and imported) and small amounts of imported obsidian14,23,24. Cores, blades and bladelets and retouched tools are rare in the Latnija Mesolithic assemblage, which is instead focused on simple flakes produced by hard hammer percussion. The main reduction products were squat and often cortical flakes, with generally unidirectional dorsal scar patterns. In contrast to penecontemporaneous assemblages from Sicily and other adjacent areas, which generally exhibit complex technologies and geometric forms (for example, trapezes), the lithic material from Latnija most resembles relatively expedient Mesolithic lithic technology from Sardinia25 (Supplementary Information 1 and 5). The simple character of the Latnija lithic assemblage might reflect the poor quality of the limestone used and expediency, but could also reflect other factors, including demographic aspects, such as small population size and isolation.
A total of 955 piece-plotted specimens (larger than 20 mm) from the Mesolithic Horizon were recorded during the 2021 and 2022 seasons, in addition to many smaller fragments recovered during sieving and flotation (Supplementary Information 6). The fauna is all wild, and overall is dominated by red deer (Cervus elaphus), birds and marine gastropods (P. turbinatus in particular, but also limpets), with the latter so far comprising some 10,000 shells (Fig. 4 and Supplementary Information 6). Small numbers of reptiles (for example, turtles and tortoises), fish (for example, groupers), crustaceans (crabs), echinoderms (sea urchins) and marine mammals (seals) were also found (Fig. 4). In line with the extensive evidence for anthropic combustion, around 25% of taphonomically studied faunal remains, including those of red deer, birds and tortoises, as well as the marine gastropods, had evidence of burning or charring (Supplementary Information 6). Although a detailed taphonomic analysis is ongoing, other traces of anthropogenic activity can also be observed, including probable percussion notches and green fracturing.
a–q, Selected fauna and lithics from the Mesolithic Horizon. All the fauna are wild. Limestone flakes (a–d,f,g), red deer left mandible (e), and metatarsal (q), Phorcus turbinatus (h), Patella sp. (i), crab claw (k), turtle or tortoise carapace (l,p), fish vertebra (m), seal proximal phalanx (n), bird humerus (j) and coracoid (o). Scale bar is 50 mm and applies to all. r, Percentage of the number of reported specimens (NRSP) of piece-plotted bone. This includes terrestrial animals and marine mammals. s, Percentage of the number of identified specimens (NISP) of fish and marine invertebrates from squares L2 and N2 recovered during wet sieving and flotation.
The use of marine resources, including not only small gastropods and crustaceans, but also large marine mammals, matches well with subsistence behaviours observed at other Mesolithic sites in the Mediterranean26,27,28. Notably, studies of Neolithic and younger sites in Malta have uncovered little evidence for marine resource exploitation—and archaeological and isotopic studies suggest that people had diets that were focused mostly on terrestrial resources, including livestock and wild and domesticated plants15,29. The Mesolithic deposits at Latnija therefore represent a unique level of marine resource engagement in Malta and a substantially different diet to that of later, farming communities.
Archaeobotanical analyses were further used to understand the environmental context of the Mesolithic Horizon. Grasses were abundant and are represented by many different phytolith morphologies (Supplementary Information 3). Most of the grasses correspond to C3 types, although phytolith morphologies ascribed to C4 plants are also present. Pollen analysis of two samples from Phase V provides evidence of an open shrub vegetation consisting of Erica multiflora and Euphorbia melitensis, with patches of Pistacia lentiscus shrub communities occupying areas in which higher moisture levels were present and soil development occurred.
Macrobotanical samples were recovered from the systematic flotation of sediments (Methods). Seeds of a few small, wild herbaceous plants were identified, including a small-seeded grass (Poaceae), small-seeded legumes and seeds of a member of the Chenopodioideae, as well as Mercurialis cf. annua and Vaccaria hispanica. All of these plants grow wild on Malta today and might have been introduced to the site either by the burning of brush or through natural processes, such as the activity of rodents or birds, and inadvertently burned with cave sediments. Complementing the phytolith and macrobotanical data, the charcoal analyses reflect a shrubby vegetation adapted to the island environment, and characterized by an open scrubland dominated by Pistacia cf. lentiscus, Juniperus and Tetraclinis among other shrubs, similar to the present day. These data together indicate the presence of vegetative communities typical of the Early to Middle Holocene in the Central Mediterranean region, which have been linked to the onset of more humid climate conditions30,31,32. These observations were further complemented by isotopic analyses of ungulate and rodent teeth from the site (Methods and Supplementary Information 3), which indicate a fairly stable mixture of dry C3 grassland, scrubland and woodland. In terms of plant use, the presence of the spheroid echinate phytolith morphotype in the hearth is noteworthy. This probably corresponds to the indigenous Chamaerops humilis (Mediterranean fan palm)33. Chamaerops humilis and other palms have a wide range of uses, ranging from textiles to construction materials and food, among others. However, the greater presence of these morphotypes in the samples related to the combustion residue seems to indicate that they were also used as fuel. Anthracological analyses revealed that the most common fuel was Pistacia cf. lentiscus wood, which still grows in the vicinity of the site today. Wild seeds of grasses, and a few other low-growing herbaceous plants, were recovered in a carbonized state, either representing the burning of vegetation around the site or the construction of a hearth on top of seed-laden sediments.
The evidence from Latnija confirms a Mesolithic occupation of the Maltese islands spanning from around 8.5 ka to 7.5 ka, which differs markedly from younger, agro-pastoral societies in technology, raw materials, diet and subsistence practices. The earliest Mesolithic arrivals on what we presume were dugout canoes, date to a time when Malta had almost reached its current configuration, which today has a minimum straight-line distance of around 85 km to Sicily34,35. However, sea surface currents and prevailing winds, as well as the use of landmarks, stars and other wayfinding practices, mean that the distances traversed by hunter-gatherers to Malta could have been considerably longer, and a crossing of about 100 km has been proposed for the Neolithic36,37,38,39 (Supplementary Information 1). In particular, any crossing from Sicily to Malta would have had to contend with the ocean current dynamics in the Malta Channel40. Experimental voyages on a replica of an Early Neolithic dug-out canoe from La Marmotta (Italy) suggest that crossings of 50 km could be accomplished at a speed of about 4 km h−1 (just over 2 knots)41, implying an outward summer sea journey that would have necessitated all daylight hours and an additional 8 h of darkness. In the summer, the drift caused by a southeasterly current that goes up to as much as 2 knots would have extended this outward journey even further42. In antiquity, as well as more historic periods, these conditions seem to have led sailboats to prioritize ports along the Gulf of Gela as a point of departure from Sicily, rather than the closest point to Malta43. These findings therefore provide evidence of long-distance, open-water sea journeys that were far longer than any previously documented in the Mediterranean, before the Neolithic and Bronze Age, when developments such as the invention of the sail occurred1. Such inter-island crossings fall into the category of ‘difficult routes'; evidence from elsewhere suggests that canoers would avoid the dangers of voyaging at night altogether44.
The motivation for these long sea crossings remains ambiguous. It might be that movement to Malta was driven by the availability of (perhaps seasonal) subsistence resources, catalysed by the slightly improved climate of the Early Holocene. It is also possible that the Maltese Mesolithic reflects social rather than environmental factors; namely, the potential regional demographic shockwaves through hunter-gatherer societies associated with the transition to the Neolithic in the Mediterranean (Supplementary Information 1).
The story of Mesolithic Malta is part of a set of broader demographic and behavioural changes in the dynamic epoch of the final hunter-gatherer societies of the Mediterranean. These are both important in their own right, and also set the cultural and ecological scene for the transition to the Neolithic. The ability of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers to reach small and remote Mediterranean islands forces a re-evaluation of the capabilities and strategies of the last hunter-gatherers of the region. It also shows that Neolithic arrivals did not enter a pristine insular landscape on Malta, but rather an ecosystem that had been shaped by humans for centuries. Finally, the presence of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers on Malta raises the possibility of other long-distance connections. For example, the technological similarities between contemporary Mesolithic and Epipaleolithic communities on the African and European sides of the Mediterranean have been noted45,46,47. The combination of several islands, and their proximity to indented mainland shorelines, has also suggested that the south-central Mediterranean and eastern Maghreb could have been a hub for early maritime activity in the region48. The evidence we present for early long-distance seafaring from the heart of the Mediterranean adds another layer to this emerging narrative.
Our multidisciplinary study combines archaeobotany (Supplementary Table 1), chronological modelling (Supplementary Tables 2–6), isotopes (Supplementary Table 7), contextual research and broad regional chronological modelling (Supplementary Tables 8 and 9) with anthracology and phytoliths (Supplementary Tables 10–13), lithics (Supplementary Table 14) and the study of faunal remains (Supplementary Tables 15 and 16). The methods used are described below, with further contextual information in the Supplementary Information and Extended Data Figs. 1–11.
Here, we describe the excavation of a 5 × 5-m trench, designated Trench 4, at Latnija between 2021 and 2023, expanding on a 1 ×1-m test trench excavated in 2019. We set up an alphanumeric grid system in the doline to label each individual 1 ×1-m square, aligned in orientation with the 2019 test trench and with the nearby cave wall, with letters running on a SW–NE axis and numbers increasing on a NW–SE axis. The 2019 test excavation targeted square M2, with the expanded Trench 4 spanning squares J–N and 2–6, located at the northern edge of the doline spanning the dripline (Fig. 1).
Excavation was performed using a single-context recording methodology to resolve between discrete sediment units, with arbitrary subdivisions within a single deposit as 5–10-cm spits where necessary to aid control of find recovery and sediment sampling. Features of post-depositional disturbance, such as animal burrows, were readily differentiated from undisturbed sediments owing to their mixed character and friable texture and the presence of sediment voids, and were excavated in their entirety and excluded from our analyses. Finer-scale post-depositional disturbance occurs as limited fine rooting and is restricted to the uppermost deposits. The natural deposition of clasts from the shelter wall presents an alternate form of potential post-depositional disturbance that might have led to localized soft-sediment deformation. The three-dimensional position of all artefacts larger than 20 mm, bones larger than 20 mm and charcoal, and the geometry of excavation context boundaries, were recorded using a total station. Bulk sediment sampling retained a minimum of 60 l per context (predominantly in the uppermost deposits) up to 100% sampling of sediments, which were processed by bucket flotation using 250-µm mesh for macrobotanical recovery, followed by wet sieving through 5-mm screens for artefact recovery; sediments that were not retained for flotation and wet sieving were dry sieved through 5-mm screens. Additional sediment samples were recovered from each context for ancillary analyses.
So far, we have identified 309 discrete sedimentary contexts, reaching a maximum depth of 1.48 m from the surface. We have grouped contexts into six phases (Phases I to VI) on the basis of major changes in sediment colour, texture, composition and structure, alongside patterns evident in material culture. The stratigraphic matrix for the Mesolithic Horizon and immediately underlying deposits is presented in Extended Data Fig. 3.
Micromorphological samples for thin-section production were collected by cutting in situ, orientated blocks of sediment into Kubiena tins (90 mm × 70 mm × 50 mm). The location of Kubiena samples was dictated by the architecture of the sediment sequence and representative sediment deposits, and the contacts between deposits were targeted. The laboratory samples were air-dried for two weeks and placed in labelled plastic pots. The samples were immersed in a mixture of clear casting resin (four parts) to acetone (one part). To accelerate curing, a catalyst of methylethylketone peroxide was added (3 ml catalyst to 2,000 ml resin). The resin mixture was poured around the side of the sample to allow the larger pore spaces to be filled from adhesion and cohesion, and then completely immersed in the resin. The samples were impregnated under a stepped-vacuum regime to a maximum vacuum pressure of −25 in Hg for eight hours. The samples were left to cure for around six weeks until the resin was hardened, followed by a final cure at 65 °C for 15 h. The blocks were removed from the sample frame, split along their long axes and one surface polished on fixed diamond abrasives with successively finer grades (70 µm, 45 µm and 20 µm). The polished sample was stuck to a labelled slide using an epoxy resin that cures overnight. The slide and sample were cut down to around 1 mm and then excess sample was removed using a Jones and Shipman surface grinder. The sample was hand-polished to finish off the surface before coverslipping the sample again by bonding with an epoxy resin. Analysis of the thin sections was performed on a Leica M205C petrological stereo zoom microscope and image capture was done using the Image Pro-Express software.
Studies of plants in the Mesolithic Horizon at Latnija were performed in the form of pollen analyses, anthracology, hearth phytolith analyses and macrobotanical identifications from remains recovered through flotation. These analyses were performed to reconstruct the vegetation of the site, determine whether any domesticated plants were present, investigate the use of different fuels at the site and unravel mineral composition to identify combustion structures.
For pollen analysis, we collected sedimentary samples to perform palynological analyses focused on the reconstruction of past vegetation at and near Latnija. Sampling was performed in Phase V contexts (034) and (048), both of which are characterized by the presence of thick ash and combustion residue deposits. This approach was adopted to correlate the palaeobotanical remains preserved in the sediment with human activities during Phase V, which is characterized by the oldest Mesolithic.
Samples were treated following pollen concentration techniques52. This included sediment deflocculation with sodium pyrophosphate, Lycopodium tablets with known content to calculate palynomorph concentration values53 and 7-µm nylon sieve to discard clay-sized particles. Carbonates were removed with 10% HCl and concentrated at 2,500 rpm for three minutes. Heavy liquid separation using sodium metatungstate with a specific gravity of 2.0 and centrifugation at 1,500 rpm for 20 min was done to separate organic and mineral fractions. After recovering the upper supernatant fraction, this step was repeated to increase the concentration. The remaining fraction was treated with cold 40% HF for one night to eliminate remaining silicates. The residue was washed in 98% ethanol, glycerol was added and the remaining ethanol was evaporated. The solution was kept in glycerol, mounted on slides and identified at 400× magnification under a light-transmitted microscope by referring to established literature54,55. Pollen counts were done up to 250 identifiable grains. A pollen diagram (Extended Data Fig. 4a) indicating values for each taxon as percentages of the total pollen sum was plotted with the help of C2 software56.
For anthracological analyses, bucket flotation was used to recover charcoal and other carbonized archaeobotanical remains from the sediments, all of which were collected. Charcoal was also handpicked to provide a larger number to select for dating purposes and anthracology.
A total of 165 charcoal fragments were observed under reflected light microscopy (Motic PANTHERA) with dark and bright fields and ×50, ×100, ×200 and ×500 magnifications. Images were taken with an environmental scanning electron microscope (FEI Quanta 600) coating charcoal with gold. Each charcoal piece was manually fragmented into the three wood anatomy sections (transverse, tangential and radial). Observing the three anatomy sections allowed us to identify taxonomic characters. Different wood anatomy atlases and a comparative collection at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution were used to support the identifications57,58. The assemblage is characterized by a number of indeterminable fragments related to wood anatomy alterations (cracks and vitrification) and/or size of the fragments.
To study the pyroarchaeological record of the Mesolithic Horizon at Latnija, we combined the study of phytoliths and the mineralogical composition of sediments by FTIR. We analysed 24 samples that were collected during the 2022 fieldwork from a large combustion structure identified in square N2 at the base of Phase V (Fig. 2). Sampling was performed on the basis of visual identification of the internal structure of the hearth, distinguishing between samples coming from the possible combustion residue (n = 10), samples coming from the thermal impact zone (n = 8) and control samples from below the hearth (n = 6).
Phytoliths were extracted following the fast extraction method59. Phytolith quantification and identification was done using a Zeiss Axioscope transmitted light microscope at ×200 and ×400 magnifications. Phytolith morphological identification followed the standard literature and modern plant reference collections33,60,61,62. We followed the terminology of the International Code for Phytolith Nomenclature (ICPN 2.0) for phytolith descriptions63.
The mineral composition of the samples was identified using a Jasco FT/IR-6700 spectrometer. Infrared spectra were collected in the 4,000–400 cm−1 wavelength range at a resolution of 4 cm−1 using the conventional KBr pellets method. The spectra were interpreted using the position of the main peaks described on reference collections64. Thermally altered clay was identified on the basis of specific absorption peaks in the clay spectrum65, and the presence of anthropogenic or geogenic calcite was determined following previous studies66,67.
The archaeobotanical samples from Latnija's Mesolithic Horizon were recovered from the 2021 and 2022 excavation seasons. Although we engaged in a 100% sediment collection strategy, after flotation, not all samples from these phases contained plant macrofossils. The assemblage suitable for study consists of 28 samples in total—19 from the 2021 field season and 9 from the 2022 season. Each sample was processed in the field using a basic bucket flotation method, as described previously68,69. The samples were then sent to the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, for analysis. Once in the laboratory, samples were passed through nested U.S. Geological sieves to ease sorting. Material smaller than 0.50 mm was not sorted. Carbonized wood fragments larger than 2 mm were counted, although wood identification was done as a separate analysis and is reported above. Seeds and seed fragments were separated from all sieved contexts, and charred seeds were systematically collected. The identified taxa are presented in Supplementary Table 1.
Except for the bone samples, radiocarbon dating was performed at the Curt-Engelhorn-Centre Archaeometry (CEZA) in Mannheim, Germany. Samples included charcoal, seeds and marine shells. Bone samples were analysed at the University of Georgia Centre for Applied Isotope Studies (CAIS). We used a multistep chronological study to clearly constrain the Mesolithic Horizon at Latnija. First, we constructed a chronological framework for the site, which involved 31 charcoal samples and the one bone (Supplementary Tables 2 and 3). Charcoal samples were selected from contexts directly underlying the Mesolithic Horizon to help constrain the onset of Mesolithic occupation, excluding samples from burrows that appear at the interface of major divides in sediment depositional processes (Phases VI–V) (see Extended Data Fig. 5 for illustrated sample locations). In addition, charcoal samples were selected from contexts throughout the Mesolithic Horizon (Phases V–III), including direct sampling from hearths that appear at the base of Phase V (Fig. 2, Supplementary Information 2 and Extended Data Fig. 6). The model was divided into the major phases recorded during the excavation (Supplementary Information 2).
To obtain independent verification of the integrity of the age model, we also targeted marine gastropods (P. turbinatus in particular) because they formed clear in situ tip lines identified in Phase III. Forty-nine samples of P. turbinatus were dated for this purpose. The number of samples was chosen to reflect the fact that: (i) marine calibration is more complex than terrestrial calibration, thus a larger sample size was required to account for the natural spread in the data; and (ii) these shells are a direct measure of human presence, because they have been imported to the site by people.
Charcoal samples were prepared using a standard ABA pretreatment. This covers an acid step with diluted hydrochloric acid to remove calcite and lime attached to the sample. A base step with diluted sodium hydroxite follows to remove soluble humic acids. As the base attracts fresh CO2, another acid step finalizes the pretreatment and removes any modern contamination. The samples are then combusted in an elemental analyser (MicroCube, Elementar) and the CO2 is collected and graphitized to elemental carbon. The carbon is pressed into a target and measured in a MICADAS mass spectrometer70.
The shell samples only undergo a treatment with diluted acid to remove adjacent carbon contamination from limestone or calcite. For shell samples, the CO2 is extracted using phosphoric acid in an autosampler before graphitization, and measurements are the same as for the charcoal samples described in a previous study71.
The bone sample was cleaned by wire brush and washed using an ultrasonic bath. After cleaning, the sample was then reacted under vacuum with 1 M HCl to dissolve the bone mineral and release CO2 from bioapatite. The residue was filtered, rinsed with deionized water and, under slightly acid conditions (pH 3), heated at 80 °C for six hours to dissolve collagen and leave humic substances in the precipitate. The collagen solution was then filtered to isolate pure collagen and dried out. The dried collagen was combusted at 575 °C in evacuated and sealed Pyrex ampoules in the present CuO. The resulting CO2 was cryogenically purified from the other reaction products and catalytically converted to graphite. Graphite 14C/13C ratios were measured using the CAIS 0.5 MeV accelerator mass spectrometer. The sample ratios were compared with the ratio measured from the Oxalic Acid I (NBS SRM 4990). The uncalibrated dates were then given in radiocarbon years before 1950 (years bp), using the 14C half-life of 5,568 years. The error is quoted as one standard deviation and reflects both statistical and experimental errors. The date has been corrected for isotope fractionation. As with other terrestrial radiocarbon dates in this study, calibration was performed with OxCal 4.4 using IntCal20 and as part of a phase model for the site. Modelled and unmodelled calibrated dates and model diagnostics are presented in Supplementary Tables 2 and 3.
To correct for the MRE, we compared the ages of P. turbinatus shells with the ages of charcoal from the same stratigraphic contexts. The reservoir effect ΔR was modelled in OxCal 4.4. with the latest datasets of IntCal20 for the charcoal samples and Marine20 for the shells. It was modelled using a phase model and choosing a wide restriction for ΔR. Samples marked by OxCal as outliers are presented in the table but are not included in the next modelling step if the model cannot deal with them leading to an A of less than 60%. These outliers might reflect processes such as bioturbation. The results of the MRE calculations are shown in Supplementary Table 4, and the corrected dates for each P. turbinatus age are shown in Supplementary Table 5 (see also Supplementary Information 4).
Models involving radiocarbon dates were used to address the key question of whether there is evidence of occupation in the Latnija cave excavation sequence that securely relates to human activity predating the available evidence for Neolithic habitation elsewhere on Malta and in the surrounding Mediterranean archaeological record. This was done by: (1) establishing the age of the Mesolithic deposits at Latnija; (2) determining when the wider regional Mesolithic-to-Neolithic transition is most likely to have occurred; and (3) determining whether there is evidence for an early Neolithic occupation of Malta in in a sediment core extracted from Salina Bay in northeast Malta, while accounting for the high-energy depositional environment and chronological uncertainty associated with radiocarbon dates used to produce associated age–depth models. Each of the analyses was conducted in R and is fully replicable, with scripts, data and outputs contained in a GitHub repository along with further replication instructions (https://github.com/wccarleton/mesoneomalta).
First, we used a standard archaeological phase model to determine start and end boundaries for major depositional phases identified at Latnija. For this model, the excavation team constructed a general Harris matrix relating different contexts to major phases of sediment deposition and artefact accumulation. Thirty-three radiocarbon samples—charcoal from short-lived local shrubs and one bone—recovered from these units were then dated and the dates were placed into an OxCal phase model to estimate phase boundary distributions. All phase boundaries were of the ‘sigma' type. This boundary allows the tails of the distribution of events (dates) making up abutting phases to overlap. The flexibility reflects the sedimentary fuzziness inherent in the physical boundaries between depositional units. Following previously published guidance72, we included a general outlier model along with the phases, allowing for the model to identify potential outliers (events with extreme dates relative to both their phases and the structure of the model as a whole). The modelling identified no significant outliers among the radiocarbon-dated samples given the boundaries we used, as indicated by the posterior probabilities associated with the outlier model that indicate the probability that a given sample is an outlier in the model context (all were 8% or less; most were 4%; Supplementary Table 6).
Next, we used a cleaned regional database of radiocarbon dates associated with securely identified Mesolithic and Neolithic sites or site components from Italy, Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia and Malta. We divided the dates by region and cultural association. Then, we used a simple OxCal phase model to estimate when the Mesolithic phase ended and the Neolithic phase began in each of the regions (details in Supplementary Information 4). We used a single phase for the Mesolithic and one for the Neolithic within each region bookended by flexible ‘sigma' boundaries, meaning that events at the end of the Mesolithic phase could occur after the estimated start-date boundary for the Neolithic. This flexibility reflects the fact that both phases refer to cultural traditions or packages that are known to have overlapped in space and time throughout the Mediterranean and that have well-established spatio-temporal trends.
Finally, we re-examined the published age–depth model for the Salina Deep sediment core. The core was argued to contain evidence for an early Neolithic in Malta, because it contains findings such as the pollen of domesticated cereals, which was estimated to date to around 8 ka on the basis of an age–depth model. However, the age–depth model used (Bchron), like many sophisticated sedimentation models, assumes monotonicity in the age–depth relationship, which we argue does not apply in the Salina Deep case. Although monotonicity is typically a good working assumption in low-energy depositional environments without evidence of disturbance, Salina Bay in the past and present is a high-energy littoral and fluvial environment that is subject to frequent storms. The core itself contains evidence of marine ingression and many of the radiocarbon dates indicate substantial sediment redeposition, with very old dates near the surface and segments showing a wide radiocarbon temporal spread. Together, this evidence suggests that monotonicity is a poor assumption for Salina Deep and, consequently, that the published age–depth model is overly (unduly) precise because it cannot account for the wide variance in radiocarbon sample dates for many of the core's segments. To account for this, and produce a model that is more representative of the empirical temporal variance, we used a linear Bayesian regression to model the age–depth relationship. The model recognizes a general relationship in the available age–depth observations indicating a trend toward older dates correlated with depth. However, it also does not assume strict monotonicity, instead focusing on the broad age–depth relationship. We used a custom distribution (based on standard radiocarbon-date calibration) to add a measurement uncertainty component to the model, representing radiocarbon dating and calibration uncertainties. We also used Bayesian imputation to model dates with full posterior uncertainty for a sequence of undated sediment depths (see Supplementary Information 1 for further details).
During the 2021 and 2022 field seasons, faunal remains greater than 20 mm in length were piece plotted using a total station, given a unique identifier and bagged. Smaller bone fragments, shells and other faunal remains were recovered through various methods, including an exhaustive programme of wet sieving, flotation and manual inspection of 8-mm, 4-mm, 2-mm, 1-mm and 0.5-mm sieved sinks under microscopy. Here we present a preliminary taxonomic and taphonomic analysis of this faunal material, but note that a full detailed analysis is currently underway that comprises all remains recovered during excavation.
Bones were identified to skeletal element and, for the most part, to broad taxonomic categories (for example, fish and birds), facilitated by relevant literature73,74,75,76, online resources and comparative material housed at the University of Malta. The taphonomic analysis focused on identifying bone fractures and surface modifications, such as burning, butchery marks (such as cut marks) and carnivore damage (for example, gnawing) following standard protocols77,78,79,80. Remains are reported as the number of specimens (NRSP) and number of identified specimens (NISP), following a previous report81. NRSP includes all skeletal remains (bones and teeth) included in this study, whereas NISP is defined as all skeletal elements (bones and teeth) identified minimally to class.
In addition to the piece-plotted bone, we also report here the complete counts of marine fauna for two excavation squares (L2 and N2), reflecting material that was directly recovered and bagged during excavation and material from wet sieving and flotation. Given the very different sediment volumes exposed for the different phases, we chose here to focus at first on these two squares, which offer a good sequence through the phases, to showcase the marine component at the site.
Nineteen samples, comprising 12 wood mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus) and 7 red deer (Cervus elaphus), were selected for δ13C and δ18O isotope analysis of tooth enamel (Supplementary Table 7). For red deer, molar teeth were targeted for analysis, although the sample set does include one red deer premolar tooth. It should also be noted that because some of these samples are non-overlapping teeth, it is possible that some pseudo-sampling (sampling from the same individual) took place. For wood mouse, whole molar and incisor teeth were used to ensure that the minimum sample size for stable isotope analysis was met.
Before sampling, red deer were cleaned through gentle abrasion with a diamond-tipped drill to remove any adhering material. After cleaning, the same approach was used to sample the tooth enamel along the full length of the buccal surface to ensure a representative measurement for the period of tooth formation. For wood mouse, as much of the dentine was removed as possible using a drill before the remaining whole teeth were crushed using a mortar and pestle, with cleaning of the mortar and pestle using 70% ethanol between samples.
To remove organic or secondary carbonate contaminates, all samples underwent pretreatment, which involved soaking in 0.1 M acetic acid for 10 min followed by three rinses in purified water82,83. After reaction with 100% phosphoric acid, gasses were analysed using a Thermo GasBench II connected to a Thermo Delta V Advantage mass spectrometer housed at the Department of Archaeology at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. Carbon and oxygen isotopes are reported as the ratio of heavier to lighter isotopes (13C/12C or 18O/16O) in parts per million (‰) relative to international standards (Vienna Peedee Belemnite, VPDB). δ13C and δ18O values were normalized using a three-point calibration against the international standards IAEA-603 (δ13C = 2.5‰, δ18O = −2.4‰), IAEA-CO-8 (δ13C = −5.8‰, δ18O = −22.7‰) and IAEA NBS 18 (δ13C = −5.014‰, δ18O = 23.2‰), as well as the in-house standard of USGS44 (δ13C = −42.2‰).
Further information on research design is available in the Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article.
Data required to reproduce the chronological models are available at https://github.com/wccarleton/mesoneomalta, and are archived with Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14192393 (ref. 84).
Code required for reproducing the chronological models is available at https://github.com/wccarleton/mesoneomalta, and is archived with Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14192393 (ref. 84).
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This article is dedicated to the memory of Christopher Foyle, who did so much to encourage, support and drive investigations into Maltese prehistory. Without him, this project would never have happened. This research was performed with the permission (SCH332/19) of the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage (Malta) and the Environment Resources Authority (EP01281/23). We are grateful to K. Farrugia and K. Borda for their support over the years. We thank Heritage Malta, in particular S. Sultana, for assistance and support in this work; the students who assisted in excavation and flotation; B. Restall for advice regarding fresh water sources; H. Russ for assistance identifying grouper remains; and S. O'Reilly and H. Sell for assistance with the main-text figures. This research was funded by the Foyle Research Institute UK (to E.M.L.S.), the European Research Council ‘IslandLab' project grant no. 101041480 (E.M.L.S.), the Max Planck Society ‘Lise Meitner' Excellence Scheme (E.M.L.S.), the University of Malta Research Excellence Award grant 202103 (N.C.V., R.G. and E.M.L.S.), the Generalitat de Catalunya grant SGR2021-01237 (E.A.), the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation ‘María de Maeztu' program for Units of Excellence in R&D grant CEX2019-000945-M (E.A.) and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions HORIZON-MSCA–2021–PF-01 ID: 101063904 (A.B.-C.).
Open access funding provided by Max Planck Society.
Human Palaeosystems Group, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Jena, Germany
Eleanor M. L. Scerri, James Blinkhorn, Andrés Currás, Margherita Colucci, Johanna Kutowsky, Mario Mata-González & Khady Niang
Department of Classics and Archaeology, Faculty of Arts, University of Malta, Msida, Malta
Eleanor M. L. Scerri, Huw S. Groucutt, Mario Mata-González, Nicolette Mifsud & Nicholas C. Vella
Institute of Prehistoric Archaeology, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
Eleanor M. L. Scerri, Huw S. Groucutt & Andreas Maier
Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
James Blinkhorn
Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Mathew Stewart
Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, UK
Ian Candy
Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES-CERCA), Tarragona, Spain
Ethel Allué & Aitor Burguet-Coca
Departament d'Història i Història de l'Art, Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV), Tarragona, Spain
Ethel Allué & Aitor Burguet-Coca
Department of Archaeological Sciences, Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
Aitor Burguet-Coca
Department of Archaeology, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Jena, Germany
W. Christopher Carleton, Amy Hatton & Patrick Roberts
Curt-Engelhorn-Centre Archaeometry, Mannheim, Germany
Susanne Lindauer
Domestication and Anthropogenic Evolution Research Group, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Jena, Germany
Robert Spengler & Kseniia Boxleitner
Superintendence of Cultural Heritage, Valletta, Malta
Gillian Asciak
Evolutionary Ecology Group, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Margherita Colucci
Department of Geography, Faculty of Arts, University of Malta, Msida, Malta
Ritienne Gauci
Department of Structural Changes of the Technosphere, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Jena, Germany
Amy Hatton
Institute for Archaeological Sciences, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
Amy Hatton
Département d'Histoire, Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Dakar, Senegal
Khady Niang
isoTROPIC Research Group, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Jena, Germany
Patrick Roberts
Department of Archaeology, University of York, York, UK
Joshua de Giorgio
National Museum of Natural History, Heritage Malta, Mdina, Malta
Rochelle Xerri
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Conceptualization: E.M.L.S. Project methodology: E.M.L.S., J.B., H.S.G., N.C.V. and M.S. Investigation: all authors contributed in the field or in the laboratory. Funding acquisition: E.M.L.S., N.C.V. and R.G. Project administration: E.M.L.S. and N.C.V. Supervision: J.B. and N.C.V. Writing (original draft): E.M.L.S., J.B., H.S.G., M.S., A.C., E.A., A.B.-C., S.L., W.C.C., N.C.V., K.B., R.S., P.R. and I.C. Writing (review and editing): E.M.L.S., J.B., M.S., H.S.G., I.C., E.A., A.B.-C., A.C., W.C.C., S.L., R.S., K.B., G.A., M.C., R.G., A.H., J.K., A.M., M.M.-G., N.M., K.N., P.R., J.d.G, R.X. and N.C.V.
Correspondence to
Eleanor M. L. Scerri, James Blinkhorn or Nicholas C. Vella.
The authors declare no competing interests.
Nature thanks Cyprian Broodbank, Dylan Gaffney, Carlos Duarte Simões, Sahra Talamo and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
Publisher's note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
OxCal phase modelling of the estimated start and end dates for the Mesolithic and Neolithic phases in and around Malta125 using the IntCal20 terrestrial calibration curve55. Results indicate a general geographical cline in the spread of the Neolithic in mainland Italy from north to south, to Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, and then finally to Malta. See the OxCal script in https://github.com/wccarleton/mesoneomalta for specifics.
a, Plotted radiocarbon dates available for the sequence from the Salina Deep record in Malta, along with the pollen sequence reported by Farrell and colleagues48, using the Bchron R package52, one of the methods used by Hunt and colleagues47. Results show many potentially intrusive samples used to date the sediments and very few sequences of dates in strict stratigraphic order. b, Our Bayesian regression model to relate depth to age in the Salina Deep core using the IntCal20 calibration curve55 to calibrate the dates. The results suggest that the first Neolithic evidence in the Salina Deep record has a date with a broad error range of around two thousand years. Depth shown = cm.
Harris matrix of the Latnija excavation organized by phase illustrating the stratigraphic relationship between excavation contexts, with numbers shown in red indicating deposits containg dated material.
a, Pollen diagram from Latnija archaeological site, with percentage values of pollen remains identified from contexts (034) and (048). b, The deep Mesolithic hearth from Phase V, square N2, with sample locations for phytolith and FTIR studies. The internal structure of the hearth can be observed, from top to bottom, combustion residue, thermal impact and natural substrate (control). c, ESEM images of Pistacia cf. lentiscus and Juniperus sp. charcoal remains showing wood anatomical characters: (i) Juniperus sp. charcoal fragment tangential section; (ii) Juniperus sp. charcoal fragment tangential section showing rays and tracheids; (iii) Juniperus sp. charcoal fragment tangential section showing a detail of tracheid pits; (iv) Pistacia cf. lentiscus charcoal fragment transverse section showing ring porous distribution and vessel clusters; (v) Pistacia cf. lentiscus charcoal fragment tangential section showing spiral thickenings and biseriated rays; (vi) Pistacia sp. charcoal fragment transverse section showing cracks and vitrification altering the wood cell structure.
Oblique view illustrating the location of dated contexts (red) with respect to sediment phase boundaries spanning grid squares J–N, showing the distribution of sediments at the base of Phase II; the location of dated contexts from Phase III, with the upper boundary of Phase III deposits shown as a wireframe; the location of dated contexts from Phase IV, with the upper boundary of Phase IV deposits shown as a wireframe; the location of dated contexts from Phase V, with the upper boundary of Phase V deposits shown as a wireframe; and the location of dated contexts from Phase VI, with the upper boundary of Phase VI deposits shown as a wireframe.
a, Section drawing of the Latnija exposure with the detailed section shown in Fig. 3 highlighted (recorded September 2022). b, Detailed record of the contact between the upper part of Unit 4 and the lower contact of Bed 10 (for location of the recorded section see Fig. 1). The section was recorded in September 2024, note that some of the large clasts that were recorded in the September 2022 section (a) had been removed from the section by September 2024.
a, Overview of the sediments of Unit 1. The sediments are dominated by limestone derived clasts and fine-grained material. The clear grains are fine-sand/silt sized grains of quartz. b, Biological material within Unit 1 (Sh – shell, Bo – Bone, BF – Burrow fill). c, Overview of the sediments of Unit 2 (Bed 10). The high birefringence colours show the dominance of limestone material in both the coarse and fine component. d, Limestone clasts within Bed 10 showing unweathered limestone fragments (UWLF) and blackened, burnt limestone fragments (BLF). e, Burnt limestone fragment (BLF) next to an iron oxide enriched intraclast (IC) of reworked sediment. f, Charcoal Fragment (ChF) and Burnt limestone fragment (BLF) in Bed 10. g, Iron enriched sediments of Unit 1 from directly below the contact with Bed 12. h, Pelleted microfabric of lens b below Bed 10.
See Extended Data Fig. 6 and sediment section (Supplementary Information 2) for the location of thin-section samples. a, MM2 is taken from the unaltered sediments at the base of the sequence. This sample presents the key characteristics of patterns of sedimentation prior to the Mesolithic occupation. These can be summarized as consisting of: 1) rare limestones clasts (frequently showing evidence for in situ decay), 2) intraclasts of reworked sediment and 3) fragments of terrestrial mollusc shell. Limited materials that are indicative of burning or burning products are present. b, MM3 is taken from the ash-rich sediments of the sequence, a factor that can be seen in the colour difference between the brown matrix of MM2 and the grey matrix of MM3. MM3 is rich in >1 mm sized charcoal fragments and limestone clasts, some of which show evidence for a strong degree of burning. c, MM5 is taken from the contact between the ash-rich sediment (MM3) and the underlying cave floor sediment (MM2). The sediment of MM5 is, consequently, characterized by a mixture of both sediment types. Charcoal fragments are abundant (but only rarely >1 mm) but the matrix overall is more typical of MM2. Bones fragments are present as are circular features that are characteristics of deformation which could be either biological or physical in origin. The sediments have formed in association with cutting into pre-existing sediments prior to the deposition of the ash-rich sediments. d, MM6 is taken from below darkened sediment believed to be in situ burning. The sediments of MM6 are more reddened than any other sampled sediments and occur directly below sediments the colour of which are more typical of the unaltered cave sediments of MM2. This unit is interpreted as being thermally altered as a direct result of in situ burning directly above these deposits.
a, Phytoliths image identified in the Phase V deep hearth. a,b, Elongate entire from grass leaf; c,d, Elongate dentate from grass inflorescence; e, Bulliform flabellate from grass leaf; f, Acute bulbosus from grasses leaf; g,h, GSSCP Bilobate from grasses-C4; i–j, GSSCP Rondel from grasses-C3; k,l, Spheroid echinate from Palms. b, Different dynamics of phytoliths identified in the layers that make up the hearth in relation to the number of phytoliths identified as spheroid echinate in each sample. Key: C, Control; TI, Thermal Impact; CR, Combustion Residue. c, Infrared spectra of sediments from some representative samples. Key: C, Control; TI, Thermal Impact; CR, Combustion Residue; Ca, Calcite; Cl, Clay; Qz, quartz; b, thermally altered clay; nb, not thermally altered clay.
a, Photographs of lithics from Phase III (left) and Phase V (right) showing terrestrial and coastal raw material forms. b–d, Illustrations of lithics from Phases V (b), IV (c) and III (d). All are flakes except b3 (core) and b4 (retouched flake). All limestone.
Red deer remains, taphonomic modifications, and stable isotope results. a, Remains of red deer including a proximal radius (1), distal radius (b), proximal metatarsal (3), proximal metacarpal (4), scapula (5), and a distal metatarsal (6). Examples of taphonomic modifications including a midshaft fragment with a green fracture and a double notch with corresponding negative flake scars (7), a midshaft fragment with a green fracture (8), examples of charred bone (9–11), and examples of bone covered in adhering matrix (12–14). b, Results of the stable carbon δ13C and δ18O analysis by taxa. Roman numerals refer to ref. 75. Left scale bar applies to A1–6 and right scale bar to A7–14.
This document contains additional details and information including the context of research (1), a description of the deposits (2), details of the archaeobotany (3), a chronology (4), lithic analyses (5), faunal analyses (6), Supplementary Tables 1–16 (7), OxCal scripts (8) and Supplementary References (9).
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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Scerri, E.M.L., Blinkhorn, J., Groucutt, H.S. et al. Hunter-gatherer sea voyages extended to remotest Mediterranean islands.
Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08780-y
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Understanding the brain requires understanding neurons' functional responses to the circuit architecture shaping them. Here we introduce the MICrONS functional connectomics dataset with dense calcium imaging of around 75,000 neurons in primary visual cortex (VISp) and higher visual areas (VISrl, VISal and VISlm) in an awake mouse that is viewing natural and synthetic stimuli. These data are co-registered with an electron microscopy reconstruction containing more than 200,000 cells and 0.5 billion synapses. Proofreading of a subset of neurons yielded reconstructions that include complete dendritic trees as well the local and inter-areal axonal projections that map up to thousands of cell-to-cell connections per neuron. Released as an open-access resource, this dataset includes the tools for data retrieval and analysis1,2. Accompanying studies describe its use for comprehensive characterization of cell types3,4,5,6, a synaptic level connectivity diagram of a cortical column4, and uncovering cell-type-specific inhibitory connectivity that can be linked to gene expression data4,7. Functionally, we identify new computational principles of how information is integrated across visual space8, characterize novel types of neuronal invariances9 and bring structure and function together to uncover a general principle for connectivity between excitatory neurons within and across areas10,11.
Francis Crick wrote in 197912 that “It is no use asking for the impossible, such as, say, the exact wiring diagram for a cubic millimetre of brain tissue and the way all its neurons are firing”. Crick's request was presumably motivated by the idea that the function of every neuron depends on its synaptic connections13, and such dataset would allow the rigorous test and refinement of hypotheses about network anatomy. For decades, these relationships were studied through challenging single-cell experiments14,15,16,17 or electrophysiology recordings18,19. Later, by combining calcium imaging with in vitro electrophysiological20 and viral tracing methods21 it was possible to link the functional recordings to the underlying connectivity. Much has been learned from these experiments, but they provide fragmentary information.
To realize Crick's vision, volumetric electron microscopy (EM) can be combined with calcium imaging22,23, as demonstrated at smaller scales in the visual cortex24,25,26, retina27,28,29 and other systems30,31. Here we present a dataset (Fig. 1) that bridges neuronal function and connectivity at the cubic millimetre scale in mouse visual cortex (in vivo dimensions 1.3 × 0.87 × 0.82 mm3). To measure visual responses, we performed calcium imaging of excitatory neurons across cortical layers in response to visual stimuli. To map connectivity, we imaged the same cubic millimetre with serial section transmission EM (TEM). Using scalable convolutional networks and custom computational systems, we reconstructed neurons and their synaptic connections in 3D, with extensive proofreading to ensure accuracy. Finally, we co-registered the calcium-imaging and TEM data to match neuronal responses to neurons and their connectivity.
a, The nine data resources that are publicly available at https://www.microns-explorer.org/. b, Relationship between different data types. The primary in vivo data resource consists of 2P calcium images, 2P structural images, natural and parametric video stimuli used as visual input, and behavioural measurements. The secondary (derived) in vivo data resource includes the responses of approximately 75,909 pyramidal cells from cortical layer 2 to 5 segmented from the calcium videos, along with the pupil position and diameter extracted from the video of eye movements and locomotion measured on a single-axis treadmill. The primary anatomical data are composed of ex vivo serial section transmission EM images registered with the in vivo 2P structural stack. The volume includes a portion of VISp and three higher visual areas—VISlm, VISrl and VISal—for all cortical layers except extremes of layer 1. The secondary anatomical data is derived from the serial section EM image stack, and consists of semi-automated segmentation of cells, automated segmentation of nuclei, and automatically detected synapses. The tertiary anatomical data consists of assignments of the synapses to presynaptic and postsynaptic cells, triangle meshes for these segments, classification of nuclei as neuronal versus non-neuronal, and classification of neurons into excitatory and inhibitory cell classes. Secondary data for co-registration of in vivo and ex vivo images consists of manually chosen correspondence points between 2P structural images and EM images. Tertiary co-registration data are a transformation derived from these correspondence points. The transformation is then used to facilitate the matching of cell indices between the 2P calcium cell segmentation masks and the EM segmentation cells. MicroCT, micro-computed tomography.
As proofreading of the automated reconstruction continues, the dataset is becoming increasingly accurate. It includes pyramidal neurons from all layers (the following examples link to public data in Neuroglancer, our data visualization tool (https://www.microns-explorer.org/ngl-instructions), such as cortical layer 5 thick tufted (https://go.nature.com/L5tt), layer 5 near-projecting (https://go.nature.com/l5np), layer 4 (https://go.nature.com/l4) and layer 2/3 (https://go.nature.com/l2-3) neurons. It includes inhibitory neurons from many classes, such as bipolar cells (https://go.nature.com/bip), basket cells (https://go.nature.com/bkt) a chandelier cell (https://go.nature.com/cdl) and Martinotti cells (https://go.nature.com/mar). It also includes non-neuronal cells, such as astrocytes (https://go.nature.com/asc) and microglia (https://go.nature.com/mg) and the network of blood vessels (https://go.nature.com/bv). Using the interactive tools, one can visualize the input and output synapses of a single cell (https://go.nature.com/io). The database of functional recordings (https://www.microns-explorer.org/cortical-mm3#f-data) is also available for download to explore how cells responded to visual stimuli.
The first set of scientific findings emerging from the data are described in the accompanying studies. Detailed morphological and synaptic data enabled novel approaches to characterize cell types3,4,5,6,7 and show that connectivity can be used to identify cell types that are difficult to identify by morphology alone4, a recurring theme in connectomic cell typing. We also began to establish correspondences between connectivity and transcriptomics-defined cell types7. The combination of structural connectivity and functional similarity across thousands of pairs of individual neurons enabled a new examination of ‘like-to-like' connectivity25,32 and shows that this principle generalizes across cortical layers and visual areas10. This work relied on a novel approach using an artificial neural network that was trained to predict neural activities from visual stimuli10,11. Further linked Articles utilize this model to point the way to experimental studies of the mechanisms supporting contextual interactions8,9,10 and invariances9 in visual cortical computations.
The potential of the dataset extends far beyond these initial findings. To maximize its impact, we have made the data publicly available as a resource (https://www.microns-explorer.org/) with tools for interactive exploration and programmatic analysis. Finally, the accompanying studies highlight the tools that we developed to scale up connectomics to a cubic millimetre1,2,11,33. These technologies are enabling broader applications, such as reconstruction of the entire wiring diagram of a whole fly brain34,35,36, the first adult connectome to be completed since that of Caenorhabditis elegans.
The data were collected from a single mouse and involved a pipeline spanning three primary sites. First, two-photon (2P) in vivo calcium imaging under various visual stimulation conditions was performed at Baylor College of Medicine. Then the mouse was shipped to the Allen Institute, where the imaged tissue volume was extracted, prepared for EM imaging, sectioned and imaged over a period of six months of continuous imaging. The EM data were then montaged, roughly aligned and delivered to Princeton University, where fine alignment was performed and the volume was densely segmented. Finally, extensive proofreading was performed on a subset of neurons to correct errors of automated segmentation, and cell types and various other structural features were annotated (Fig. 2).
Outline of the major sequential steps used to generate the MICrONS dataset. First, in vivo measurements of neuronal functional properties are acquired from a region of interest (ROI) in the mouse visual cortex. In addition, a spatial overlapping in vivo structural image stack is collected to facilitate later registration with postmortem data. Following fixation of the brain, the tissue encompassing the functional ROI is processed for histology and sectioned. These sections are then imaged by TEM, and the resulting images are assembled into a 3D volume. Automated methods subsequently reconstruct the cellular processes and synapses within this volume, and the automated reconstructions are proofread as needed to ensure accuracy for further analysis. Image panels are adapted from Yin et al.63, Springer Nature Limited, and mouse and autoTEM drawings are adapted from Mahalingam et al.64, CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
The calcium-imaging data include the responses to visual stimuli of an estimated 75,909 excitatory neurons spanning cortical layers 2 to 5 across 4 visual areas in a transgenic mouse that expressed GCaMP6s in excitatory neurons via Slc17a7-Cre and Ai162. The dataset contains 14 individual scans, collected between postnatal day 75 (P75) and P81, spanning a volume of approximately 1,200 × 1,100 × 500 µm3 (anteroposterior × mediolateral × radial depth; Fig. 3a). The centre of the volume was placed at the junction of primary visual cortex (VISp) and three higher visual areas—lateromedial area (VISlm), rostrolateral area (VISrl) and anterolateral area (VISal)—in order to image retinotopically matched neurons that were potentially connected via inter-areal feedforward and feedback connections.
a, Representation of the 2P functionally imaged volume with area boundaries (white) and vascular label from structural stack (red). b, Wireframe representation of 104 planes registered in the structural 2P stack. c, Mean depth of posterior (post.) and anterior (ant.) registered fields relative to the pial surface. d, 3D scatter plot of each functional mask in its registered location in the structural 2P stack. Black, VISp; red, VISlm; blue, VISal; green, VISrl. e, Example frames from each of the five stimulus types (cinematic, Sports-1M, rendered, Monet2 and Trippy) shown to the mouse. f, Raster of deconvolved calcium activity for three neurons to repeated stimulus trials (oracle trials; ten repeats of six sequential clips, with each repeat normalized independently). Rasters for high (top), medium (middle) and low (bottom) oracle scores with the percentile shown on the right. g, Trial-averaged raster (central 500 ms of trial-average raster for each direction, out of 937 ms) of deconvolved calcium activity for 80 neurons in 40 Monet2 trials (16 randomly ordered directions) grouped by preferred direction (5 neurons per direction; alternating blue shading) and sorted according to the stimulus directions.
Each scan consisted of two adjacent overlapping 620-µm-wide fields at multiple imaging planes, imaged with the wide field of view (FOV) of the 2P random access mesoscope (2P-RAM). The scans ranged up to approximately 500 µm in depth, with a target spacing of 10–15 µm to maximize the coverage of imaged cells in the volume (Fig. 3b,c). For 11 of the 14 scans, 4 imaging planes were distributed widely in depth using the mesoscope remote focus, spanning roughly 300–400 µm with an average spacing of approximately 125 µm between planes for near-simultaneous recording across multiple cortical layers. In the remaining 3 scans, fewer planes were imaged at 10–20 µm spacing to achieve a higher effective pixel density (Extended Data Table 1). These higher-resolution scans were designed to be amenable to future efforts to extract signals from large apical dendrites from deeper layer 5 and layer 6 neurons. However, for this release, imaging data were automatically segmented only from somas using a constrained non-negative matrix factorization approach and fluorescence traces were extracted and deconvolved to yield activity traces. In total, 125,413 masks were generated across 14 scans, of which 115,372 were automatically classified as somatic masks by a trained classifier (Fig. 3d).
The functional data collection relied on newly established technologies, especially the 2P-RAM mesoscope. In addition, we developed an imaging workflow with the goal of full coverage within the target volume. This required several optimizations—for example, to densely target scan planes across multiple days, we needed a common reference frame to assess the coverage of scans within the volume. Therefore, in addition to the functional scans, high-resolution (0.5–1.0 pixels per µm) structural volumes were acquired for registration with the subsequent EM data. At the end of each imaging day, individual imaging fields of the functional scans were independently registered into a structural stack (Fig. 3b,c). This enabled us to target scans in subsequent sessions to optimize coverage across depth. On the last day of imaging, a 2-channel (green, red) 1,412 × 1,322 × 670 μm3 (anteroposterior × mediolateral × radial depth) structural stack was collected at 0.5 pixels per μm after injection of fluorescent dye (Texas Red) to label vasculature, enhancing fiducial labelling for co-registration with the EM volume (Fig. 3a).
After registration of the functional imaging field with the structural stack, 2D centroids from the segmentation were assigned 3D centroids in the shared structural stack coordinate space, on the basis of a greedy assignment of 3D proximity. Based on this analysis, we estimate the functional imaging volume contains 75,909 unique functionally imaged neurons consolidated from 115,372 segmented somatic masks, with many neurons imaged in 2 or more scans.
During imaging, the mouse was head-restrained, and the stimulus was presented to the left visual field. Treadmill rotation (single axis) and video of the left eye were captured throughout the scan, yielding locomotion velocity, eye movements and pupil diameter data.
The stimulus for each scan lasted approximately 84 min, and consisted of naturalistic (complex scenes with real-world statistics) and parametric (simpler, artificially generated) video stimuli. The majority of the stimulus (64 min) was made up of 10 s clips drawn from films, the Sports-1M dataset37 or rendered first-person point of view (POV) movement through a virtual environment (Fig. 3e). Our goal was to approximate natural statistical complexity to cover a sufficiently large feature space. These data can support multiple lines of investigation, including applying deep learning-based systems identification methods to build highly accurate models that predict neural responses to arbitrary visual stimuli11,38. These models enable a systematic characterization of tuning functions with minimal assumptions relative to classical methods using parametric stimuli38.
The stimulus composition included a mixture of unique stimuli for each scan, some that were repeated across every scan, and some that were repeated within each scan. In particular, 6 natural film stimuli clips totalling 1 min (oracle natural videos) were repeated in the same order 10 times per scan, and were used to evaluate the reliability of the neural responses to repeated visual stimuli (Fig. 3f). Variations in this ‘oracle score' from scan to scan serve as an important indicator of scan quality, since reliable responses are not observed when imaging conditions are poor or the mouse is not engaged with the stimulus.
To relate our findings to previous work, we also included a battery of parametric stimuli (Monet2 and Trippy, 10 min each; Methods, ‘Stimulus composition') that were generated to produce spatially decorrelated stimuli that were suitable for characterizing receptive fields while also containing local or global directional and orientation components for extracting basic tuning properties such as orientation selectivity (Fig. 3e,g).
After the in vivo neurophysiology data collection, we imaged the same volume of cortex ex vivo using TEM, which enabled us to map the connectivity of neurons for which we measured functional properties. These required considerable scaling from previous state-of-the-art datasets, with particular emphasis on automation and on reducing rare but potentially catastrophic events that could incur loss of multiple serial sections.
The tissue sample was trimmed and sectioned into 27,972 serial sections (nominal thickness 40 nm) onto grid tape to facilitate automated imaging. Although the cutting was automated, it was supervised by humans who worked in shifts around the clock for 12 days. They were ready to stop and restart the ultramicrotome immediately if there was a risk of multiple section loss. As will be described later, the EM dataset is subdivided into two subvolumes owing to sectioning and imaging events (details of sectioning timeline and artefacts are presented in Methods).
A total of 26,652 sections were imaged by 5 customized automated TEMs (autoTEMs), which took approximately 6 months to complete and produced a dataset composed of 2 Pb of raw data at a resolution of approximately 4 nm (Fig. 4d–h).
a, Top view of EM dataset (grey) registered with the in vivo 2P structural dataset (vasculature in red and GCaMP in green). Area borders calculated from calcium imaging are shown as black lines. The two portions of the dataset are separated by a dashed line. Scale bar, 500 μm. Mouse drawing adapted from from Mahalingam et al.64, CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). b,c, Top view of small region showing the quality of the fine alignment and its robustness to large folds shown in c (the dataset is available at https://ngl.microns-explorer.org/#!gs://microns-static-links/mm3/data_fig/4b.json). Scale bars, 5 μm. d, Montage of a single section showing the coverage from pia to white matter and across three different cortical regions. Scale bar, 100 μm. e, Example of a single tile from the section shown in in d, with dashed squares representing the locations in f–h. Scale bar, 5 μm. f,g, Examples of excitatory synapses indicated with arrowheads (dataset available at https://ngl.microns-explorer.org/#!gs://microns-static-links/mm3/data_fig/4f.json (f) and https://ngl.microns-explorer.org/#!gs://microns-static-links/mm3/data_fig/4g.json (g)). h, Example of an inhibitory synapse (arrowhead) (dataset available at https://ngl.microns-explorer.org/#!gs://microns-static-links/mm3/data_fig/4h.json).
An 800-µm region (sections 7,931–27,904) (Fig. 4a) was selected for further processing, as it had no consecutive section loss and an overall section loss of around 0.1%. This region contains approximately 95 million individual tiles that were stitched into 2D montages per section and then aligned in 3D. Owing to the re-trimming of the block and the requirement for a knife change (Methods), the EM data are divided into two subvolumes (Fig. 4a). One subvolume contains approximately 35% of the sections (sections 7,931–14,815) and the other contains 65% of the sections (sections 14,816–27,904). The two subvolumes were processed individually and later aligned to each other in the same global coordinate frame, enabling the tracing of axons and dendrites across their border (Fig. 5). To facilitate the reconstruction process across the division between the two subvolumes, a composite image of the partial sections was created at the interface. However, the two subvolumes were reconstructed separately and each has a distinct representation in the analysis infrastructure and database.
a, A pyramidal cell reconstructed from the EM images (inset). b, Pyramidal cells from both subvolumes as they cross the subvolume boundary. c, A selection of 78 proofread pyramidal cells from subvolume 65. d, A distant pair of pyramidal cells connected by a synapse within subvolume 65.
Accurate reconstruction requires extremely accurate stitching and alignment of images with hundreds of thousands of pixels on a side. To achieve this at petabyte scale, we split the process into distinct coarse and fine pipelines. For the coarse pipeline, sections were initially stitched using a per image affine transformation, and a polynomial transformation model was applied to a subset of sections whose stitching quality had a local misalignment error of more than five pixels. Down-sampled 2D stitched sections were then roughly aligned in 3D. The rough alignment process ensured global consistency within the dataset and accounted for images from multiple autoTEMs with varied image sizes and resolutions. It is also corrected for locally varying misalignments such as scale differences and deformations between sections and aids the fine alignment process.
To further refine image alignment, we developed a set of convolutional networks to estimate pixel-wise displacement fields between pairs of neighbouring sections33. This process was able to correct nonlinear misalignments around cracks and folds that occurred during sectioning. Although this fine alignment does not restore the missing data inside a fold, it was still effective in correcting the distortions caused by large folds (Fig. 4b,c), which caused large displacements between sections and were the main cause of reconstruction errors. Although imaging was performed with 4 nm resolution, the aligned imagery volume was generated at 8 nm resolution to decrease data size for subsequent processing.
We densely segmented cellular processes across the volume using affinity-predicting convolutional neural networks and mean affinity agglomeration (Fig. 5a) Segmentation was not attempted where the alignment accuracy was deemed insufficient or tissue was missing or occluded over multiple sections.
The automatic segmentation produced highly accurate dendritic arbors before proofreading, enabling morphological identification of broad cell types. Most dendritic spines are properly associated with their dendritic trunk. Recovery of larger-caliber axons, those of inhibitory neurons, and the initial portions of excitatory neurons was also typically successful. Owing to the high frequency of imaging defects in the shallower and deeper portions of the dataset, processes near the pia and white matter often contain errors. Many non-neuronal objects are also well-segmented, including astrocytes, microglia and blood vessels. The two subvolumes of the dataset were segmented separately, but the alignment between the two is sufficient for manually tracing between them (Fig. 5b).
Nuclei were also automatically segmented (n = 144,120) within subvolume 65 using a distinct convolutional network33. To use nucleus shape to map cell classes across the dataset, we manually labelled a subset of the 2,751 nuclei in a 100-µm-square column of the dataset as non-neuronal, excitatory or inhibitory. We then developed machine learning models to automate distinguishing neurons from non-neuronal cells such as glia, as well as to classify cells at different levels of resolution2,6 within the subvolume with high accuracy (Methods). The results of this nucleus segmentation, manual cell classification and model building are provided as part of this data resource.
Synaptic contacts were automatically segmented in the aligned EM image, and the presynaptic and postsynaptic partners from the cell segmentation were automatically assigned to identify each synapse (Fig. 5d). We automatically detected and associated a total of 524 million synaptic clefts across both subvolumes (subvolume 35: 186 million, subvolume 65: 337 million). We manually identified synapses in 70 small subvolumes (n = 8,611 synapses) distributed across the dataset, giving the automated detection an estimated precision of 96% and recall of 89% (Extended Data Fig. 1). We estimated partner assignment accuracy at 98% from a separate dataset of manually annotated synapses (n = 191) that were held-out from training.
Although the automated segmentation creates impressive reconstructions, proofreading is required to make those reconstructions more complete and accurate. The proofreading process involves merging additional segments of the neurons that were missing in the reconstruction, and splitting segments that were incorrectly associated with a neuron. To perform real-time collaborative proofreading in a petascale dataset, we developed the ChunkedGraph proofreading system1 that can be used with Neuroglancer as a user interface or a REST (representational state transfer) application programming interface (API) for computationally driven edits. This flexibility enabled the proofreading methods to be tailored to different scientific needs, including manual, semi-automated and automated proofreading. Note that all proofreading was performed in subvolume 65.
The released segmentation now contains all 1,046,656 edits of the proofreading that had occurred as of 16 September 2024 and is being updated quarterly. Proofreading was performed by individual scientists and focused teams of proofreaders to both support targeted scientific discovery for companion studies3,4,5,6,7,10 and correct errors that most affected general connectivity. Because of this, the level of completeness differs across these cells (Fig. 5), as neurons have been proofread as part of multiple Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) data analysis projects. For example, in the functional connectomics study, we proofread the full extent of axonal and dendritic arbors of 85 excitatory neurons within subvolume 65 (Fig. 5c), whereas for a broad columnar sample only the dendrites of 1,188 excitatory neurons were proofread. The result is a wide variation in edits per neuron with more edits generally corresponding to more extensive axons (100–1,000 edits per axon) (Extended Data Fig. 2). The most time-consuming task is extending axons, and thus this is where the data varies most across cells and studies. In total, the released dataset includes 1,433 neurons that have proofread axons with varying levels of extension, where all incorrect mergers have been removed and many false splits corrected. From the proofread dendrites, we determined that 99% of inputs were correct when assigned to a postsynaptic soma in the automated segmentation. As a result, for the neurons with proofread axons all synapses—both input and output—are now correctly associated. A full-time proofreader can generate between 400–600 axon extension edits in a work week. The proofread excitatory neurons contain some of the most extensive axonal arbors reconstructed in the neocortex at EM resolution, with the longest excitatory axon measuring 18.9 mm with 2,483 synaptic outputs and inhibitory axons ranging from in length from 1.1 to 32.3 mm with a mean of 2,754 synaptic outputs (range 99–14,019) (Fig. 5f). In general, inhibitory axons were more complete in the automated reconstruction, probably because their axons are slightly thicker than those of most excitatory axons.
In addition to proofreading axons and dendrites, we made widespread edits to enhance the general dataset quality. Following the automated segmentation, there were 7,050 segmented objects consisting of a total of 17,753 neurons that were merged together (based on nucleus segmentation), preventing analysis of these cells. Using a combination of manual and automated error-detection workflows, we have split almost all neurons into single-soma objects, bringing the total number of individually segmented neurons to 84,035 (Extended Data Fig. 3). To work through such dataset-wide tasks more quickly, we developed and validated an automated error-detection and correction workflow using graph and morphological analysis to identify merge error locations and generate edits that could be executed using PyChunkedGraph (PCG)1. This automated approach (NEURD) was also used to remove false axon merges onto dendritic segments and split axon branches with abnormally high degree across the dataset2, totalling more than 164,000 edits.
Proofreading is ongoing in the dataset with regular public updates, and there is now a project called the Virtual Observatory of the Cortex (https://www.microns-explorer.org/vortex) funded by the National Insitutes of Health (NIH), to which individual researchers can submit scientific requests to steer proofreading and annotation of the dataset in directions that will move their research questions forward.
Functional connectomics requires that cells are matched between the 2P calcium-imaging and EM coordinate frames. We achieved this using a three-phase approach combining expert annotations and automatic methods. In the first step, we generated a co-registration transform using a set of 2,934 expert-matched fiducials between the EM volume and the 2P structural dataset (1,994 somata and 942 blood vessels, mostly branch points, which are available as part of the resource; Methods). To evaluate the error of the transform we evaluated the distance in micrometres between the location of a fiducial after co-registration and its original location; a perfect co-registration would have residuals of 0 μm. The average residual was 3.8 μm.
For the second step we used the results of the transform to guide a group of experts to manually match 19,181 functional ROIs from 14 scans to 15,439 individual EM neurons (multiple functional ROIs can match to a single EM neuron if it was present in multiple scans). The results of manual matching provide both high-confidence matches for analysis and ‘ground truth' for fully automated approaches. These results help to validate the first phase, as most matched ROIs have low residuals and high separation scores (Extended Data Fig. 4). Furthermore, as expected for successful matches, ROIs with at least moderate visual responses that are independently matched to the same neuron across multiple scans have higher signal correlations than adjacent neurons (Extended Data Fig. 4).
In the third and final step, we used two automated approaches to match the entire set of functional ROIs. The first approach used the EM-to-2P co-registration transform to move the centroids of all EM neurons (predicted from nucleus detections) to the 2P coordinate space, and then used minimum weight matching for bipartite graphs to assign functional ROIs to EM neurons. This method (referred to as the fiducial-based automatch table) resulted in 84,198 functional ROIs matched to 37,364 EM neurons. Considering all matches, this method achieved 83% precision relative to manual matchers, but filtering out matches in the bottom 30% of separation scores yields 90% precision, while still including 59,934 functional ROIs and 31,042 EM neurons. (Extended Data Fig. 5). The second automated approach used only the EM and 2P blood vessel segmentations to generate a novel co-registration between the two volumes, using a fine-scale deformable B-spline-based registration. Then, minimum weight matching for bipartite graphs was used to assign functional ROIs to EM neurons. This table (referred to as the vessel-based automatch table) contains 75,856 functional ROIs matched to 34,712 EM neurons. Remarkably, this fiducial-free method performed as well as the fiducial-based method, achieving 84% precision with manual matches. Filtering out matches in the bottom 30% of separation scores yielded 90% precision, while including 53,248 functional ROIs and 28,233 EM neurons (Extended Data Fig. 5). Finally, we tested whether taking only the matches for which both automated methods agree would increase the performance relative to manual matches. Indeed, this hybrid automated table achieves 89% agreement with no additional filtering, yielding 60,091 functional ROIs and 29,620 EM neurons (Extended Data Fig. 5).
To create a resource for the neuroscience community, we have made the data from each of the steps described above—functional imaging, the EM subvolumes, segmentation and a variety of annotations—publicly available on the MICrONS Explorer website (https://www.microns-explorer.org/). From the site, users can browse through the large-scale EM imagery and segmentation results using Neuroglancer (https://github.com/google/neuroglancer); several example visualizations are provided to get started. All data are served from publicly readable cloud buckets hosted through Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Storage.
To enable systematic analysis without downloading hundreds of gigabytes of data, users can selectively access cloud-based data programmatically through a collection of open source Python clients (Extended Data Table 2). The functional data, including calcium traces, stimuli, behavioural measures and more, are available in a DataJoint database that can be accessed using DataJoint's Python API (https://datajoint.com/docs/), or is available as neurodata without borders (NWB) files on the Distributed Archives for Neurophysiology Data Integration (DANDI) Archive (https://dandiarchive.org/dandiset/000402). EM imagery and segmentation volumes can also be selectively accessed using cloud-volume (https://github.com/seung-lab/cloud-volume), a Python API that simplifies interacting with large-scale image data. Mesh files describing the shape of cells can be downloaded with cloud-volume, which also provides features for convenient mesh analysis, skeletonization and visualization. These meshes can be decomposed and richly annotated for automated proofreading and morphological analysis of processes and spines using NEURD2 (https://github.com/reimerlab/NEURD). Annotations on the structural data, such as synapses and cell body locations, can be queried via CAVE client, a Python interface to the Connectome Annotation Versioning Engine (CAVE) APIs (Fig. 6a,b). CAVE encompasses a set of microservices for collaborative proofreading and analysis of large-scale volumetric data.
a–e, Cell body locations and cell-are type classifications, all nucleus detections shown in light grey. a, Non-neuronal cells, manually typed (dark outlines) and classifier-based (no outline)6. OPC, oligodendrocyte precursor cell. b, Excitatory cells, labelled by unsupervised clustering of morphological features4 (dark outline) and a model based on those labels6. L2, layer 2; L3, layer 3; L4, layer 4; L5ET, layer 5 extratelencephalic; L5IT, layer 5 intratelencephalic; L5NP, layer 5 near-projecting; L6CT, layer 6 cortico-thalamic; L6IT, layer 6 intratelencephalic; L6WM, layer 6 white matter. c, Inhibitory cells, classified by human experts4 and trained models6. d, Neurons registered to in vivo functional traces. e, Proofreading status of neurons in subvolume 65: black dots (fully proofread), red (cleaned of false merges but potentially incomplete) and blue (dendrites cleaned/extended). f, The number of output synapses per neuron shown in e versus the fraction mapped to a single postsynaptic soma, coloured by cell class. g, A fully proofread pyramidal cell (nucleus ID: 294657, segment ID: 864691135701676411) with postsynaptic soma locations shown as coloured dots (by cell class). Cells with functionally co-registered regions are outlined in dark green. h, Quantification of synapses associated with different categories of postsynaptic cells. The first column shows the fraction that map to a single postsynaptic soma. The second column shows the fraction of those that are excitatory or inhibitory. The third column shows the fraction of cells that are in each sub-class based on the model shown in b,c. The fourth column shows the proportion that map to functionally co-registered cells. The cell and its synapses are viewable at https://neuroglancer-demo.appspot.com/#!gs://microns-static-links/mm3/data_fig/6f.json. i, EM image (i) and corresponding image from the 2p structural stack (j) centred on the cell shown in g (yellow circle). Red arrowheads indicate blood vessels. k, Functional responses of the presynaptic (presyn) neuron (g; yellow) and its functionally co-registered postsynaptic (postsyn) targets. Heat maps show average ΔF/F traces for the presynaptic neuron and postsynaptic targets, sorted by synaptic strength, in response to oracle clips from functional scans.
The first collection of annotation tables available through CAVE client focus on the larger subvolume of the dataset, which we refer to within the infrastructure as Minnie65, and which has been the current focus of proofreading and ongoing analysis (Extended Data Table 3). The largest table describes connectivity, contains all 337.3 million synapses and is searchable by presynaptic ID, postsynaptic ID and spatial location. In addition, there are several tables that describe the soma location of key cells, predictions for which cells are different non-neuronal (Fig. 6a), excitatory (Fig. 6b) and inhibitory (Fig. 6c) types. There are also annotations that denote which cells have been functional co-registered (Fig. 6d) and which cells have been proofread to different degrees of completion (Fig. 6e). In this release, the only table available for Minnie35 contains synapses, as its segmentation and alignment occurred later and little proofreading, annotation or analysis has been conducted within it. We expect that continued proofreading and analysis of the data will lead to updated and additional tables for both portions of the data in future data releases.
This collection of tools and public data enables analyses that integrate questions of connectivity, morphology and functional properties of neurons. Here, we provide an example to suggest how the data might be used together. The power of the dataset lies in the fact that when an axon is proofread, it contains hundreds to more than ten thousand output synapses (Fig. 6f). Furthermore, between 60 and 95% of those outputs can be accurately mapped onto their postsynaptic targets with a known soma location, depending on the cell type and its spatial location in the volume (Fig. 6f). This is because the segmentation is highly accurate for dendritic inputs, with a 99% input precision based on comparing proofread with non-proofread dendrites. To seed an analysis with an as-complete-as-possible cell, one might begin by using the proofreading table to identify a neuron with complete axons and dendrites and querying for all the synaptic inputs and outputs for the cell, in this case a L2/3 cell in VISp (Fig. 6g). For this particular proofread neuron, 74.5% (1,053 out of 1,412 synapses) are onto objects with a single nucleus (as determined from automated detection), with 275 synapses onto cells classified as inhibitory, 662 synapses onto cells classified as excitatory, and 116 synapses onto cells whose soma did not pass classification quality control (Fig. 6h). The remainder (25.4% 359 out of 1.412 synapses) are onto orphan fragments, composed of a mix of disconnected spine heads and stretches of dendrite. By filtering the synaptic targets with functionally matched neurons (Fig. 6k), one can further identify which targets have been matched to the functional experiments (365 out of 1,412) and use DataJoint to query the functional data or read NWB files deposited in the DANDI data archive (Fig. 6i–k). In this case, the targets include pyramidal cells in both L2/3 and L5. Subsequent investigation could examine the morphology of such cells in detail, or consider functional responses of their targets. We have provided example notebooks that walk through the above examples and more to help users get started. Together, these data provide a platform for analysis of the relationship between the synaptic structure, neuronal morphology and functional tuning of mouse visual circuits.
Connectivity and morphology are key properties of cell types, and the scale of this dataset enables an unprecedented exploration of the anatomical diversity of cortical neurons as well as a need to relate known cell types to EM data. We have taken multiple approaches to addressing these challenges in the accompanying studies. Two projects3,4 applied data-driven methods to dendritic reconstructions to characterize excitatory neurons across cortical depth and visual areas, revealing intralaminar subtypes and inter-areal differences in populations. Another study linked transcriptomic types of inhibitory neurons to EM reconstructions, establishing a proof of concept for linking molecular cell types to anatomical cell types that use morphology and synapse connectivity7. Although these studies used proofread or post-processed neuronal reconstructions, not all segmented neurons in the dataset were amenable to such analysis due to truncation by dataset boundaries or segmentation quality. To push cell typing even in such difficult cases, a fourth study showed that key features of the soma and nucleus of a cell alone was sufficient to predict cell classes such as glia, excitatory neuron or inhibitory neuron, as well as subclasses such as basket cells versus bipolar cells or microglia versus oligodendrocytes, or identify similar cells to a cell of interest6. Together, these approaches enable matching known cell types with EM neurons and using the EM data to discover new cell types.
The integration of cell-type classifications with additional modalities enables a powerful set of tools for discovery. Examining the output of proofread neurons, which includes more than 900,000 synaptic connections between neurons, reveals key differences in the interlaminar communication between excitatory and inhibitory neurons (Fig. 7a–c). The size of the dataset also allows for a comprehensive analysis of cell-type connectivity, including tracing across one or more steps along the synaptic network. A major finding from multiple studies of the MICrONS dataset is the widespread specificity of connectivity exhibited by various inhibitory4,7 and excitatory5 cell types. As an example of such analysis, we can follow a collection of layer 3 pyramidal neurons and compare their first-order (direct) connectivity onto excitatory cell types and inhibitory neurons as well as the second-order (two-hop) connectivity of those inhibitory neurons that are targeted by the layer 3 cells (Fig. 7d).
a–c, Connectivity matrix for proofread neurons connecting to all postsynaptic targets of the predicted class: excitatory→excitatory (a); excitatory→inhibitory (b); inhibitory→excitatory (c). Each connection between two cells is represented by a dot, with the position on the x axis depicting the depth of the postsynaptic soma and the position on the y axis depicting the depth of the presynaptic cell. Dots are transparent, with darker shades indicate more connections between laminar depths. Layer boundaries are shown as dashed grey lines. d, First-order and second-order synaptic output heat maps of seven layer 3 pyramidal cells similar to the one shown in Fig. 6g. Left, total number of synapses that each layer 3 pyramidal cell makes with each of their order 1 postsynaptic excitatory cell types. Greyscale heat map (top) showing number of synapses that each L3 pyramidal cell makes with their individual order 1 postsynaptic inhibitory partners, sorted by synaptic targeting types and soma depth from the pia to white matter (WM). Coloured heat map (bottom) showing total number of synapses that each order 1 inhibitory partner makes with each of their postsynaptic order 2 excitatory partners of layer 3 pyramidal cells, colour-coded by the synaptic targeting types of order 1 inhibitory partners. Inhibitory cell subclasses are represented as follows4: DTC, distal targeting cells (also known as Martinotti cells); PTC, proximal targeting cells (also known as basket cells); ITC, inhibitory targeting cells; STC, sparse targeting cells (mostly neurogliaform). L3a, layer 3a.
EM is widely recognized as the gold standard for identifying structural features of synapses, and most datasets, including the output of the MICrONS project, were primarily created to answer questions related to circuit-level connectivity. Regardless of the original intent, the scale and high resolution of the MICrONS dataset offers information that is far richer and of broader interest than just connectivity. For example, the imagery also reveals the intracellular machinery of cells, including the morphology of subcellular structures such as the nucleus, mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum and microtubules. Furthermore, the segmentation includes non-neuronal cells such as microglia, astrocytes, oligodendrocyte precursor cells and oligodendrocytes, as well the fine morphology of the cortical vasculature.
The scale of large functional and EM datasets presents a wealth of opportunities for analysis and discovery. With advances in microscopy and computing power, it is now possible to work with datasets that are orders of magnitude larger than just a few years ago with millions of synapses and tens of thousands of recorded neurons. Among the key opportunities presented by this data is the ability to identify patterns and trends that may be hidden in smaller datasets, the ability to identify and validate general principles at a larger scale, and the ability to perform more sophisticated analyses—since with more data, it is possible to use more complex algorithms and models including machine learning techniques. The accessibility of these datasets also enhances hypothesis-driven approaches by enabling scientists to investigate whether specific types of connectivity exist among different cell types of interest. Additionally, the scale of the data and the availability of exploration tools to facilitate the discovery of anomalies or contradictions to current hypotheses and provide opportunities to address and resolve them effectively. Both of these approaches can help to identify patterns and trends that would be difficult to observe using smaller datasets.
However, larger datasets have limitations and challenges associated with them. When analysing the connectivity graph, it is essential to keep in mind that although, as shown by our results, the automatic segmentation of dendritic inputs is highly accurate, the automatic segmentation of axons is not as accurate. Therefore, it is essential to be aware of which processes have been proofread and to what extent. Additionally, it is worth considering that although each neuron in the dataset receives thousands of inputs, a percentage of synapses in the dataset are on detached spines. Depending on the scientific question being asked, it is worth considering whether these detached spines may create bias in the conclusions drawn, such as distinguishing between excitatory and inhibitory inputs5.
In the functional data, it is important to recognize that photon scattering and out-of-plane fluorescence may cause signal degradation and contamination with increasing depth from the pia surface, especially given the dense GCaMP6s expression in excitatory somas and neurites39. Caution should be taken to disentangle true biological variation in neuronal tuning across layers from these optical artefacts, by either matching controls at the same depth, or validating the finding with a method that is less prone to these artefacts (such as electrophysiology or 2P microscopy with more sparse or targeted labelling). Furthermore, although all functional imaging was done in the same volume, it was done across several distinct imaging sessions. Technical factors as well as changes in the physiological state of the mouse should be taken into account when analysing functional recordings that were taken at different times. The simultaneous recordings of treadmill activity and pupillometry can be used to help account for variability due to state.
Developing and executing this pipeline took a large team effort, and so it is worth reflecting on the practical limitations and bottlenecks in generating datasets of this scale. Proofreading and analysis remains the largest overall expense in terms of person hours, although it can be distributed across diverse scientific interests. Improvements in data quality, such as folds, membrane clarity and errors in computational image alignment are the most pressing technical issues that appear to limit the quality of the automated segmentation. The present dataset has already collected more than a million manual corrections to the automated segmentation, which are available for querying via CAVE1. We hope that these edits can be leveraged in the future to make more accurate automated segmentation, or a more extensively automated edit approach that can further increase the efficiency of proofreading. Analysis questions are often diverse in nature, so it is difficult to predict all the computational steps that are required, but having a more general framework and scalable technique of identifying specific features (such as cell types, spines and organelles) within the dataset would help increase efficiency, rather than using the specialized pipelines we used here. Some research in this direction has been applied to this dataset40. In terms of marginal costs of data generation, human labour remains the largest, followed by computational costs of automated segmentation and then the material costs of grid tape. Beyond these, there are no fundamental technical limitations to producing more data at this scale for other individual animals, species or brain regions.
The importance of high-resolution structural data was recognized early in invertebrate systems, particularly in the worm41,42. However, it is in the fly that connectomics as the pursuit of complete connectivity diagrams has had the strongest renaissance. EM volumes now describe the Drosophila nervous system at both larval43 and adult34,44 life stages and in both central brain34,44 and nerve cord45. The size of the volume required to capture most central neurons and their synaptic connections in the fly is well-suited to EM. The whole fly brain fills about one-third of a 750 × 350 × 250 µm3 bounding box, and the nerve cord fills about one-quarter of a 950 × 320 × 200 µm3 bounding box45, well within the bounds of contemporary EM methods. The creation of these datasets has spurred investment in both manual skeletonized reconstruction and automated dense reconstructions33,44,46, with both centralized and community-minded efforts to proofread and mine them for biological insight26,44,47,48,49. In addition to the many targeted reconstructions in these datasets, large-scale proofread reconstructions from these datasets now include a manually traced full larval brain, a densely segmented and extensively proofread partial central brain and a densely segmented and proofread complete adult brain. These datasets collectively span nearly the entire fly nervous system and are driving a revolution in how fly systems neuroscience is being studied.
In the mammalian system, there is currently no EM dataset that contains a complete area, let alone a complete brain. There is however, as mentioned above, an established culture of making data open and publicly available24,26,50,51,52. In the past 10 years, there have been only three other rodent EM datasets with publicly available reconstructions that are at least 5% the size of the MICrONS multi-area dataset presented in this Article. One dataset is a 424 × 429 × 274 µm3 volume from P26 rat entorhinal cortex53, with skeleton reconstructions of incomplete dendrites of 667 neurons, and skeleton reconstructions of local axons of 22 excitatory neurons averaging 550 µm in length. A dataset from mouse lateral geniculate nucleus that is 500 × 400 × 280 µm3 in size and contains around 3,000 neuronal cell bodies is publicly available54. This dataset is large enough that dendritic reconstructions from the centre of the volume are nearly complete, and it has a sparse manual segmentation, covering around 1% of the volume, which includes 304 thalamocortical cells and 162 axon fragments. The third dataset is a 424 × 453 × 360 µm volume covering layer 4 of mouse primary somatosensory cortex, with manual reconstruction of 52 interneuronal dendrites and many axons55.
It is critically important to compare circuit architectures across regions and species. The neocortex is of particular interest as it is expanded in human compared to mouse. There is already a large body of literature on the comparative aspects between the cortex of humans and of other species. This research includes morphological and electrical properties of neurons, density of spines, synapses and neurons, as well as biophysical properties and morphology of synaptic connections56,57,58. Of note, a recent EM connectomics dataset of the human medial temporal gyrus59 vastly expands the possibilities of this comparison. This is a cubic millimetre scale volume, with a maximum extent of 3 × 2 mm and a thickness of 150 µm. This human dataset is publicly available, including a dense automated reconstruction of all objects, with around 16,000 neurons, 130 million synapses and an initial release of 104 proofread cells. These human connectomics data will doubtless yield critical insights. One practical difference from the volume described here is the aspect ratio of the human data, which is matched to the greater thickness of human cortex compared to mouse. To some extent, the wide and thin dimensions of the human dataset trades off completeness of local neurons and circuits in order to sample all layers, whereas the nearly cubic volume described here is more suitable for studying local circuits and long-range connections across areas. With the exception of the study by Hua et al.55, the other studies mentioned above do not have corresponding functional characterizations of the neurons reconstructed in EM. By contrast, the functional connectomics data we have released includes both anatomy and activity of the same cells.
In the mammalian nervous system, transcriptomics has been the most scalable approach for cell-type taxonomies. In smaller organisms such as the fly, for which we have both extensive gene expression maps, whole-brain neuronal reconstructions and nearly complete connectomes, integration across modalities has been a powerful engine of discovery. Moreover, the availability of connectomes in the fly have enabled a much higher resolution of cell types, with novel taxonomies and new cell types being discovered44. The accompanying studies4,5,6,7 suggest that a similar path to cell-type discovery will be enabled by large-scale EM in the mammalian system with novel cell types and novel patterns of connectivity.
This wealth of structural data on cell types and circuits provides strong constraints on the nature of the computations that the brain performs, whereas genes provide constraints on how this structure is built and operates. Linking connectomics to transcriptomics is a first step for merging connectivity with molecular information and building cell-type-specific tools that are informed by how neurons connect. In one of the accompanying studies7, we offer a proof of concept on how to achieve this link for Martinotti cells, using morphology as a common feature to integrate PatchSeq and EM datasets, suggesting a broader pathway for multimodal integration.
In this respect, our work parallels another milestone of connectomics, the completion of the Drosophila connectome34,35,44,46; only 20% of the neuron types described in the EM connectome of the central brain were previously described in the literature44. There is however an important difference to be drawn with Drosophila, in which a cell type often consists of just a few neurons that share similar functional properties that are reproducible across individuals. Owing to this stereotypy, a connectome mapped in one fly can usually be used by researchers studying neuronal function in other flies. Rules of connectivity based on cell types have proved sufficient for understanding and modelling many functions of increasingly complex neural circuits60,61. Conversely, a single cell type in a mammalian brain encompasses a huge number of cells, which generally exhibit different tuning preferences. This is why it is important to combine cortical connectomics with functional studies of the same neurons in the same brain. This is also why the mapping of cortical connectivity must go beyond rules that depend solely on cell types.
Almost 50 years after Crick described his “impossible” experiment, we have provided a first draft, but its full promise will take some time to achieve. Most importantly, complete segmentation still requires an extensive amount of proofreading for the largest datasets, such as the millimetre scale cortical reconstruction reported here. Similarly, simultaneously recording single action potentials from tens of thousands of neurons is constrained by sensor dynamics and optical sampling constraints.
Nonetheless, there has been steady progress. The first structure–function studies that combined 2P microscopy and EM examined how the wiring of mouse retina27,28,29,30,31 and mouse visual cortex24 related to functional properties. Lee et al.25 related visual tuning properties of 50 functionally characterized neurons in primary visual cortex to their connectivity measured via EM reconstruction of a 450 × 450 × 150 µm volume. One thousand synapses were mapped by hand, yielding a graph of connectivity between 29 orientation-tuned cells (a subset of the characterized cells, as in the current dataset). Subsequently, our consortium used dense segmentation plus proofreading of a 250 × 140 × 90 µm dataset26 from mouse layer 2/3 visual cortex, yielding many more overall connections, but still only twice the number of functionally characterized cells. Perhaps most impressively, In the olfactory bulb of the zebrafish, Wanner et al.62 manually reconstructed almost all neurons (n = 1,003) within a 72 × 108 × 119 µm3 volume, in which responses to odours were measured in vivo. Their analysis of the 18,483 measured connections revealed how this structural network mediated de-correlation and variance normalization of the functional responses and demonstrates how larger measurements of network structure and function can provide mechanistic insights.
By contrast, the data released here contains tens of thousands of neurons with functionally characterized responses to visual stimuli and, because it is densely segmented and contains complete dendritic and local axonal arbors of centrally located cells, the opportunities to study connected neurons are orders of magnitude greater. As an example, from just 94 proofread excitatory axons, one can query 69,962 output synapses, which map to 20,112 distinct neuron soma in the volume.
Moreover, inspired by recent advancements in artificial intelligence, we also created a functional digital twin of the MICrONS mouse that can enable a more comprehensive analysis of function10,11. Specifically, we developed a ‘foundation model'11 for the mouse visual cortex using deep learning that was trained using large-scale datasets from multiple visual cortical areas and mice, recorded while they viewed ecological videos. The model demonstrated its generalization abilities by accurately predicting neuronal responses, not only to natural videos, but also to various new stimulus domains, such as coherent moving dots and noise patterns, as confirmed through in vivo testing10,11. By applying the foundation model to the MICrONS mouse data, we created a functional digital twin of this mouse, paving the way for a systematic exploration of the relationship between circuit structure and function for tens of thousands of neurons connected with millions of synapses. Combined with the anatomical data from this mouse, we can investigate the structure–function relationships for specific visual computations8,9 and decipher the principles that determine the synaptic network in the cortex10,11.
The most important goal of connectomics is to map the connections between cells, from cell body to axon to synapse, and back to cell body. In a large volume with complete and segmented dendrites and local axons, this can be achieved. Currently, the dendrites are nearly completely segmented (Fig. 6), but many axons require proofreading. A goal in future years will be to complete the segmentation through a combination of additional machine learning and improved proofreading. This echoes the successful strategy in the reconstruction of the fly adult brain, which started with the TEM volume34, then added the tools developed by the MICrONS programme for segmentation and proofreading and led to the complete connectome35. If, in addition, most cell bodies have physiology with single-spike resolution, then Crick's experimental challenge will be met. These remaining hurdles may take some time to clear, but the next steps are becoming apparent.
All procedures were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) of Baylor College of Medicine. All results described here are from a single male mouse, age 65 days at onset of experiments, expressing GCaMP6s in excitatory neurons via Slc17a7-Cre65 and Ai16266 heterozygous transgenic lines (recommended and generously shared by H. Zeng at Allen Institute for Brain Science; JAX stock 023527 and 031562, respectively). In order to select this animal, 31 (12 female, 19 male) GCaMP6-expressing animals underwent surgery as described below. Of these, eight animals were chosen based on a variety of criteria including surgical success and animal recovery, the accessibility of lateral higher visual areas in the cranial window, the degree of vascular occlusion, and the success of cortical tissue block extraction and staining. Of these 8 animals, one was chosen for 40-nm slicing and EM imaging based on overall quality using these criteria.
Mouse birth date: 19 December 2017
Surgery: 21 February 2018 (P64)
2P imaging start: 4 March 2018 (P75)
2P imaging end: 9 March 2018 (P80)
Structural Stack: 21 March 2018 (P83)
Perfusion: 16 March 2018 (P87)
Anaesthesia was induced with 3% isoflurane and maintained with 1.5–2% isoflurane during the surgical procedure. Mice were injected with 5–10 mg kg−1 ketoprofen subcutaneously at the start of the surgery. Anaesthetized mice were placed in a stereotaxic head holder (Kopf Instruments) and their body temperature was maintained at 37 °C throughout the surgery using a homeothermic blanket system (Harvard Instruments). After shaving the scalp, bupivicane (0.05 ml, 0.5%, Marcaine) was applied subcutaneously, and after 10–20 min an approximately 1 cm2 area of skin was removed above the skull and the underlying fascia was scraped and removed. The wound margins were sealed with a thin layer of surgical glue (VetBond, 3 M), and a 13-mm stainless steel washer clamped in the headbar was attached with dental cement (Dentsply Grip Cement). At this point, the mouse was removed from the stereotax and the skull was held stationary on a small platform by means of the newly attached headbar. Using a surgical drill and HP 1/2 burr, a 4-mm-diameter circular craniotomy was made centred on the border between primary visual cortex and lateromedial visual cortex (V1, lateral–medial; 3.5 mm lateral of the midline, ~1 mm anterior to the lambda suture), followed by a durotomy. The exposed cortex was washed with artificial cerebrospinal fluid (25 mM NaCl, 5 mM KCl, 10 mM glucose, 10 mM HEPES, 2 mM CaCl2, 2 mM MgSO4) with 0.3 mg ml−1 gentamicin sulfate (Aspen Veterinary Resources). The cortical window was then sealed with a 4-mm coverslip (Warner Instruments), using cyanoacrylate glue (VetBond). The mouse was allowed to recover for 1 day prior to imaging. After imaging, the washer was released from the headbar and the mouse was returned to the home cage. Prior to surgery and throughout the imaging period, mice were singly housed and maintained on a reverse 12-h light cycle (off at 11:00, on at 23:00).
Mice were head-mounted above a cylindrical treadmill and calcium imaging was performed using Chameleon Ti-Sapphire laser (Coherent) tuned to 920 nm and a large FOV mesoscope67 equipped with a custom objective (excitation NA 0.6, collection NA 1.0, 21 mm focal length). Laser power after the objective was increased exponentially as a function of depth from the surface according to:
Here P is the laser power used at target depth z, P0 is the power used at the surface (not exceeding 10 mW), and Lz is the depth constant (not less than 150 μm). Maximum laser output of 115 mW was used for scans approximately 450–500 μm from the surface and below.
Visual stimuli were presented to the left eye with a 31.8 × 56.5 cm (height × width) monitor (ASUS PB258Q) with a resolution of 1,080 × 1,920 pixels positioned 15 cm away from the eye. When the monitor is centred on and perpendicular to the surface of the eye at the closest point, this corresponds to a visual angle of ~3.8° cm−1 at the nearest point and 0.7° cm−1 at the most remote corner of the monitor. As the craniotomy coverslip placement during surgery and the resulting mouse positioning relative to the objective is optimized for imaging quality and stability, uncontrolled variance in animal skull position relative to the washer used for head-mounting was compensated with tailored monitor positioning on a six-dimensional monitor arm. The pitch of the monitor was kept in the vertical position for all animals, while the roll was visually matched to the roll of the animal's head beneath the headbar by the experimenter. In order to optimize the translational monitor position for centred visual cortex stimulation with respect to the imaging FOV, we used a dot stimulus with a bright background (maximum pixel intensity) and a single dark square dot (minimum pixel intensity). Dot locations were randomly ordered from a 5 × 8 grid to tile the screen, with 15 repetitions of 200 ms presentation at each location. The final monitor position for each animal was chosen in order to centre the population receptive field of the scan field ROI on the monitor, with the yaw of the monitor visually matched to be perpendicular to and 15 cm from the nearest surface of the eye at that position. An L-bracket on a six-dimensional arm was fitted to the corner of the monitor at this location and locked in position, so that the monitor could be returned to the chosen position between scans and across days.
The craniotomy window was leveled with regards to the objective with six degrees of freedom, five of which were locked between days to allow us to return to the same imaging site using the z axis. Pixel-wise responses from a 3,000 × 3,000 μm ROI spanning the cortical window (150 μm from surface, five 600 × 3,000 μm fields, 0.2 pixels per μm) to drifting bar stimuli were used to generate a sign map for delineating visual areas68. Our target imaging site was a 1,200 × 1,100 × 500 μm volume (anteroposterior × mediolateral × radial depth) spanning layer 2 to layer 6 at the conjunction of VISp and three higher visual areas: VISlm, VISrl and VISal69. This resulted in an imaging volume that was roughly 50% VISp and 50% higher visual area (HVA). This target was chosen to maximize the number of visual areas within the reconstructed cortical volume, as well as maximizing the overlap in represented visual space. The imaging site was further optimized to minimize vascular occlusion and to minimize motion artefact, especially where the brain curves away from the skull/coverslip towards the lateral aspect.
Once the imaging volume was chosen, a second retinotopic mapping scan with the same stimulus was collected at 12.6 Hz and matching the imaging volume FOV with four 600 × 1,100 μm fields per frame at 0.4 pixels per μm xy resolution to tile a 1,200 × 1,100 μm FOV at 2 depths (2 planes per depth, with no overlap between coplanar fields). Area boundaries on the sign map were manually annotated.
Of 19 completed scans over 6 days of imaging, 14 are described here (Extended Data Table 1). Scan placement targeted 10–15 μm increments in depth to maximize coverage of the volume in depth.
For 11 scans, imaging was performed at 6.3 Hz, collecting eight 620 × 1,100 μm fields per frame at 0.4 pixel per μm xy resolution to tile a 1,200 × 1,100 μm (width × height) FOV at four depths (two planes per depth, 40 μm overlap between coplanar fields).
For 2 scans, imaging was performed at 8.6 Hz, collecting six 620 × 1,100 μm fields per frame at 0.4 pixels per μm xy resolution to tile a 1,200 × 1,100 μm (width × height) FOV at 3 depths (2 planes per depth, 40 μm overlap between coplanar fields).
For 1 scan, imaging was performed at 9.6 Hz, collecting four 620 × 1,000 μm fields per frame at 0.6 pixels per μm xy resolution to tile a 1,200 × 1,000 μm (width × height) FOV at 2 depths (2 planes per depth, 40 μm overlap between coplanar fields).
The higher-resolution scans were designed to enable future analysis efforts to extract signals from large apical dendrites for example using EM-Assisted Source Extraction (EASE70). In addition to locking the craniotomy window mount between days, the target imaging site was manually matched each day to preceding scans within several micrometres using structural features including horizontal blood vessels (which have a distinctive z-profile) and patterns of somata (identifiable by GCaMP6s exclusion as dark spots).
The full 2P imaging processing pipeline is available at (https://github.com/cajal/pipeline). Raster correction for bidirectional scanning phase row misalignment was performed by iterative greedy search at increasing resolution for the raster phase resulting in the maximum cross-correlation between odd and even rows. Motion correction for global tissue movement was performed by shifting each frame in x and y to maximize the correlation between the cross-power spectra of a single scan frame and a template image, generated from the Gaussian-smoothed average of the Anscombe transform from the middle 2,000 frames of the scan. Neurons were automatically segmented using constrained non-negative matrix factorization, then deconvolved to extract estimates of spiking activity, within the CaImAn pipeline71. Cells were further selected by a classifier trained to separate somata versus artefacts based on segmented cell masks, resulting in exclusion of 8.1% of masks. The functional data is available in a DataJoint72 database and can also be read as NWB files deposited in the DANDI data archive73.
Approximately 55 min prior to collecting the stack, the mouse was injected subcutaneously with 60 μl of 8.3 mM Dextran Texas Red fluorescent dye (Invitrogen, D3329). The stack was composed of 30 repeats of three 620 × 1,300 μm (width × height) fields per depth in 2 channels (green and red, respectively), tiling a 1,400 × 1,300 μm FOV (460 μm total overlap in width) at 335 depths from 21 μm above the surface to 649 μm below the surface. The green channel average image across repetitions for each field was enhanced with local contrast normalization using a Gaussian filter to calculate the local pixel means and standard deviations. The resulting image was then Gaussian smoothed and sharpened using a Laplacian filter. Enhanced and sharpened fields were independently stitched at each depth. The resulting stitched planes were independently horizontally and vertically aligned by maximizing the correlation of the cross-power spectrum of their Fourier transformations. Finally, the resulting alignment was detrended in z using a Hann filter with a size of 60 μm to remove the influence of vessels passing through the fields. The resulting transform was applied to the original average images resulting in a structural 2P 1,412 × 1,322 × 670 μm (width × height × depth) volume at 0.5 × 0.5 × 0.5 pixels per μm resolution in both red and green channels.
Owing to tissue deformation from day to day across such a wide FOV, some cells are recorded in more than one scan. To assure we count cells only once, we subsample our recorded cells based on proximity in 3D space. Functional scan fields were independently registered using an affine transformation matrix with 9 parameters estimated via gradient ascent on the correlation between the sharpened average scanning plane and the extracted plane from the sharpened stack. Using the 3D centroids of all segmented cells, we iteratively group the closest 2 cells from different scans until all pairs of cells are at least 10 μm apart or a further join produces an unrealistically tall mask (20 μm in z). Sequential registration of sections of each functional scan into the structural stack was performed to assess the level of drift in the z dimension. All scans had less than 10-μm drift over the 1.5-h recording, and for most of them drift was limited to <5 μm.
Fields from the FOV-matched retinotopy scan described above were registered into the stack using the same approach, and the manually annotated area masks were transformed into the stack. These area masks were extended vertically across all depths, and functional units inherit their area membership from their stack xy coordinates.
Video images of the eye and face of the mouse were captured throughout the experiment. A hot mirror (Thorlabs FM02) positioned between the animal's left eye and the stimulus monitor was used to reflect an IR image onto a camera (Genie Nano C1920M, Teledyne Dalsa) without obscuring the visual stimulus. An infrared 940 nm LED (Thorlabs M940L2) illuminated the right side of the animal, backlighting the silhouette of the face. The position of the mirror and camera were manually calibrated per session and focused on the pupil. FOV was manually cropped for each session (ranging from 828 × 1,217 pixels to 1,080 × 1920 pixels at ~20 Hz), such that the FOV contained the superior, frontal, and inferior portions of the facial silhouette as well as the left eye in its entirety. Frame times were time stamped in the behavioural clock for alignment to the stimulus and scan frame times. Video was compressed using Labview's MJPEG codec with quality constant of 600 and stored the frames in AVI file.
Light diffusing from the laser during scanning through the pupil was used to capture pupil diameter and eye movements. Notably, scans using wide ranges in laser power to scan both superficial and deep planes resulted in a variable pupil intensity between frames. A custom semi-automated user interface in Python was built for dynamic adaptation of fitting parameters throughout the scan to maximize pupil tracking accuracy and coverage. The video was manually cropped to a rectangular region that includes the entirety of the eye at all time points. The video was further manually masked to exclude high intensity regions in the surrounding eyelids and fur. In cases where a whisker is present and occluding the pupil at some time points, a merge mask was drawn to bridge ROIs drawn on both sides of the whisker into a single ROI. For each frame, the original and filtered image was visible to the user. The filtered image was an exponentially weighted temporal running average, which undergoes exponentiation, Gaussian blur, automatic Otsu thresholding into a binary image, and finally pixel-wise erosion/dilation. In cases where only one ROI was present, the contour of the binary ROI was fit with an ellipse by minimizing least squares error, and for ellipses greater than the minimum contour length the xy centre and major and minor radii were stored. In cases where more than one ROI was present, the tracking was automatically halted until the user either resolved the ambiguity, or the frame was not tracked (a NaN (Not a Number) is stored). Processing parameters were under dynamic control of the user, with instructions to use the minimally sufficient parameters that result in reliably and continuous tracing of the pupil, as evidenced by plotting of the fitted ROI over the original image. Users could also return to previous points in the trace for re-tracking with modified processing parameters, as well as manually exclude periods of the trace in which insufficient reliable pupil boundary was visible for tracking.
The mouse was head-restrained during imaging but could walk on a treadmill. Rostro-caudal treadmill movement was measured using a rotary optical encoder (Accu-Coder 15T-01SF-2000NV1ROC-F03-S1) with a resolution of 8,000 pulses per revolution, and was recorded at ~57–100 Hz in order to extract locomotion velocity.
The stimulus was designed to cover a sufficiently large feature space to support training highly accurate models that predict neural responses to arbitrary visual stimuli11,38,74,75. Each scan stimulus was approximately 84 min in duration and comprised:
Oracle natural videos: 6 natural video clips, 2 from each category. 10 s each, 10 repeats per scan, 10 min total. Conserved across all scans.
Unique natural videos: 144 natural videos, 48 from each category. 10 s each, 1 repeat per scan, 24 min total. Unique to each scan.
2× repeat natural videos: 90 natural videos, 30 from each category. 10 s each, 2 repeats (one in each half of the scan), 30 min total. Conserved across all scans.
Local directional parametric stimulus (Trippy): 20 seeds, 15 s each, 2 repeats (one in each half of the scan), 10 min total. 10 seeds conserved across all scans, 10 unique to each scan.
Global directional parametric stimulus (Monet2): 20 seeds, 15 s each, 2 repeats (one in each half of the scan), 10 min total. 10 seeds conserved across all scans, 10 unique to each scan.
Each scan was also preceded by 0.15–5.5 min with the monitor on, and followed by 8.3–21.2 min with the monitor off, in order to collect spontaneous neural activity.
The visual stimulus was composed of dynamic stimuli, primarily including natural video but also including generated parametric stimuli with strong local or global directional component. Natural video clips were 10 s clips from one of three categories:
Cinematic, from the following sources: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens (2015), The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), The Matrix Revolutions (2003), Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance (1982), Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation (1988) and Naqoyqatsi: Life as War (2002).
Sports-1M collection37, with the following keywords: cycling, mountain unicycling, bicycle, BMX, cyclo-cross, cross-country cycling, road bicycle racing, downhill mountain biking, freeride, dirt jumping, slopestyle, skiing, skijoring, Alpine skiing, freestyle skiing, Greco-Roman wrestling, luge, canyoning, adventure racing, streetluge, riverboarding, snowboarding, mountainboarding, aggressive inline skating, carting, freestyle motocross, f1 powerboat racing, basketball and base jumping.
Rendered 3D video of first-person POV random exploration of a virtual environment with moving objects, produced in a customized version of Unreal Engine 4 with modifications that enable precise control and logging of frame timing and camera positions to ensure repeatability across multiple rendering runs. Environments and assets were purchased from Unreal Engine Marketplace. Assets chosen for diversity of appearance were translated along a piecewise linear trajectory, and rotated with a piecewise constant angular velocity. Intervals between change points were drawn from a uniform distribution from 1 to 5 s. If a moving object encountered an environmental object, it bounced off and continued along a linear trajectory reflected across the surface normal. The first-person POV camera followed the same trajectory process as the moving objects. Light sources were the default for the environment. Latent variable images were generated by re-generating the scenes and trajectories, rendering different properties, including absolute depth, object identification number and surface normals.
All natural videos were temporally resampled to 30 frames per second, and were converted to greyscale with 256 × 144 pixel resolution with FFmpeg (ibx264 at YUV4:2:0 8 bit). Stimuli were automatically filtered for upper 50th percentile Lucas–Kanade optical flow and temporal contrast of the central region of each clip. All natural videos included in these experiments were further manually screened for unsuitable characteristics (for example, fragments of rendered videos in which the first-person perspective would enter a corner and become ‘trapped' or follow an unnatural camera trajectory, or fragments of cinematic or Sports-1M containing screen text or other post-processing editing).
To probe neuronal tuning to orientation and direction of motion, a visual stimulus (Monet2) was designed in the form of smoothened Gaussian noise with coherent orientation and motion. In brief, an independently identically distributed (i.i.d.) Gaussian noise video was passed through a temporal low-pass Hamming filter (4 Hz) and a 2D Gaussian spatial filter (σ = 3.0° at the nearest point on the monitor to the mouse). Each 15-s block consisted of 16 equal periods of motion along one of 16 unique directions of motion between 0–360° with a velocity of 42.8° s−1 at the nearest point on the monitor. The video was spatial filtered to introduce a spatial orientation bias perpendicular to the direction of movement by applying a bandpass Hanning filter G(ω; c) in the polar coordinates in the frequency domain for \(\omega =\phi -\theta \) where \(\phi \) is the polar angle coordinate and \(\theta \) is the movement direction θ. Then:
and
Here, c = 2.5 is an orientation selectivity coefficient. At this value, the resulting orientation kernel's size is 72° full width at half maximum in spatial coordinates.
To probe the tuning of neurons to local spatial features including orientation, direction, spatial and temporal frequency, the Trippy stimulus was synthesized by applying the cosine function to a smoothened noise video. In brief, a phase movie was generated as an i.i.d. uniform noise video with 4 Hz temporal bandwidth. The video was up-sampled to 60 Hz with the Hanning temporal kernel. An increasing trend of 8π s−1 was added to the video to produce drifting grating movements whereas the noise component added local variations of the spatial features. The video was spatially up-sampled to the full screen with a 2D Gaussian kernel with a sigma of 5.97 cm or 22.5° at the nearest point. The resulting stimulus yielded the local phase video of the gratings, from which all visual features are derived analytically.
A photodiode (TAOS TSL253) was sealed to the top left corner of the monitor, where stimulus sequence information was encoded in a three-level signal according to the binary encoding of the flip number assigned in order. This signal was recorded at 10 MHz on the behaviour clock (MasterClock PCIe-OSC-HSO-2 card). The signal underwent a sine convolution, allowing for local peak detection to recover the binary signal. The encoded binary signal was reconstructed for 89% of trials. A linear fit was applied to the trial timestamps in the behavioural and stimulus clocks, and the offset of that fit was applied to the data to align the two clocks, allowing linear interpolation between them.
We used six natural video conditions that were present in all scans and repeated ten times per scan to calculate an oracle score representing the reliability of the trace response to repeated visual stimuli. This score was computed as the jackknife mean of correlations between the leave-one-out mean across repeated stimuli with the remaining trial.
After optical imaging at Baylor College of Medicine, candidate mice were shipped via overnight air freight to the Allen Institute. All procedures were carried out in accordance with the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. All mice were housed in individually ventilated cages, 20–26 °C, 30–70% relative humidity, with a 12-h light:dark cycle. Mice were transcardially perfused with a fixative mixture of 2.5% paraformaldehyde, 1.25% glutaraldehyde, and 2 mM calcium chloride, in 0.08 M sodium cacodylate buffer, pH 7.4. After dissection, the neurophysiological recording site was identified by mapping the brain surface vasculature. A thick (1,200-μm) slice was cut with a vibratome and post-fixed in perfusate solution for 12–48 h. Slices were extensively washed and prepared for reduced osmium treatment based on the protocol of Hua et al.76. All steps were performed at room temperature, unless indicated otherwise. Osmium tetroxide (2%, 78 mM) with 8% v/v formamide (1.77 M) in 0.1 M sodium cacodylate buffer, pH 7.4, for 180 min, was the first osmication step. Potassium ferricyanide 2.5% (76 mM) in 0.1 M sodium cacodylate, 90 min, was then used to reduce the osmium. The second osmium step was at a concentration of 2% in 0.1 M sodium cacodylate, for 150 min. Samples were washed with water, then immersed in thiocarbohydrazide (TCH) for further intensification of the staining (1% TCH (94 mM) in water, 40 °C, for 50 min). After washing with water, samples were immersed in a third osmium immersion of 2% in water for 90 min. After extensive washing in water, lead aspartate (Walton's (20 mM lead nitrate in 30 mM aspartate buffer, pH 5.5), 50 °C, 120 min) was used to enhance contrast. After two rounds of water wash steps, samples proceeded through a graded ethanol dehydration series (50%, 70%, 90% w/v in water, 30 min each at 4 °C, then 3× 100%, 30 min each at room temperature). Two rounds of 100% acetonitrile (30 min each) served as a transitional solvent step before proceeding to epoxy resin (EMS Hard Plus). A progressive resin infiltration series (1:2 resin:acetonitrile (33% v/v), 1:1 resin:acetonitrile (50% v/v), 2:1 resin acetonitrile (66% v/v), then 2× 100% resin, each step for 24 h or more, on a gyrotary shaker) was done before final embedding in 100% resin in small coffin molds. Epoxy was cured at 60 °C for 96 h before unmolding and mounting on microtome sample stubs for trimming.
The surface of the brain in the neurophysiology ROI was highly irregular, with depressions and elevations that made it impossible to trim all the resin from the surface of the cortex without removing layer 1 (L1) and some portions of layer 2 (L2). Though empty resin increases the number of folds in resulting sections, we left some resin so as to keep the upper layers (L1 and L2) intact to preserve inter-areal connectivity and the apical tufts of pyramidal neurons. Similarly, white matter was also maintained in the block to preserve inter-areal connections despite the risk of increased sectioning artefacts that then have to be corrected through proofreading.
The sections were then collected at a nominal thickness of 40 nm using a modified ATUMtome63 (RMC/Boeckeler) onto 6 reels of grid tape45. The knife was cleaned every 100–500 sections, occasionally leading to the loss of a very thin partial section (≪40 nm). Thermal expansion of the block as sectioning resumed post-cleaning resulted in a short series of sections substantially thicker than the nominal cutting thickness. The sectioning took place in two sessions, the first session took 8 consecutive days on a 24 h a day schedule and contained sections 1 to 14773. The loss rate on this initial session was low, but before section 7931 there were two events that led to consecutive section loss (due to these consecutive section losses we decided to not reconstruct the region containing sections 1 to 7931 even though the imagery was collected). The first event that led to consecutive section loss was due to sections being collected onto apertures with damaged films. To prevent this from happening again, we installed a camera that monitors the aperture before collection. The second event was due to an accident where the knife bumped the block and nicked a region near the edge of the ROI. At the end of this session we started seeing differential compression between the resin and the surface of the cortex. Because this could lead to severe section artefacts, we paused to trim additional empty resin from the block and also replaced the knife. The second session lasted five consecutive days and an additional 13,199 sections were cut. Due to the interruption, block shape changes and knife replacement, there are approximately 45 partial sections at the start of this session; importantly, these do not represent tissue loss (see stitching and alignment section). As will be described later, the EM dataset is subdivided into two subvolumes due to sectioning and imaging events that resulted in loss of a series of sections.
The parallel imaging pipeline described here63 converts a fleet of TEMs into high-throughput automated image systems capable of 24/7 continuous operation. It is built upon a standard JEOL 1200EXII 120 kV TEM that has been modified with customized hardware and software. The key hardware modifications include an extended column and a custom electron-sensitive scintillator. A single large-format CMOS camera outfitted with a low distortion lens is used to grab image frames at an average speed of 100 ms. The autoTEM is also equipped with a nano-positioning sample stage that offers fast, high-fidelity montaging of large tissue sections and an advanced reel-to-reel tape translation system that accurately locates each section using index barcodes for random access on the GridTape. In order for the autoTEM system to control the state of the microscope without human intervention and ensure consistent data quality, we also developed customized software infrastructure piTEAM that provides a convenient GUI-based operating system for image acquisition, TEM image database, real-time image processing and quality control, and closed-loop feedback for error-detection and system protection etc. During imaging, the reel-to-reel GridStage moves the tape and locates targeting aperture through its barcode. The 2D montage is then acquired through raster scanning the ROI area of tissue. Images along with metadata files are transferred to the data storage server. We perform image quality control on all the data and reimage sections that fail the screening. Pixel sizes for all systems were calibrated within the range between 3.95 and 4.05 nm per pixel and the montages had a typical size of 1.2 mm × 0.82 mm. The EM dataset contains raw tile images with two different sizes because two cameras with two different resolutions were used during acquisition. The most commonly used was a 20-megapixel camera that required 5,000 individual tiles to capture the 1 mm2 montage of each section. During the dataset acquisition, three autoTEMs were upgraded with 50-megapixel camera sensors, which increased the frame size and reduced the total number of tiles required per montage to ~2,600
The images in the serial section are first corrected for lens distortion effects. A nonlinear transformation of higher order is computed for each section using a set of 10 × 10 highly overlapping images collected at regular intervals during imaging64. The lens distortion correction transformations should represent the dynamic distortion effects from the TEM lens system and hence require an acquisition of highly overlapping calibration montages at regular intervals. Overlapping image pairs are identified within each section and point correspondences are extracted for every pair using a feature based approach. In our stitching and alignment pipeline, we use SIFT (scale invariant feature transform) feature descriptors to identify and extract these point correspondences. Per image transformation parameters are estimated by a regularized solver algorithm. The algorithm minimizes the sum of squared distances between the point correspondences between these tile images. Deforming the tiles within a section based on these transformations results in a seamless registration of the section. A down-sampled version of these stitched sections are produced for estimating a per section transformation that roughly aligns these sections in 3D. A process similar to 2D stitching is followed here, where the point correspondences are computed between pairs of sections that are within a desired distance in z direction. The per section transformation is then applied to all the tile images within the section to obtain a rough aligned volume. MIPmaps are utilized throughout the stitching process for faster processing without compromise in stitching quality.
The rough aligned volume is rendered to disk for further fine alignment. The software tools used to stitch and align the dataset are available in our github repository (https://github.com/AllenInstitute/asap-modules). The volume assembly process is entirely based on image metadata and transformations manipulations and is supported by the Render service (https://github.com/saalfeldlab/render).
Cracks larger than 30 μm in 34 sections were corrected by manually defining transforms. The smaller and more numerous cracks and folds in the dataset were automatically identified using convolutional networks trained on manually labelled samples using 64 × 64 × 40 nm3 resolution image. The same was done to identify voxels which were considered tissue. The rough alignment was iteratively refined in a coarse-to-fine hierarchy77, using an approach based on a convolutional network to estimate displacements between a pair of images78. Displacement fields were estimated between pairs of neighbouring sections, then combined to produce a final displacement field for each image to further transform the image stack. Alignment was first refined using 1,024 × 1,024 × 40 nm3 images, then 64 × 64 × 40 nm3 images.
The composite image of the partial sections was created using the tissue mask previously computed. Pixels in a partial section which were not included in the tissue mask were set to the value of the nearest pixel in a higher-indexed section that was considered tissue. This composite image was used for downstream processing, but not included with the released images.
Remaining misalignments were detected by cross-correlating patches of image in the same location between two sections, after transforming into the frequency domain and applying a high-pass filter. Combining with the tissue map previously computed, a mask was generated that sets the output of later processing steps to zero in locations with poor alignment. This is called the segmentation output mask.
Using the outlined method79, a convolutional network was trained to estimate inter-voxel affinities that represent the potential for neuronal boundaries between adjacent image voxels. A convolutional network was also trained to perform a semantic segmentation of the image for neurite classifications, including: (1) soma plus nucleus; (2) axon; (3) dendrite; (4) glia; and (5) blood vessel. Following the described methods80, both networks were applied to the entire dataset at 8 × 8 × 40 nm3 in overlapping chunks to produce a consistent prediction of the affinity and neurite classification maps. The segmentation output mask was applied to the predictions.
The affinity map was processed with a distributed watershed and clustering algorithm to produce an over-segmented image, where the watershed domains are agglomerated using single-linkage clustering with size thresholds81,82. The over-segmentation was then processed by a distributed mean affinity clustering algorithm81,82 to create the final segmentation. We augmented the standard mean affinity criterion with constraints based on segment sizes and neurite classification maps during the agglomeration process to prevent neuron-glia mergers as well as axon–dendrite and axon–soma mergers.
A convolutional network was trained to predict whether a given voxel participated in a synaptic cleft. Inference on the entire dataset was processed using the methods described previously80 (using 8 × 8 × 40 nm3 images). These synaptic cleft predictions were segmented using connected components, and components smaller than 40 voxels were removed.
A separate network was trained to perform synaptic partner assignment by predicting the voxels of the synaptic partners given the synaptic cleft as an attentional signal83. This assignment network was run for each detected cleft, and coordinates of both the presynaptic and postsynaptic partner predictions were logged along with each cleft prediction.
To evaluate precision and recall, we manually identified synapses within 70 small subvolumes (n = 8,611 synapses) spread throughout the dataset84.
A convolutional network was trained to predict whether a voxel participated in a cell nucleus. Following the methods described previously80, a nucleus prediction map was produced on the entire dataset at 64 × 64 × 40 nm3. The nucleus prediction was thresholded at 0.5, and segmented using connected components.
Extensive manual, semi-automated, and fully automated proofreading of the segmentation data was performed by multiple teams to improve the accuracy of the neural circuit reconstruction.
Critical to enabling these coordinated proofreading activities is the central ChunkedGraph system1,85,86, which maintains a dynamic segmentation dataset, and supports real-time collaborative proofreading on petascale datasets though scalable software interfaces to receive edit requests from various proofreading platforms and support querying and analysis on edit history.
Multiple proofreading platforms and interfaces were developed and leveraged to support the large-scale proofreading activities performed by various teams at Princeton University, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Baylor College of Medicine, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and ariadne.ai (individual proofreaders are listed in Acknowledgements). Below we outline the methods for these major proofreading activities focused on improving the completeness of neurons within and proximal to the main cortical column, splitting of merged multi-soma objects distributed throughout the image volume, and distributed application of automated proofreading edits to split erroneously merged neuron segments.
Following the methods described previously26,85,87 proofreaders from Princeton University, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Baylor College of Medicine, and ariadne.ai used a modified version of Neuroglancer with annotation capabilities as a user interface to make manual split and merge edits to neurons with somata spatially located throughout the dataset. The choice of which neurons to proofread was based on the scientific needs of different projects, which are described in the accompanying studies4,5,7,10.
Proofreading was aided by on-demand highlighting of branch points and tips on user-defined regions of a neuron based on rapid skeletonization (https://github.com/AllenInstitute/Guidebook). This approach quickly directed proofreader attention to potential false merges and locations for extension, as well as allowed a clear record of regions of an arbor that had been evaluated.
For dendrites, we checked all branch points for correctness and all tips to see if they could be extended. False merges of simple axon fragments onto dendrites were often not corrected in the raw data, since they could be computationally filtered for analysis after skeletonization (see next section). Detached spine heads were not comprehensively proofread. Dendrites that were proofread are identified in CAVE table proofreading_status_and_strategy as status_dendrite = “true”.
For axons, we began by ‘cleaning' axons of false merges by looking at all branch points. We then performed an extension of axonal tips, the degree of this extension depended on the scientific goals of the different project. The different proofreading strategies were as follows:
Comprehensive extension: each axon end and branch point was visited and checked to see if it was possible to extend until either their biological completion or reached an incomplete end (incomplete ends were due to either the axon reaching the borders of the volume or an artefact that curtailed its continuation). Label: axon_fully_extended.
Substantial extension: each axon branch point was visited and checked, many but not all ends were visited and many but not all ends were done. Label: axon_partially_extended.
Inter_areal_extension: a subset of axons that projected either from a HVA to V1, or from V1 to a HVA were preferentially extended to look specifically at inter-areal connections. Label: axon_interareal
Local cylinder cutting: a subset of pyramidal cells were proofread in a local cylinder which had a 300-μm radius centred around the column featured in Schneider-Mizell et al.4. For layer 2/3 cells the cylinder had a a floor at the layer 4/5 border, for layer 4 cells it had a floor at the layer 5/6 border. Any axon leaving the cylinder was cut and
At least 100 synapses: axons were extended until at least 100 synapses were present on the axon to get a sampling of their output connectivity profile. Label: also axon_partially_extended.
Axons that were proofread are identified in CAVE table proofreading_status_and_strategy as status_axon=‘true' and the proofreading strategy label associated with each axon is described in the column ‘strategy_axon'.
Proofreading was also performed to correctively split multi-soma objects containing more than one neuronal soma, which had been incorrectly merged from the agglomeration step in the reconstruction process. This proofreading was performed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Princeton University, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and Baylor College of Medicine. These erroneously merged multi-soma objects were specifically targeted given their number, distribution throughout the volume, and subsequent impact on global neural connectivity88 (Extended Data Fig. 3). As an example, multi-soma objects comprised up to 20% of the synaptic targets for 78 excitatory cells that with proofreading status ‘comprehensive extension'. Although the majority of multi-soma objects contained 2 to 25 nuclei (Extended Data Fig. 3a), one large multi-soma object contained 172 neuronal nuclei due to proximity to a major blood vessel present in a substantial portion of the image volume.
Different Neuroglancer web-based applications1,85,86,88 were used to perform this proofreading, but most edits were performed using NeuVue88. NeuVue enables scalable task management across dozens of concurrent users, as well as provide efficient queuing, review, and execution of proofreading edits by integrating with primary data management APIs such as CAVE and PCG. Multi-soma objects used to generate proofreading tasks were originally identified using the nucleus detection table available through CAVE. Additionally, algorithms were employed in a semi-automated workflow to detect the presence of incorrect merges and proposed potential corrective split locations in the segmentation for proofreaders to review and apply2.
Following methods described elsewhere2 automated error-detection and error-correction methods were utilized using the Neural De-composition (NEURD) framework to apply edits to split incorrectly merged axonal and dendritic segments distributed across the image volume. These automated methods leveraged graph filter and graph analysis algorithms to accurately identify errors in the reconstruction and generate corrective solutions. Validation and refinement of these methods were performed through manual review of proposed automated edits through the NeuVue platform88.
We initially manually matched 2,934 fiducials between the EM volume and the 2P structural dataset (1,994 somata and 942 blood vessels, mostly branch points, which are available as part of the resource). Though the fiducials cover the total volume of the dataset it is worth noting that below 400 µm from the surface there is much lower signal to noise in the 2P structural dataset requiring more effort to identify somata, therefore we made use of more vascular fiducials. The fiducial annotation was done using a down-sampled EM dataset with pixel sizes 256 nm (x), 256 nm (y) and 940 nm (z).
Using the fiducials, a transform between the EM dataset and the 2P structural stack was calculated (Methods). To evaluate the error of the transform we evaluated the distance in micrometres between the location of a fiducial after co-registration and its original location; a perfect co-registration would have residuals of 0 μm. The average residual was 3.8 μm.
For calculating the transform we introduced a staged approach to separate the gross transformation between the EM volume and the 2P space from the finer nonlinear deformations needed to get good residuals. This was done by taking advantage of the infrastructure created for the alignment of the EM dataset described above.
The full 3D transform is a list of eight transforms that fall into four groups with different purposes:
The first group is a single transform that is a second-order polynomial transform between the two datasets. This first group serves to scale and rotate the optical dataset into EM space, followed by a single global nonlinear term, leaving an average residual of ~10 µm.
The second group of transforms addresses an issue we saw in the residuals: there were systematic trends in the residuals, both positive and negative, that aligned well with the EM z axis. These trends are spaced in a way that is indicative of changing shape of the EM data on approximately the length scale between knife cleanings or tape changes. We addressed this with a transform that binned the data into z ranges and applied a further second-order polynomial to each bin. We did this in a 2-step hierarchical fashion, first with 5 z bins, followed by a second with 21 z bins. These steps removed the systematic trends in the residuals versus z and the average residuals dropped to 5.6 µm and 4.6 µm respectively.
The third group is a set of hierarchical thin plate spline transforms. We used successively finer grids of control points of even n × n × n spacing in the volume. We used 4 steps with n = [3, 5, 10, 12]. The idea here is to account for deformations on larger length scales first, so that the highest order transforms introduce smaller changes in position. The average residuals in these steps were 3.9, 3.5, 3.1 and 2.9 µm accomplished with average control point motions of 12.5, 7.5, 3.8 and 1.6 µm.
The final group is a single thin plate spline transform. The control points for this transform are no longer an evenly spaced grid. Instead, each fiducial point is assigned to be a control point. This transform minimizes the residuals almost perfectly (as it should for the control points which are identical to the fiducials; 0.003 µm on average; Fig. 3) and accomplishes this final step by moving each data point on average another 2.9 µm. This last transform is very sensitive to error in fiducial location but provides the co-registration with minimal residuals. This last transform is also more likely to create errors in regions with strong distortions, as for example the edges of the dataset.
Since the nature of transform 4 is to effectively set the residuals to zero for the control points, we used a new measure to evaluate the error of the transform. We created 2,933 3D transforms, each time leaving out one fiducial and then evaluated the residual of the left-out point. We call this measure ‘leave-one-out' residuals and it evaluates how well the transform does with a new point.
A custom user interface was used to visualize images from both the functional data and EM data side-by-side to manually associate functional ROIs to their matching EM cell counterpart and vice versa. To visualize the functional scans, summary images were generated by averaging the scan over time (average image) and correlating pixels with neighbour pixels over time (correlation image). The product of the average and correlation images were used to clearly visualize cell body locations. Using the per field affine registration into the 2P structural stack (Fig. 3b), a representative image of labelled vasculature corresponding to the registered field was extracted from the red channel of the stack. EM imagery and EM nucleus segmentation was resized to 1 μm3 resolution, and transformed into the 2P structural stack coordinates using the co-registration transform, allowing an EM image corresponding to the registered field to be extracted. The overlay of the extracted vessel field and extracted EM image were used to confirm local alignment of the vasculature visible in both domains. Soma identity was assessed by comparing the spatial structure of the target soma and nearby somas in the functional image to soma locations from the EM cell nuclei image. Using the tool, matchers generated a hypothesis for which EM cell nucleus matched to a given functional unit or vice versa. A custom version of Neuroglancer (Seung laboratory; https://github.com/seung-lab/neuroglancer) was used to visualize the region of interest in the ground truth EM data for match confirmation. The breakdown in the number of unique neuron matches per 2P scan is shown in Extended Data Fig. 4a. The resulting matches are uploaded to CAVE table coregistration_manual_v4. The latest recommended manual match table can be found at https://www.microns-explorer.org/cortical-mm3#f-coreg.
In addition to the matches, the manual co-registration table includes two metrics that help assess confidence. The first, residual, measures the distance between the matched 2P functional unit centroid and EM neuron soma centroid, after transformation with the EM to 2P fiducial-based transform (Extended Data Fig. 4b, top). The second metric, separation score, measures the difference in residuals between the match and the nearest non-matched EM neuron. (Extended Data Fig. 4b, bottom) Negative separation indicates that the nearest EM neuron to the functional unit after transformation was not chosen by the matchers. Smaller residuals and larger separation scores indicate higher confidence matches, as is the case for a majority of matches (Extended Data Fig. 4c). To help validate the manual matches, for every EM neuron that was independently matched to at least two scans, the in vivo signal correlation (correlation between trial-averaged responses to oracle stimuli) was computed between the matched unit in scan A to the matched unit in scan B. In addition, for each neuron, two control correlations were computed, the matched unit in scan A to the nearest unit not matched to the neuron in scan B, and vice versa (Extended Data Fig. 4d). As expected, the distribution of oracle scores between the matched neurons and control neurons are qualitatively similar, with a slight right-shift towards higher oracle scores for matches, as higher oracle scores were prioritized for matching (Extended Data Fig. 4e). The comparison of signal correlation between matched neurons and their control counterparts exhibits a strong trend, with a clustering in the upper left quadrant and most data points positioned above the diagonal. This indicates that the matched neurons consistently have stronger signal correlations compared to their nearest counterparts, and high signal correlation overall, especially when the oracle score is larger (Extended Data Fig. 4f). Filtering by oracle score further refines the trend, highlighting that high oracle score neurons (score >0.2) show even more distinct separation, with matched neurons maintaining superior signal correlation values compared to the nearest-neighbour matches (Extended Data Fig. 4g,h).
To generate the fiducial-based automatch, we utilized the EM-to-2P co-registration transform to map all EM neuron nucleus centroids (retrieved from the CAVE table nucleus_neuron_svm) into the 2P functional space. Next, we applied the minimum weight matching algorithm for bipartite graphs89 using the linear_sum_assignment function from the scipy.optimize module90 to perform the matching. The resulting automatch table is stored in the CAVE table coregistration_auto_phase3_fwd, which also includes the associated residual and separation scores. The latest recommended fiducial-based automatch table can be found at https://www.microns-explorer.org/cortical-mm3#f-coreg.
To achieve co-registration starting with the 2P structural stacks and EM segmentation and without the use of fiducials, we employed a multi-scale B-spline registration91 using only vasculature data. This non-rigid transformation method corrects the extreme nonlinear tissue distortions caused by shrinkage from 2P to EM. Both the EM segmentation and the 2P structural stack volumes were subsampled to match 1-μm voxel resolution, ensuring consistent scaling and indexing between the volumes.
Pre-processing on the vessels was necessary to address inconsistent signal quality in the 2P data, especially for vessels located deeper in the cortex, which emit lower fluorescence. A Meijering neurite filter92 was applied to the vessels, using the eigenvectors of the Hessian matrix to detect vessels effectively.
An additional filtering step mitigated discrepancies in z resolution and errors from false splits in the EM segmentation. To address the z direction smearing in 2P due to anisotropy, both the 2P and EM volumes were binarized, skeletonized and further processed by removing small isolated segments. A Gaussian filter was convolved over the skeletons, forming tubes of constant radius for co-registration. Another round of skeletonization and Gaussian filtering was applied to correct for false splits in thicker vessels.
The final co-registration was computed using SimpleITK's B-spline algorithm93, treating the EM volume as the ‘moving' volume. Initially, centroid alignment was achieved via template matching within a small subvolume. Despite tissue shrinkage, the volumes were locally aligned well enough to yield good correlations. The B-spline transformation was performed across multiple scales, progressing from coarse grids with strong smoothing to finer grids with minimal smoothing. The Limited-Memory Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (L-BFGS) optimizer with 600 iterations was used, sampling 1% of the points to handle large matrices. The resulting flow field and its inverse defined how each voxel mapped between spaces.
For the final step, the flow field was applied to both the EM nuclear segmentation and the 2P unit centroids. Minimum weight matching was performed (as described in ‘Generating the fiducial-based automatch') to establish match assignments, using excitatory neuron centroids from the CAVE table aibs_metamodel_mtypes_v661_v2. The final table is uploaded to apl_functional_coreg_vess_fwd with the associated residual and separation scores. The latest recommended vessel-based automatch table can be found at https://www.microns-explorer.org/cortical-mm3#f-coreg.
To generate the fiducial-vessel agreement automatch table, first, for each table described above (coregistration_auto_phase3_fwd, apl_functional_coreg_vess_fwd), the residual and separation scores were transformed into percentiles. Then, the two tables were merged on keys: ‘session', ‘scan_idx', ‘field', ‘unit_id' and ‘target_id'.
To evaluate the automatch tables, we computed precision and recall using manual matches as ground truth. To ensure a fair comparison, we first restricted both the automatch and manual match tables to only contain rows where the functional unit or EM neuron was commonly attempted. For calculating precision and recall, true positives were rows common to both tables, false positives were rows only in the automatch table, and false negatives were rows only in the manual match table. The precision-recall curves can be used to select an automatch, and/ or a metric with which to threshold matches (Extended Data Fig. 5a). In addition, heat maps are provided indicating precision levels (Extended Data Fig. 5b) and number of automatches remaining (Extended Data Fig. 5c) for jointly applied residual and separation percentile thresholds. To apply a threshold, first convert the residual and separation (named ‘score' in the table) to percentiles. Then for residual, apply the threshold as a maximum, taking the matches below the threshold. Conversely, for separation, apply the threshold as a minimum.
We analysed the nucleus segmentations for features such as volume, surface area, fraction of membrane within folds and depth in cortex. We trained a support vector machine (SVM) machine classifier to use these features to detect which nucleus detections were likely neurons within the volume, with 96.9% precision and 99.6% recall. This model was trained based upon data from an independent dataset, and the performance numbers are based upon evaluating the concordance of the model with the manual cell-type calls within the volume. This model predicted 82,247 neurons detected within the larger subvolume. For the neurons, we extracted additional features from the somatic region of the cell, including its volume, surface area, and density of synapses. Dimensionality reduction on this feature space revealed a clear separation between neurons with well-segmented somatic regions (n = 69,957) from those with fragmented segmentations or sizable merges with other objects (n = 12,290). Combining those features with the nucleus features, we trained a multi-layer perceptron classifier to distinguish excitatory from inhibitory neurons among the well-segmented subset, using the 80% of the manual labelled data as a training set, and 20% as a validation set to choose hyper-parameters. After running the classifier across the entire dataset, we then tested the performance by sampling an additional 350 cells (250 excitatory and 100 inhibitory). We estimate from this test that the classifier had an overall accuracy of 97% with an estimated 96% precision and 94% recall for inhibitory calls.
Further information on research design is available in the Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article.
EM imagery, segmentation and annotation data is available via https://www.micronsexplorer.org/cortical-mm3 and from https://bossdb.org/project/microns-minnie.
Code for analysis and generation of figures was generated in Python Jupiter notebooks and is available at https://github.com/AllenInstitute/MicronsFunctionalConnectomics, making extensive use of CAVE analysis infrastructure1 (available at https://github.com/CAVEconnectome) and CloudVolume94 to interact with data infrastructure, and libraries Matplotlib95, Numpy96 and Pandas for general computation and data visualization.
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The authors thank D. Markowitz, the IARPA MICrONS Program Manager, who coordinated this work during all three phases of the MICrONS programme; IARPA programme managers J. Vogelstein and D. Markowitz for co-developing the MICrONS programme; J. Wang, IARPA SETA for her assistance; J. Philips, S. Coulter and the Program Management team at the AIBS for their guidance for project strategy and operations; H. Zeng, E. Lein, C. Koch and A. Jones for their support and leadership; the Manufacturing and Processing Engineering team at the AIBS for their help in implementing the EM imaging and sectioning pipeline; B. Youngstrom, S. Kendrick and the Allen Institute IT team for support with infrastructure, data management and data transfer; the facilities, finance and legal teams at the AIBS for their support on the MICrONS contract; S. Saalfeld, K. Khairy and E. Trautman for help with the parameters for 2D stitching and rough alignment of the dataset; Z. Hanson and J. Singh for their contribution to manual matching of functional ROIs to EM nuclei; D. Kim for his contribution to pupil tracking; R. Raju for his contribution to parametric stimuli development; A. Mok and D. Ouzounov for their contribution to three-photon imaging development; G. McGrath for computer system administration; M. Husseini, L. Jackel and J. Jackel for project administration at Princeton University; S. Hider, T. Gion, D. Pryor, D. Kleissas, L. Rodriguez, M. Wilt and the team from the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), as well as Marysol Encarnación and Martha Cervantes from the CIRCUIT Program at APL for supporting data assessments on the neural circuit reconstruction and data infrastructure through the Brain Observatory Storage Service and Database (BossDB; https://bossdb.org/; NIH/NIMH R24 MH114785); F. Chance, B. Aimone and everyone at Sandia National Laboratories for their support and assistance; the ‘Connectomics at Google' team for developing Neuroglancer and computational resource donations, in particular J. Maitin-Shepard for authoring Neuroglancer and help creating the reformatted sharded multi-resolution meshes and imagery files used to display the data; Amazon, the AWS Open Data Program, and the AWS Open Science platform for providing data and computational resources; and Intel for their assistance. The authors also thank the following individuals for their work proofreading neurons in the MICrONS dataset: N. Smith (24,101 edits), D. Panchal (19,384 edits), M. Cook (17,088 edits), C. Ordish (14,333 edits), Niyati (13,897), Z. Sorangwala (13,777 edits), Nirali (13,317 edits), Sholka (11,569 edits), K. Shah (10,570 edits), D. Patel (10,368 edits), Dhara (9,871 edits), Anuja (9,337 edits), Zeba (8,742 edits), A. Rajput (8,674 edits), C. Smith (8,281 edits), Hemal (8,084 edits), Harshil (8,022 edits), C. Knecht (7,199), S. Pal (7,036 edits), D. Rami (6,850 edits), Sweksha (6,766 edits), Priyanka (6,485 edits), Yashvi (6,306 edits), Frank (5,711 edits), K. Raval (5,638 edits), D. Dalal (5,597 edits), E. Phillips (5,454 edits), Hetvi (5,358 edits), Yuvaraju (4,787 edits), G. Hopkins (4,505 edits), Neha (2,968 edits), A. Pandey (2,426 edits), Vaishakhi (2,227 edits), Twinkal (1,270 edits), D. Parodi (1,007 edits), Kinjal (980 edits), R. Xu (947 edits), Kashish (911 edits), C. Moore (828 edits), V. Lung (804 edits), S. Wu (746 edits), T. Gaito (643 edits), J. Gayk (570 edits), L. Fozo (506 edits), Diksha (438 edits), M. Baptiste (416 edits), E. Macgregor (383 edits), E. Miranda (354 edits), S. Bare (220 edits). The work was supported by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) via Department of Interior/Interior Business Center (DoI/IBC) contract numbers D16PC00003, D16PC00004, D16PC0005 and 2017-17032700004. The US Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation thereon. H.S.S. also acknowledges support from NIH/NINDS U19 NS104648, NIH/NEI R01 EY027036, NIH/NIMH U01 MH114824, NIH/NIMH U01 MH117072 NIH/NINDS R01 NS104926, NIH/NIMH RF1 MH117815, NIH/NIMH RF1 MH123400 and the Mathers Foundation, as well as assistance from Google, Amazon and Intel. X.P. acknowledges support from NSF CAREER grant IOS-1552868. X.P. and A.T. acknowledge support from NSF NeuroNex grant 1707400. A.T. acknowledges support from National Institute of Mental Health and National Institute of Neurological Disorders And Stroke under award number U19MH114830. R.C.R. acknowledges support from NSF NeuroNex 2 award 2014862, NIH U24NS120053 and NIH 1RF1MH128840-01. We thank the Allen Institute for Brain Science founder, Paul G. Allen, for his vision, encouragement and support. Disclaimer: the views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of IARPA, DoI/IBC, or the US Government.
Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
J. Alexander Bae, Manuel A. Castro, Sven Dorkenwald, Jay Gager, Akhilesh Halageri, James Hebditch, Zhen Jia, Chris Jordan, Nico Kemnitz, Selden Koolman, Kai Kuehner, Kisuk Lee, Ran Lu, Thomas Macrina, Eric Mitchell, Shanka Subhra Mondal, Merlin Moore, Shang Mu, Barak Nehoran, Oluwaseun Ogedengbe, Sergiy Popovych, H. Sebastian Seung, Ben Silverman, William Silversmith, Amy Sterling, Nicholas L. Turner, Adrian Wanner, Sarah Williams, Kyle Willie, Ryan Willie, William Wong, Jingpeng Wu, Runzhe Yang & Szi-chieh Yu
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
J. Alexander Bae & Shanka Subhra Mondal
Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA
Mahaly Baptiste, Maya R. Baptiste, Victoria Brooks, Brendan Celii, Erick Cobos, Paul G. Fahey, Emmanouil Froudarakis, Sarah McReynolds, Elanine Miranda, Taliah Muhammad, Christos Papadopoulos, Stelios Papadopoulos, Saumil Patel, Guadalupe Jovita Yasmin Perez Vega, Xaq Pitkow, Anthony Ramos, Jacob Reimer, Zachary M. Sauter, Fabian H. Sinz, Cameron L. Smith, Zheng H. Tan, Andreas S. Tolias, Edgar Y. Walker, Dimitri Yatsenko & Fei Ye
Center for Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA
Mahaly Baptiste, Maya R. Baptiste, Victoria Brooks, Brendan Celii, Erick Cobos, Paul G. Fahey, Emmanouil Froudarakis, Sarah McReynolds, Elanine Miranda, Taliah Muhammad, Christos Papadopoulos, Stelios Papadopoulos, Saumil Patel, Guadalupe Jovita Yasmin Perez Vega, Xaq Pitkow, Anthony Ramos, Jacob Reimer, Zachary M. Sauter, Fabian H. Sinz, Cameron L. Smith, Zheng H. Tan, Andreas S. Tolias, Edgar Y. Walker, Dimitri Yatsenko & Fei Ye
Research and Exploratory Development Department, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD, USA
Caitlyn A. Bishop, William Gray-Roncal, Justin Ellis-Joyce, Lindsey M. Kitchell, Jordan Matelsky, Patricia K. Rivlin, Victoria Rose, Brock A. Wester & Daniel Xenes
Allen Institute for Brain Science, Seattle, WA, USA
Agnes L. Bodor, Derrick Brittain, JoAnn Buchanan, Daniel J. Bumbarger, Forrest Collman, Nuno Maçarico da Costa, Bethanny Danskin, Leila Elabbady, Tim Fliss, Clare Gamlin, Emily Joyce, Daniel Kapner, Sam Kinn, Gayathri Mahalingam, Erika Neace, R. Clay Reid, Casey M. Schneider-Mizell, Rachael Swanstrom, Shelby Suckow, Marc Takeno, Russel Torres, Grace Williams, Wenjing Yin, Rob Young & Chi Zhang
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA
Brendan Celii, Xaq Pitkow & Andreas S. Tolias
Computer Science Department, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
Sven Dorkenwald, Zhen Jia, Kai Li, Thomas Macrina, Barak Nehoran, Sergiy Popovych, H. Sebastian Seung, Nicholas L. Turner & Runzhe Yang
Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas, Heraklion, Greece
Emmanouil Froudarakis
Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Kisuk Lee
Neuroscience Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Xaq Pitkow
Department of Machine Learning, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Xaq Pitkow
Department of Computer Science, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA
Xaq Pitkow
NSF AI Institute of Artificial and Natural Intelligence, New York, NY, USA
Xaq Pitkow & Andreas S. Tolias
Institute for Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics, University Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
Fabian H. Sinz & Edgar Y. Walker
Institute for Computer Science, University Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
Fabian H. Sinz
Department of Ophthalmology, Byers Eye Institute, Stanford Bio-X, Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute, Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Andreas S. Tolias
International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems, University Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
Edgar Y. Walker
School of Applied and Engineering Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Tianyu Wang & Chris Xu
Paul Scherrer Institute, Villigen, Switzerland
Adrian Wanner
Conceptualization: H.S.S., F.C., R.C.R., N.M.d.C., A.S.T., J.R. and X.P. Methodology: J.A.B., M.A.C., S.D., A.H., Z.J., C.J., N.K., K.K., K. Lee, K. Li, R.L., T.M., E. Mitchell, S. Mu, S.S.M., B.N., O.O., S.P., W.S., N.L.T., R.W., W.W., J.W., R.Y., C.M.S.M., A.B., F.C., D.B., J.B., M.T., R.T., G.M., D.B., W.Y., R.C.R., N.M.d.C., L.E., D.K., S.K., T.F., J.R., P.G.F., S.P., E.F., C.X., T.W., F.H.S., D.Y., E.Y.W. and B.C. Software: J.A.B., M.A.C., S.D., A.H., Z.J., C.J., N.K., K.K., K. Ler, K. Li, R.L., T.M., E. Mitchell, S. Mu, S.S.M., B.N., O.O., S.P., W.S., N.L.T., R.W., W.W., J.W., R.Y., C.M.S.M., F.C., D.B., R.T., G.M., W.Y., L.E., D.K., T.F., S.P., E.C., T.M., C.A.B., J.J., L.M.K., V.R., D.X. and J.M. Validation: C.A.B., W.G.R., P.K.R. and J.M. Investigation: J.A.B., M.A.C., S.D., A.H., Z.J., C.J., N.K., K. Lee, K. Li, R.L., T.M., E. Mitchell, S. Mu, S.S.M., B.N., O.O., S.P., H.S.S., W.S., N.L.T., R.W., W.W., J.W., R.Y., C.M.S.M., A.B., F.C., D.B., J.B., M.T., R.T., G.M., D.B., W.Y., R.C.R., N.M.d.C., L.E., D.K., T.F., A.S.T., J.R., P.G.F., S.P., E.F., S.P., E.C., T.M. and X.P. Resource: Z.H.T. Data curation: S.D., J.G., J.H., S.K., M.M., B.S., S.W., K.W., S.Y., C.M.S.M., A.B., F.C., J.B., M.T., N.M.d.C., C.G., G.W., P.G.F., S.P., E.F., E.C., S. McReynolds, M.B., E. Miranda, F.Y., A.W., E.J., C.Z., C.A.B., J.J., L.M.K., P.K.R., V.R., B.W., D.X., E.N., R.S., B.D., V.B., G.J.Y.P.V. and Z.M.S. Writing, original draft: S.D., T.M., H.S.S., C.M.S.M., F.C., R.C.R., N.M.d.C., A.S.T., J.R., P.G.F., S.P., C.P., B.C. and X.P. Writing, review and editing: J.A.B., M.A.C., A.H., Z.J., C.J., N.K., K. Lee, K. Li, R.L., E. Mitchell, S. Mu, S.S.M., B.N., O.O., S.P., W.S., N.L.T., R.W., W.W., J.W., R.Y., A.B., D.B., J.B., M.T., R.T., G.M., D.B., W.Y., L.E., D.K., T.F., E.F., S.P., C.X., T.W., E.C., C.L.S., A.R., T.M., P.K.R., J.J., D.X., C.A.B. and B.W. Visualization: S.D., A.S., F.C. and N.M.d.C. Supervision: H.S.S., S.Y., F.C., R.C.R., N.M.d.C., A.S.T., J.R., X.P., W.G.R., L.M.K., P.K.R., B.W. and D.X. Project administration: T.M., N.M.d.C., S.S., J.R., R.Y., W.G.R. and B.W. Funding acquisition: H.S.S., R.C.R., N.M.d.C., A.S.T., J.R., X.P. and B.W.
Correspondence to
Forrest Collman, Nuno Maçarico da Costa, Xaq Pitkow, R. Clay Reid, Jacob Reimer, H. Sebastian Seung or Andreas S. Tolias.
S. Seung and T. Macrina disclose a competing interest in ZettaAI; J. Reimer and A. S. Tolias disclose a competing interest in Vathes. The other authors declare no competing interests.
Nature thanks Costas Anastassiou, Aravinthan Samuel and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer review reports are available.
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Location and distribution of test subvolumes (x = 5.5 µm, y = 5.5 µm, z = 5.5 µm) throughout the whole subvolume 65 that were used for validation of automated synaptic contact segmentation. Identification and annotation of synaptic contacts (n = 8,611 synapses) were performed manually within each subvolume and compared with automated results to calculate subvolume and combined precision (96%), recall (89%), and F1 scores (92%), with test subvolume F1 scores visualized by color within each plot. The two panels show a coronal (a) and top (b) view of the location of the sampling sites. In (a) the vertical axis represents the pia to white matter direction and the horizontal axis represents the medial-lateral direction. In (b) the vertical axis represents the anterior-posterior direction and the horizontal axis represents the medial-lateral direction.
(A) Histogram of number of edits across all the objects associated with nuclei. Distribution of neurons with complete dendritic proofreading highlighted in blue, and neurons with clean axons in orange. Cells with complete dendritic proofreading have often had some axon edits as well, so this is an upper bound on the number of edits required to fully extend dendrites. Most cells have had very little proofreading and have been mostly touched by automated methods. Note plot is on a log-log scale. (B) Number of edits compared to number of output synapses in reconstruction. For all the clean axons for which we have cell type annotations, the number of edits versus the number of outputs is plotted on a log log scale. Data points are colored with respect to their broad cell class. Generally, more extensively reconstructed axons have more edits, but there are also strong cell and cell-type specific effects. This reflects systematic differences in the thickness of axons of different cell types, as well as variation in how much of the axon is contained within the volume and the quality of the segmentation in different locations in the dataset.
(A) Distribution of multi-soma IDs by number of neuronal nuclei was monitored throughout proofreading. Difference in multi-neuron root IDs before APL proofreading (dark blue) and after (light blue). Note that this shows the number of neurons per ID, which means that non-neuron somas are not counted. This figure was derived using the soma classification table: nucleus_ref_neuron_svm. Note that a small number of multi-soma IDs were skipped during APL proofreading because they contain low quality neurons merged to myelinated axons or they were falsely classified as neuronal (e.g. blood vessels); (B) Spatial distribution of multi-neuron ID soma centers (soma locations of merged cells containing ≥ 2 neuronal nuclei) before APL proofreading and after. Both are a lateral view of the volume that shows distribution across layers, from pia (top) to white matter (bottom). Color-bar represents depth.
a) The number of matched neuronal EM nuclei by session/ scan b) Schematic of the residual and separation score metric. Residual: For a matched EM nucleus to a functional ROI (unit), the residual is computed as the euclidean distance between the nucleus centroid and unit centroid after transforming the nucleus centroid from EM to 2P space with the spline-based co-registration. Separation score: For a matched EM nucleus to a functional unit the separation score is computed as the difference between the residual of the matched pair and the residual of the nearest EM neuronal nucleus that was not matched to the unit. c) 2D histogram of separation score and residual. d) Schematic of in vivo signal correlation analysis (see Methods). e) The distribution of oracle scores for matched units and the nearest unit controls. f) Scatter plot of signal correlations for all matched units (y-axis) vs the signal correlations for the nearest unit controls (x-axis) and colored by oracle score. Note that each matched unit pair has two data points on the plot for each of the two control correlations. g) Same as in f) restricted to matched units with oracle >0.2. h) same as in f) restricted to matched units and control units with oracle > 0.2.
a) Precision-recall curves showing performance relative to manual matches (used as the ground truth) across residual (left) and separation percentiles (right) for fiducial-based, vessel-based, and fiducial-vessel agreement automatch methods. b) Heatmaps of max residual percentile and min separation percentile colored by precision relative to manual matches, for the fiducial-based (left), vessel-based (middle) and fiducial-vessel agreement (right) automatches. Max residual percentile represents the threshold below which matches were included, while min separation percentile represents the threshold above which matches were included. c) Heatmaps of max residual percentile and min separation percentile colored by the number of neurons remaining after thresholds were applied, for the fiducial-based (left), vessel-based (middle) and fiducial-vessel agreement (right) automatches.
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The MICrONS Consortium. Functional connectomics spanning multiple areas of mouse visual cortex.
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Retroelements have a critical role in shaping eukaryotic genomes. For instance, site-specific non-long terminal repeat retrotransposons have spread widely through preferential integration into repetitive genomic sequences, such as microsatellite regions and ribosomal DNA genes1,2,3,4,5,6. Despite the widespread occurrence of these systems, their targeting constraints remain unclear. Here we use a computational pipeline to discover multiple new site-specific retrotransposon families, profile members both biochemically and in mammalian cells, find previously undescribed insertion preferences and chart potential evolutionary paths for retrotransposon retargeting. We identify R2Tg, an R2 retrotransposon from the zebra finch, Taeniopygia guttata, as an orthologue that can be retargeted by payload engineering for target cleavage, reverse transcription and scarless insertion of heterologous payloads at new genomic sites. We enhance this activity by fusing R2Tg to CRISPR–Cas9 nickases for efficient insertion at new genomic sites. Through further screening of R2 orthologues, we select an orthologue, R2Tocc, with natural reprogrammability and minimal insertion at its natural 28S site, to engineer SpCas9H840A–R2Tocc, a system we name site-specific target-primed insertion through targeted CRISPR homing of retroelements (STITCHR). STITCHR enables the scarless, efficient installation of edits, ranging from a single base to 12.7 kilobases, gene replacement and use of in vitro transcribed or synthetic RNA templates. Inspired by the prevalence of nLTR retrotransposons across eukaryotic genomes, we anticipate that STITCHR will serve as a platform for scarless programmable integration in dividing and non-dividing cells, with both research and therapeutic applications.
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High-throughput sequencing data have been deposited in the NCBI Sequencing Read Archive database under accession PRJNA1223444. Expression plasmids are available from Addgene under the UBMTA; support information and computational tools are available at https://www.abugootlab.org/. All other data are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.
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We thank P. Reginato, D. Weston and E. Boyden for support with MiSeq instrumentation; K. Holden for Synthego sgRNAs; S. Levine and the MIT BioMicro Center for Pacific Biosciences sequencing library preparation and sequencing; PhoenixBio for providing primary human hepatocytes (PXB cells); X. D. Chen for retrotransposon analysis; N. Willis and S. Khoramian Tusi for Southern blot advice and protocols; R. Desimone and J. Crittenden for support and discussions; and members of the Abudayyeh–Gootenberg lab for support and advice. C.W.F. is supported by a grant from the Simons Foundation International to the Simons Center for the Social Brain at MIT. L.V. is supported by a Swiss National Science Foundation postdoc mobility fellowship. H.N is supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant 21H05281, the Takeda Medical Research Foundation and the Inamori Research Institute for Science. M.H is supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant 23K14133, the Takeda Medical Research Foundation and JST, ACT-X grant JPMJAX232F. J.S.G. and O.O.A. are supported by NIH grants 1R21-AI149694, R01-EB031957, R01-AG074932 and R56-HG011857; the McGovern Institute Neurotechnology (MINT) program; the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics in Neuroscience; the G. Harold & Leila Y. Mathers Charitable Foundation; the NHGRI Technology Development Coordinating Center Opportunity Fund; the MIT John W. Jarve (1978) Seed Fund for Science Innovation; Impetus Grants; a Cystic Fibrosis Foundation pioneer grant; Google Ventures; FastGrants; the Harvey Family Foundation; Winston Fu; and the McGovern Institute.
These authors contributed equally: Christopher W. Fell, Lukas Villiger, Justin Lim, Masahiro Hiraizumi
These authors jointly supervised this work: Omar O. Abudayyeh, Jonathan S. Gootenberg
Department of Medicine, Division of Engineering in Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Christopher W. Fell, Dario Tagliaferri, Kaiyi Jiang, Alisan Kayabolen, Cian Schmitt-Ulms, Harsh Ramani, Omar O. Abudayyeh & Jonathan S. Gootenberg
Gene and Cell Therapy Institute, Mass General Brigham, Cambridge, MA, USA
Christopher W. Fell, Dario Tagliaferri, Kaiyi Jiang, Alisan Kayabolen, Cian Schmitt-Ulms, Harsh Ramani, Omar O. Abudayyeh & Jonathan S. Gootenberg
Center for Virology and Vaccine Research, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Christopher W. Fell, Dario Tagliaferri, Kaiyi Jiang, Alisan Kayabolen, Cian Schmitt-Ulms, Harsh Ramani, Omar O. Abudayyeh & Jonathan S. Gootenberg
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Christopher W. Fell, Lukas Villiger, Justin Lim, Dario Tagliaferri, Matthew T. N. Yarnall, Anderson Lee, Kaiyi Jiang, Alisan Kayabolen, Rohan N. Krajeski, Cian Schmitt-Ulms, Sarah M. Yousef, Omar O. Abudayyeh & Jonathan S. Gootenberg
Department of Chemistry and Biotechnology, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
Masahiro Hiraizumi & Hiroshi Nishimasu
Integrated DNA Technologies, Coralville, Iowa, USA
Nathaniel Roberts & Christopher A. Vakulskas
Structural Biology Division Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
Hiroshi Nishimasu
Inamori Research Institute for Science, Kyoto, Japan
Hiroshi Nishimasu
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O.O.A. and J.S.G. conceived the study and participated in the design, execution and analysis of experiments. L.V. and C.W.F. designed and performed the experiments and analysed the data. J.L. developed computational pipelines for retrotransposon discovery. M.H. purified the retrotransposon proteins. M.H., C.W.F., O.O.A. and J.S.G. did the biochemistry experiments. K.J. performed computational analysis of sequencing experiments. D.T., A.L., M.T.N.Y., R.N.K., C.S.-U., A.K., H.R. and S.M.Y. assisted with experiments. C.A.V. and N.R. provided synthetic RNA templates. H.N. participated in the analysis of biochemical experiments. L.V., C.W.F., H.N., O.O.A. and J.S.G. wrote the manuscript with help from all authors. C.W.F., L.V., J.L., M.H. share co-first authorship. D.T., M.T.N.Y. and A.L. share co-second authorship. The order of authors C.W.F. and L.V. was decided by a coin toss.
Correspondence to
Omar O. Abudayyeh or Jonathan S. Gootenberg.
MIT has filed for a patent application for this work (WO2024220409A1). J.S.G. and O.O.A. are co-founders of Terrain Biosciences, Doppler Bio and Transit Therapeutics. All other authors declare no competing interests.
Nature thanks Todd Macfarlan and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
Publisher's note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
a) Schematic of computational pipeline used to discover and classify site-specific nLTR retrotransposon systems. b) Size distribution of the ORFs from the first methionine for each of the 5 families of RLE containing nLTR retrotransposons. c) Distribution of distances from candidate retrotransposons to detected Rfam annotation or tandem repeat targets for each of the 5 families of RLE containing nLTR retrotransposons. d) Distribution of the predicted 5′ and 3′ UTR sizes for all nLTR RLE-containing retrotransposons. UTR sizes are predicted based on the distance from the ORF and nearest predicted target site. Box plots are shown with the median, 25th percentile, 75th percentile, and whiskers that are 1.5x the interquartile range. All outliers are shown as individual points. n(5'UTR) = 10,033; n(3'UTR) = 7642. e) Distribution of the lengths of observed non-coding conservation regions flanking the 5′ and 3′ ends of the retrotransposon ORF. Box plots are shown with the median, 25th percentile, 75th percentile, and whiskers that are 1.5x the interquartile range. All outliers are shown as individual points. n(5'UTR) = 3307; n(3' UTR) = 6472. f) Schematic of typical nLTR retrotransposon insertion sites with target sites consistent on both sides of the retrotransposon. g) Phylogenetic tree of all 5 families of RLE-containing nLTR systems showing majority of detected Rfam targets in the vicinity of the nLTR ORF.
a) DNA sequence alignments of nLTR families with divergent target preferences in the non-coding areas surrounding the nLTR ORFs. Identified Rfam annotations in the surrounding locus are highlighted. b) Multiple sequence alignment of different nLTR retrotransposons using MUSCLE, with Pfam domain schematic above as determined by HHpred. c) Analysis of sequence identity similarity of chosen nLTR retrotransposon family members using the MUSCLE protein alignment from Extended Data Fig. 2b.
a) Analysis of the 5′ end of the nLTR1Mbr locus with the microsatellite repeat region and alignment to the human 28S rDNA region highlighted. b) Schematic of payload homology and target sites used to evaluate nLTR1Mbr insertion. c) Gluc payload insertion by nLTR1Mbr into a panel of luciferase reporters, as quantified by luciferase production, with R2Tg targeting the R2 28S sequence as control. Reporters with either similarity to the R2 28S region, or with similarity to the 28S homology region in the nLTR1Mbr locus are used for evaluation of alternative insertion sites. d) Phylogenetic tree of nLTR retrotransposons zoomed in on the R2Tocc system and surrounding orthologs. Tree branches corresponding to avian genomes are highlighted in blue and orthologs used in this study are labeled. e) Heatmap of 28S luciferase reporter assay, testing integration by R2Bm, R2Tg, R2Mes and R2TgRTmut (x axis) using RNA payloads containing UTRs from different retrotransposon ortholog systems (y axis). f) Validation of 28S NGS assessment of editing efficiencies. Synthetic eblocks containing editing and unedited DNA sequences were mixed at defined ratios (x-axis) and measured by NGS (y-axis). Agreement between the known editing percentage (x-axis) and measured editing percentage was calculated by linear regression and is shown as an inset. Schematic above shows the relationship of the three NGS primers to the inserted sequence where one forward primer is in the genomic sequence upstream and there is one reverse primer in the insert and one reverse primer in the downstream genomic sequence. g) Timecourse of biochemical TPRT by R2Tg into 28S DNA with or without RNA payloads with different incubation times, as indicated. h) NGS insertion quantification of TPRT shown in Extended Data Fig. 3g. i) Electrophoretic Mobility Shift Assay gel showing the shift of the 28S DNA target due to binding of the R2Tg protein alone or R2Tg-RNA complex. Schematics to the right of the gel show the identity of the different DNA complex products on the gel. The bottom strand is 5′ labeled. j) Biochemical insertion of Gluc sequence into the 28S target with a payload containing only homology arms to the 28S locus and no UTRs with +/–payload RNA, +/– 28S DNA, +/– R2 protein, +/– Mg2+ and +/– dNTPs, as indicated. Above, NGS quantitation of insertion efficiency and schematic of the used RNA payloads. Schematics to the right of the gels indicate the specific TPRT and cleavage products. k) Biochemical TPRT by R2Tg into 28S DNA using RNA payloads with 100 bp, 60 bp, 30 bp and 0 bp 28S homology and no RNA payload control. Insertion frequency is quantified by NGS. l) Biochemical TPRT by R2Tg into 28S DNA using RNA payloads with or without 5′ cap and/or 3′ poly-A tail modifications as well as no RNA payload control. m) NGS insertion quantification of TPRT shown in Extended Data Fig. 3l. n) Primer extension assay by WT R2Tg, RLE inactivated R2TgD1275A, and no protein, where 28S RNA payload and complementary primer were hybridized and extended by reverse transcription activity of the R2Tg protein. Error bars represent mean +/− (c, e) s.e.m. or (j) s.d. n = 3 (c, e, f, j) or n = 1 (h, k, m) where n represents biological replicates.
a) Gluc payload insertion by R2Tg reverse transcriptase domain deletions, RLE inactivation mutants (D1275A), and reverse transcriptase mutations (R2TgF876A/A877L/D878A/D879A/L880A/V881A/L882A, RTmut), at the 28S locus luciferase reporter target, as quantified by luciferase activity. Luciferase activity was assayed in HEK293FT cells. b) Gluc payload insertion by R2Tg RT domain mutations, including R2TgF876A/A877L/D878A/D879A/L880A/V881A/L882A (RTmut), R2TgD878R/D879R, and R2TgD878H/D879H, and the RLE inactivation mutant (D1275A) at the 28S locus luciferase reporter, as quantified by luciferase. Luciferase activity was assayed in HEK293FT cells. c) Uncropped version of the gels shown in Fig. 2g; Above, RNA payload insertion into a 28S plasmid reporter by wild type R2Tg, RLE inactivated, RT inactivated, and complemented RT and RLE inactivated proteins +/– RNA payload, as indicated. RNA templates used were in vitro transcribed with a 5′ cap and a poly A tail. Expected band size = 294 bp. NT, non-targeting RNA templates that have homology to the NOLC1 target instead of the 28S locus. Below, R2Tg insertion into human 28S endogenous locus with payloads containing 100, 50, 30 or 0 homology to the 28S target site. RNA templates used were in vitro transcribed with a 5′ cap and a poly A tail. Expected band size = 374 bp. d) Luciferase assay of Gluc insertion of an IVT RNA payload with variable 3′ tail length into a 28S reporter target by WT R2Tg and RLE-inactivated R2TgD1275A. Luciferase activity was assayed in Huh-7 cells. e) Sanger sequencing of 5′ and 3′ insertion junctions at the 28S target for additional selected payload designs after R2Tg integration. Payload numbers correspond to those in Fig. 2h. f) Example indels at the 5′ junction for R2Tg insertion at the 28S target for selected payloads. Non-templated Cs from reverse transcription in the bottom strand (G in the top strand) are highlighted with red boxes. g) Example indels at the WT 28S locus target for selected payloads. Non-templated Cs from reverse transcription in the bottom strand (G in the top strand) are highlighted with red boxes. Error bars represent mean +/− (a,b,d) s.e.m. n = 3 where n represents biological replicates.
a) Gaussia luciferase exon 2 (Gluc) payload insertion by wild type and domain inactivated mutants of R2Tg into a 28S plasmid reporter, with editing outcomes profiled by NGS at the upstream (left) junction. Mutants tested are WT R2Tg and R2TgD1275A (RLE mutant) and outcomes are classified as perfect insertions, insertions with indels, or WT locus indels. b) Schematic of additional payload variant with internal homology arms against the 28S target. c) Gaussia luciferase exon 2 (Gluc) payload insertion by wild type R2Tg into a 28S plasmid reporter with payload variants shown in part B, with editing outcomes profiled by NGS at the upstream (left) junction. Outcomes are classified as perfect insertions, insertions with indels, or WT locus indels. d) Size analysis by gel electrophoresis of 5′ and 3′ insertion junctions at the 28S target reporter for payload designs from part (b) and (c) after R2Tg integration. Payload numbers correspond to those in B. e) Gluc exon 2 payload insertion by WT R2Tg, R2TgD1275A, or the RT domain deletion R2TgΔ(875-885) into a 28S plasmid reporter with payloads containing 28S or AAVS1 targeting homology arms, profiled by NGS. Statistics were calculated using unpaired t-test. f) Biochemical retrotransposition of different RNA payloads into the AAVS1 DNA target with the R2Tg protein, dNTPs, and MgCl2, as indicated. Either no payload was used or the following two payloads were used: 1) payload with a 5′ UTR targeting AAVS1 and containing a Gluc insert, or 2) a payload with 5′ and 3′ UTRs targeting NOLC1 and containing an EGFP insert. Labels on the gel indicate the specific TPRT product, DNA target band, and R2Tg produced nicked fragments. g) Validation of AAVS1 NGS method. Synthetic eblocks containing editing and unedited DNA sequences were mixed at defined ratios (x-axis) and measured by NGS (y-axis). Agreement between the known editing percentage (x-axis) and measured editing percentage was calculated by linear regression and is shown inset. h) Validation of the NOLC1 3-primer NGS assay using mixes of genomic DNA from unedited or heterozygously inserted cells at NOLC1, as measured by ddPCR. Shown is the known pre-mixed ratio of edited and unedited gDNA (x-axis) vs the measured editing rate by NGS (y-axis). Inset, coefficient of determination between values on x- and y-axes. i) Schematic of payload engineering for R2Tg reprogramming to the NOLC1 locus. j) EGFP payload insertion at human endogenous NOLC1 locus by natural reprogrammed wild-type R2Tg as well as R2TgD1275A and R2TgRTmut. Insertion is quantified by ddPCR. Statistics calculated with unpaired t-test. k) Payload insertion by SpCas9H840A-R2TgΔ1-183 or SpCas9H840A-R2TgΔ1-183,D1275A into the endogenous NOLC1 locus, mediated by dual guides or non-targeting guides and quantified by ddPCR. Inset shows payload design and locus schematic with homology arms colored and top guide in red and bottom guide in blue. Statistics calculated with unpaired t-test. l) Secondary structure analysis of the 5′ UTR of R2Tg, including the full length, 15 nt truncated variant, and the 15 nt truncated variant with the 50 nt 28S homology sequence upstream. m) Validation of the 3-primer NGS assay for analysis of AAVS1 integration via the left insertion junction. Standards consist of edited and WT amplicons that are mixed in the listed ratios (x-axis) and the measured editing is determined by the 3-primer NGS assay (y-axis). n) Gluc integration at the endogenous AAVS1 locus via the SpCas9H840A-R2TgΔ1-183 fusion using payloads with the full length or 15-nt truncated 5′ UTR, an upstream 28S 50 nt sequence, and internal AAVS1 homology arms. Integration is quantified by next-generation sequencing (left) and ddPCR (right). Error bars represent mean +/− s.e.m. n = 3 where n represents three biological replicates.
a) Biochemical retrotransposition of an RNA payload into the NOLC1 DNA target with and without withdrawal of R2Tg protein, RNA, dNTPs, SpCas9/guides, or MgCl2, as indicated. Above, NGS quantification of insertion efficiency and a schematic of the RNA payload used. Gel is stained with SYBR gold for visualization of nucleic acid. b) Biochemical retrotransposition of an RNA payload into the NOLC1 DNA target with and without withdrawal of R2Tg protein, RNA, dNTPs, SpCas9/guides, or MgCl2, as indicated. The DNA top strand is Cy5 labeled (red) and bottom strand is FAM labeled (green), allowing for visualization by fluorescence. Labels on the gel indicate the specific TPRT product, DNA target band, and R2Tg produced nicked fragments. c) Reprogrammed biochemical retrotransposition by R2Tg into the NOLC1 DNA target, using a homologous IVT NOLC1 payload (N) with +/– 5′ cap and 3′ tail modifications compared to EMX1 (E)- or 28-homologous (28S) payloads (i.e. non-homologous to NOLC1). Integration is quantified by NGS. d) Reprogrammed biochemical retrotransposition of an IVT RNA payload containing the optimized 5′ and 3′ UTR and homology regions into the AAVS1 DNA target by R2Tg +/– DNA target, +/– RNA, +/– Cas9-assisted nicking, and +/– R2Tg, as indicated. Black arrow on the gel indicates the specific TPRT product. The blue arrow denotes the cleaved DNA band generated by R2Tg protein alone reprogrammed by its payload RNA. e) NGS quantification of insertion data shown in Extended Data Fig. 6d. f) Integration efficiencies, quantified by NGS, of reprogrammed biochemical TPRT of an RNA payload by R2Tg into varying amounts of NOLC1 DNA target compared to no RNA controls. g) Integration efficiencies, quantified by NGS, of reprogrammed biochemical TPRT by R2Tg using NOLC1 RNA payloads incorporating either different single-base mismatches or insertions into the NOLC1 DNA, as indicated. Either in vitro transcribed mRNA or synthetic RNA templates were used as the payloads. h) Biochemical retrotransposition of an RNA payload into the AAVS1 DNA target with and without withdrawal of R2Tg protein, RNA, dNTPs, or MgCl2, as indicated. Above, NGS quantification of insertion efficiency and a schematic of the RNA payload used. Labels on the gel indicate the specific TPRT product, DNA target band, and R2Tg produced nicked fragments. i) Schematic of DNA cleavage end detection using ligation and NGS. Ligation adaptor primers (shown in black) are used in combination with anchored primers on either the left (red) or right end (blue) are used to read out the variable R2Tg cleavage sites. j) Cleavage end detection by next-generation sequencing of the R2Tg generated nicks on the AAVS1 target from Extended Data Fig. 6h in the condition without dNTPs. The color of the reads for 5′ or 3′ ends match the anchored primers shown in the schematic in Extended Data Fig. 6i. Below the plot is a schematic of the AAVS1 target (black) and the homology arms of the payload template (beige and gray). k) Cleavage end detection by next-generation sequencing of the R2Tg generated nicks on the AAVS1 target from Extended Data Fig. 6h in the condition without the RNA template. The color of the reads for 5′ or 3′ ends match the anchored primers shown in the schematic in Extended Data Fig. 6i. Below the plot is a schematic of the AAVS1 target (black) and the homology arms of the payload template (beige and gray). l) Biochemical retrotransposition of an RNA payload into the NOLC DNA target with and without withdrawal of R2Tg protein, RNA, dNTPs, or MgCl2, as indicated. Labels on the gel indicate the specific TPRT product, DNA target band, and R2Tg produced nicked fragments. m) Cleavage end detection by next-generation sequencing of the R2Tg generated nicks on the NOLC1 target from Extended Data Fig. 6l in the condition without dNTPs but with RNA template. The color of the reads for 5′ or 3′ ends match the anchored primers shown in the schematic inset. Below each plot is a schematic of the NOLC1 target (black) and the homology arms of the payload template (beige and gray). n) Cleavage end detection by next-generation sequencing of the R2Tg generated nicks on the NOLC1 target from Extended Data Fig. 6l in the condition without RNA template. The color of the reads for 5′ or 3′ ends match the anchored primers shown in the schematic inset. Below each plot is a schematic of the NOLC1 target (black) and the homology arms of the payload template (beige and gray). Error bars represent mean +/− s.e.m. n = 3 where n represents three biological replicates.
a) Schematic of SpCas9H840A fused to N- and C-terminal truncations of R2Tg at different amino acid positions. Not all tested constructs are shown. b) Gluc payload insertion by different SpCas9H840A-R2TgΔ1-183 fusions, according to the schematic in (a), into the endogenous AAVS1 locus quantified by NGS. N-term and C-term denote either N-terminal or C-terminal fusions of the full length R2Tg protein. Denoted residue positions indicate the starting amino acid position of N-terminal R2Tg truncations that are fused to the C-terminal of SpCas9H840A. c) Gluc integration at the endogenous AAVS1 target by SpCas9H840A-R2TgΔ1-183, SpCas9H840A-R2TgΔ1-183,F876A/A877L/D878A/D879A/L880A/V881A/L882A (RTmut), and SpCas9H840A-R2TgΔ1-183,Δ(875-885), and SpCas9H840A alone. Editing rates were quantified by NGS (left) and ddPCR (right). d) TPRT activity in HEK293FT cells with SpCas9H840A alone or fused to R2Tg, R2TgΔ1-183,F876A/A877L/D878A/D879A/L880A/V881A/L882A (RTmut), or R2TgΔ1-183,Δ875-885 into the NOLC1 genomic target with dual guides. EGFP payload contains the full 5′ and 3′ UTRs for R2Tg. e) Gluc payload insertion into a 28S plasmid reporter in HEK293FT cells by selected nLTR retrotransposons fused to SpCas9H840A, with either targeting or non-targeting guides, quantified by Gluc production normalized to a control Cluc. Data is shown as ratio of targeting signal to non-targeting signal. f) Gluc payload insertion into the endogenous AAVS1 locus in HEK293FT cells by selected nLTR retrotransposons fused to SpCas9H840A, with either targeting or non-targeting guides, profiled by next generation sequencing. Editing outcomes are quantified as perfect insertions, insertions with indels, and indels at the unmodified WT target site. g) Gluc payload insertion into the endogenous AAVS1 locus in HEK293FT cells by selected nLTR retrotransposons fused to so SpCas9H840A and an AAVS1-targeting or non-targeting sgRNA control, quantified by ddPCR h) Validation of the AAVS1 3-primer NGS assay using mixes of genomic DNA from unedited or heterozygously inserted cells at AAVS1, as measured by ddPCR. Shown is the known pre-mixed ratio of edited and unedited gDNA (x-axis) vs the measured editing rate by NGS (y-axis). Inset, coefficient of determination between values on x- and y-axes. i) R2Tocc retrotransposition of a synthetic RNA payload into top- and bottom-strand labeled 28S DNA. The top strand is FAM labeled (red); the bottom strand is Cy5 labeled (green). Schematics on the side of the gel indicate the expected size of each band, including the TPRT product and cleaved target fragments. j) Indels or substitutions found in the sequencing reads of AAVS1 in vitro TPRT shown in Fig. 5b, analyzed by CRISPResso. Above, a reference sequence consisting of correct insertion of the Gluc payload into AAVS1 DNA. Below, a schematic of the different insertion outcomes found by sequencing, the raw number of reads and % of total reads which these correspond to. Error bars represent mean +/− (b,g) s.d. or (d, e, f, h) s.d. n = 3 where n represents 3 biological replicates.
a) Expression of wild type and mutant R2Tg orthologs (x-axis), quantified by luciferase signal. b) Schematic of STITCHR insertion using intron-containing templates in the following subpanels. An EGFP STITCHR payload containing an interrupting intron is expressed by a CAG promoter. After RNA splicing and TPRT, it is inserted into the genome as an uninterrupted EGFP ORF. Shown are the landing sites of the NGS primers used in the subsequent panels. Shown are the GFP cargo (green bar, approximately 500 bp), interrupting intron (USF1, 245 bp, tetrahymena self-splicing intron, 399 bp), homology sequences (yellow bar, 50 bp each), poly-A tail, genomic sequence (grey bar), external F and R NGS primers (black) and internal reverse primer (blue). c) NGS evaluation of insertion at AAVS1 (left) and EMX1 (right) loci after delivering a plasmid template containing GFP with an interrupting self-splicing tetrahymena intron. Shown is the % insertion of GFP lacking the interrupting intron (i.e. spliced insertion) by SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 or SpCas9H840A. Insertions are quantified as perfect insertions or insertions with indels. d) ddPCR evaluation of AAVS1 insertion after delivering a plasmid template containing an interrupting USF1 intron, which interrupts in two locations in the payload. The ddPCR assay used detects spliced insertion only. Shown is the % spliced insertion by SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169, SpCas9H840A-R2TgΔ1-183,RTmut, SpCas9H840A-R2TgΔ1-183,RLEmut, SpCas9H840A-R2TgΔ1-183,RTmut and SpCas9H840A control. e) Gluc reconstitution by correction of a 20 bp deletion by delivering plasmid or synthetic RNA payloads, quantified by Gluc expression normalized to control Cluc. The synthetic RNA template is an extension of the Cas9 sgRNA. f-g) Gluc reconstitution by R2Tg mutants with synthetic RNA payloads extended off the guide RNA as quantified by NGS (f) and Gluc (g) expression normalized to control Cluc. h) STITCHR 20 bp payload insertion on a luciferase reporter plasmid from a synthetic RNA lacking the 5′ UTR and containing a Cas9 guide scaffold (fused) or a synthetic RNA delivered in trans containing the 5′ UTR and the correction sequence (trans). Editing is with or without a Cas9 nicking guide that allows for initiation of TPRT for the trans template. Integration is quantified by NGS and is represented as perfect insertions or insertions with indels. WT indels are also shown which are defined as indels at the unintegrated Gluc locus. i) STITCHR 22 bp payload insertion on an EGFP reporter plasmid from a synthetic RNA lacking the 5′ UTR and containing a Cas9 guide scaffold (fused) or a synthetic RNA delivered in trans containing the 5′ UTR and the correction sequence (trans). Editing is with or without a Cas9 nicking guide that allows for initiation of TPRT for the trans template. Integration is quantified by NGS and is represented as perfect insertions or insertions with indels. WT indels are also shown which are defined as indels at the unintegrated plasmid reporter. j) STITCHR 20 bp payload insertion on a luciferase reporter plasmid from a synthetic RNA lacking the 5′ UTR and containing a Cas9 guide scaffold (fused), a synthetic RNA delivered in trans containing the 5′ UTR and the correction sequence (trans with UTR), and a synthetic RNA delivered in trans containing the correction sequence without a UTR (trans without UTR). SpCas9H840A-R2TgΔ1-183 and SpCas9H840A-R2TgΔ1-183,RTmut are compared to each other and editing is performed +/− a Cas9 nicking guide that allows for initiation of TPRT for the trans template. Integration is quantified by NGS. k) STITCHR 38 bp payload insertion at the endogenous LMNB1 locus from a synthetic RNA lacking the 5′ UTR and containing a Cas9 guide scaffold. Integration is quantified by NGS. l) STITCHR 700 bp EGFP payload insertion in Huh-7 cells at the endogenous NOLC1 locus from an in vitro transcribed mRNA, insertion is quantified by ddPCR. m) Indels or substitutions found in the sequencing reads of NOLC1 insertion experiment shown in Extended Data Fig. 8i, analyzed by CRISPResso. Above, a reference sequence consisting of correct insertion of the Gluc payload into AAVS1 DNA. Below, a schematic of the different insertion outcomes found by sequencing, the raw number of reads and % of total reads which these correspond to. n) Insertion of a GFP payload delivered as an IVT mRNA without UTRs into the human endogenous NOLC1 locus by SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 in Huh-7 cells. Insertion is quantified by NGS and is represented as perfect insertions or insertions with indels. WT indels are also shown which is defined as indels at the unintegrated NOLC1 locus. o) Insertion of a GFP payload delivered as an IVT mRNA with UTRs and other variable modifications, as indicated, into the human endogenous NOLC1 locus by SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 in HEK293FT cells. Insertion is quantified by NGS. p) EGFP payload insertion by STITCHR with SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 into the endogenous NOLC1 locus, with combinations of single and dual guides, compared to a non-targeting guide control and quantified by NGS. q) EGFP payload insertion by STITCHR with SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 into the endogenous LMNB1 locus, with combinations of single and dual guides, compared to a non-targeting guide control and SpCas9H840A alone. Editing was quantified by digital droplet PCR (ddPCR). r) EGFP payload insertion by STITCHR with SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 into the endogenous NOLC1 locus, with combinations of single and dual guides, compared to a non-targeting guide control and profiled by ddPCR. s) EGFP payload insertion by STITCHR with SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 into the endogenous EMX1 locus, with combinations of single and dual guides, compared to a non-targeting guide control and SpCas9H840A alone. Editing quantified by digital droplet PCR (ddPCR). t) EGFP payload insertion by STITCHR with SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 into the endogenous AAVS1 locus, with combinations of single and dual guides, compared to SpCas9H840A alone, SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169,RTmut, and SpCas9. Insertion is quantified by ddPCR. u) Comparison of ddPCR and NGS quantification of EGFP payload insertion by STITCHR with SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 into the endogenous AAVS1 locus, with combinations of single and dual guides. Error bars represent mean +/− (a, f, g, h, i, l, n, o, p, q, s, t, u) s.e.m or (c, d, e, j, k) s.d. n = 3 where n represents 3 biological replicates.
a) Gluc payload insertion by SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 (WT), SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169,F811A,A812L,D813A,D814A,L815A,V816A,L817A (RTmut), SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169,Δ(811-814), SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169,Δ(810-820), and SpCas9H840A at AAVS1. Editing quantified by NGS. b) EGFP insertion by SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 (WT), SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169,F811A,A812L,D813A,D814A,L815A,V816A,L817A (RTmut), SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169,Δ(876-879), SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169,Δ(875-885), and SpCas9H840A at NOLC1. Editing is quantified by ddPCR. c) GFP insertion by SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 (WT), SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169,RLEmut, and SpCas9H840A at the endogenous NOLC1 target site. Editing quantified by ddPCR. d) EGFP payload insertion by SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 into the endogenous NOLC1 locus, using payloads with 50 nt homology arms targeting NOLC1 or AAVS1 targets, or without homology. Payloads are evaluated with single, dual, or non-targeting guides and are compared to SpCas9H840A. Editing quantified by ddPCR. N = NOLC1 target. A = AAVS1 target. e) EGFP insertion by STITCHR with SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 into the endogenous NOLC1 locus, with payloads with varying homology arm lengths. Payloads are evaluated with dual or non-targeting guides and are compared to SpCas9H840A. Editing quantified by ddPCR. f) GFP insertion by STITCHR with SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 into the endogenous NOLC1 locus in HepG2 cells, compared to SpCas9H840A. Editing quantified by ddPCR. g) STITCHR EGFP insertion at endogenous EMX1, NOLC1 and two AAVS1 loci in Huh-7 cells by SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 compared to SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169,RTmut. Insertion quantified by ddPCR. h) STITCHR EGFP insertion at endogenous EMX1 and NOLC1 loci in HepG2 cells by SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 compared to SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169,RTmut. Insertion quantified by ddPCR. i) EGFP insertion at endogenous NOLC1 by STITCHR, delivered by different adenovirus amounts to HEK293FT cells. Shown is a comparison of insertion efficiency when delivering STITCHR machinery with one vector and guides and template with the other, compared to delivery of guides and template only as a control. Editing quantified by NGS. j) EGFP insertion by SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 at NOLC1 in quiescent primary human hepatocyte cells compared to SpCas9H840A control. 1.4e11 viral copies was used in the dual vector condition; half of that for the single vector payload only condition. Editing quantified by NGS. k) EGFP payload insertion by STITCHR at the NOLC1 endogenous locus in HEK293FT cells, comparing editing efficiencies with and without PAM elimination. Editing quantified by ddPCR. l) STITCHR EGFP insertion at the endogenous NOLC1 locus by SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 and SpCas9D10A-R2ToccΔ1-169. Editing quantified by ddPCR. m) PacBio sequencing of a 700 bp EGFP insertion at the endogenous NOLC1 locus by SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169. Reads are aligned to the expected reference sequences of scarless NOLC1 insertion. Gray bases indicate a match to the reference sequence; red or black indicate mismatched. n) PacBio sequencing of a 280 bp Gluc payload insertion at the endogenous AAVS1 locus by SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169. Reads are aligned to the corresponding expected reference sequences of scarless AAVS1 inseriton. Gray bases indicate a match to the reference sequence; red or black indicate mismatched. o) Additional analysis of the PacBio long read sequencing for complete, incomplete, and concatemeric insertions at the respective sites. p) Schematic of the cross-junction ddPCR assay. Primers amplify across the central junction of a hypothetical concatemeric GFP insertion. Above, a single GFP insert in which the primers are facing in opposite directions and will not amplify. Below, a hypothetical concatemeric insertion in which the primers are facing each other across the concatemer junction, producing amplification. q) Cross-junction ddPCR readout of concatemers generated by STITCHR with SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 and a 700 bp GFP payload into the endogenous NOLC1 locus, benchmarked against synthetic standards r) Cross-junction ddPCR of genomic DNA standards generated from mixtures of genomic DNA from a heterozygous clone containing a 2x concatemeric GFP insertion at NOLC1 with gDNA from WT cells. gDNA was mixed at ratios corresponding to editing efficiencies ranging from 0.01% to 1% editing. Shown is the percentage of gDNA mixing (editing percentage) versus editing detected by cross-junctional ddPCR (measured editing). s) Schematic of ddPCR assay used to assess copy number of insertions. Above, 4 possible insertion outcomes of GFP insertion at AAVS1 by STITCHR: a single insert, tail-to-head and two tail-to-tail concatemeric insertions. Other outcomes are possible that are not depicted (e.g. head-to-head, partial concatemers, >2x concatemers) but would still be detected by the ddPCR design. Shown are primers (black) and the probe (pink box) used in the assay, plus the site of the restriction enzyme Xho1 which separates any concatemers (below), detected as increasing positive droplet concentration. t) CNV ddPCR assay depicted in s), of 10 HEK293FT clones containing a monoallelic, scarless STITCHR insertion of GFP at AAVS1 (indicated with a dotted line), a HEK293FT clone (22n115) containing a tail-to-head 2x GFP insertion at NOLC1 and a negative control (22n22) containing no insertion. Each sample was assayed +/− Xho1 digestion. * = p < 0.05, statistics calculated with unpaired t-test. u) Design of two Southern blots detecting STITCHR inserts at AAVS1 and their expected outcomes. Shown are two designs: an internal probe (left) which hybridizes to the GFP insertion and an external probe (right) which hybridizes outside the insert. For both, shown are 3 possible editing outcomes and their expected sizes: a 2x monoallelic insertion, a 1x monoallelic insertion and no insertion. Other outcomes are possible that are not depicted but will alter the expected band sizes (e.g. 3x insertion, insertion with unexpected insertions/deletions). Shown are the restriction enzyme cut sites, the site where the probe (pink box) hybridizes and, right, the expected banding pattern for each depicted editing outcome. v) Southern blots of 10 HEK293FT clones containing a scarless GFP insert by STITCHR at AAVS1 and a negative clone (WT), utilizing an internal (above) or external (below) probe. Expected band sizes are indicated with a red (inserted) or black (uninserted) asterisk. Error bars represent mean +/− s.d. (a, c, f, g, j, k, r, t) or s.e.m. (b, e, h, i, l, q, r) n = 3 for panels (a-i, k-l, q, r, t), n = 2 (j), n = 1 (o) where n represents biological replicates.
a-b) Circos plots depicting genome-wide insertion sites of payloads by SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 using sgRNAs and payload homologies to a) AAVS1 (chr19) and b) NOLC1 (chr10). Counts are defined as the number of mapped reads occurring within a 5 kb window. c) Schematic of STITCHR using SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 to insert EGFP as a scarless in-frame fusion at the N-terminus of the human NOLC1 gene. The EGFP template is transcribed in a reverse complement manner to minimize background expression in the absence of insertion with 50 nt homology arms. d) STITCHR-mediated EGFP tagging of NOLC1, visualized by confocal microscopy, and compared to immunofluorescence staining of NOLC1. White scale bar denotes 10 µm. e) Therapeutically relevant payload insertion by STITCHR with SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 into the endogenous AAVS1 locus, with sizes and identities of payload panel members shown and 100 nt homology arms. Integration is quantified by ddPCR and compared to SpCas9H840A. For the NGS, shown are the number of total left junction inserts, left junction inserts containing indels and the WT locus containing indels. f) Evaluation of different sized edits using STITCHR at the NOLC1 locus using either SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 or SpCas9H840A. Inset shows payload design and locus schematic with homology arms colored and top guide in red and bottom guide in blue. g) PacBio HiFi long-read sequencing of a 12.7 kb insert at the endogenous NOLC1 locus by SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 using primers that land externally on the 5' side and within the insert on the 3' side. Reads are aligned to the corresponding expected reference sequences of scarless insertion at the NOLC1 locus. Black bases indicate a match to the reference sequence; red indicate mismatched. h) Additional analysis of the PacBio long read sequencing for the 12.7 kb insert at NOLC1 from Extended Data Fig. 10g showing complete, incomplete, and concatemeric insertions at the respective sites. i) Short read sequencing of the right junction of the same sample containing a 12.7 kb insert at NOLC1 used in Extended Data Fig. 10g, showing complete insertion of the right junction. j) Installation of small edits and insertions using STITCHR at the NOLC1 locus, using a U6 promoter for payload expression. k) SpCas9-mediated HDR editing of the EMX1 gene in cells treated with varying concentrations of aphidicolin. Genome editing is quantified by NGS. l) EGFP payload insertion efficiencies at endogenous NOLC1 locus by homology-directed repair (HDR), using SpCas9, at different concentrations of the cell cycle inhibitor aphidicolin or DMSO control. m) EGFP payload insertion (50 nt homology arms) by STITCHR with SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 into the endogenous AAVS1 locus in cells treated with cell cycling inhibitor Mirin or double thymidine. Integration is quantified by NGS and compared to SpCas9H840A. n) SpCas9-mediated HDR editing of the EMX1 gene in cells treated with cell cycling inhibitor Mirin or double thymidine. Genome editing is quantified by NGS. o) Schematic of STITCHR-replace methodology involving replacement of a region of the genome while inserting the STITCHR payload. Top guide is shown in red and the bottom guide in blue. p) Evaluation of STITCHR-replace at the NOLC1 locus using a single guide and homology arms spaced 50–150 bp apart on the genome. R2ToccRTmut corresponds to the RT inactivation mutant: F811A/A812L/D813A/D814A/L815A/V816A/L817A. q) Example sequencing reads of the EGFP insertion site at NOLC1 for STITCHR replace, showing the desired 50–150 bp deletions. r) ddPCR quantification of multiplexed gene integration by STITCHR with SpCas9H840A-R2ToccΔ1-169 at NOLC1 and AAVS1 sites. EGFP payload insertion at NOLC1 is quantified by ddPCR, and Gluc insertion at AAVS1 is quantified by NGS. Targeting conditions are compared to non-targeting guide controls. Error bars represent mean +/− s.e.m (d, e, k, l, m, n) or s.d. (f, j, p, r). n = 3 where n represents 3 biological replicates.
This file contains Supplementary Discussion, Supplementary References, Supplementary Tables 1–13 and legends to Supplementary Figs. 1–6.
Computationally mined ORF list. A full list of the mined R2 ORFs from Fig. 1, showing NCBI accession numbers, the species, the ORF protein sequence, Rfam annotations and distances to preferred insertion sites.
Supplementary Figs. 1–6.
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Fell, C.W., Villiger, L., Lim, J. et al. Reprogramming site-specific retrotransposon activity to new DNA sites.
Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08877-4
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Received: 27 August 2022
Accepted: 07 March 2025
Published: 09 April 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08877-4
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Jackpot.
A ceramic pot turned into a jackpot for a woman on a walk in the Kutnohorsk Region of the Czech Republic. While out on a stroll, the woman happened upon a roughly 900-year-old stash of more than 2,150 medieval silver coins known as denarii.
While the ceramic pot holding the coins was mostly demolished, the coins themselves remain a rich collection. According to a translated statement, they are now being processed by experts from the Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague, and the Czech Silver Museum in Kutná Hora.
Dubbed one of the greatest finds of the last decade, institute archaeologist Filip Velímský believes the discovery is like winning a prize in the lottery—even if someone else was the loser. “It was probably placed in its place during the first quarter of the 12th century, at a time of internal political instability,” he said. “At that time, there were disputes in the country between the members of the Přemysl dynasty about the princely throne of Prague.”
Stashing coins in a ceramic container was meant to be a way of keeping them safe. And the container certainly did it's job, even if the owner was never able to return for them—the coins weren't recovered for another 900 years.
According to the experts, that owner couldn't have been just anyone.“Unfortunately, for the turn of the 11th and 12th centuries, we lack data on the purchasing power of the contemporary coin,” Velímský said. “But it was a huge amount, unimaginable for an ordinary person and at the same time unaffordable. It can be compared to winning a million in the jackpot.”
The Kutnohorsk Region was known for frequent battles for the Prague princely throne, with the armies of individual rival princes repeatedly marching through the area, according to the institute. The experts claim that a large collection of coins found in such a place could mean that they were originally meant to pay wages for soldiers, or were some sort of “war booty.”
Early analysis of the haul shows both that the coins were minted in several places throughout the Kutnohorsk Region, and that they were likely created under the rule of three different Přemysl leaders (likely between 1085 and 1107): King Vratislav II and princes Břetislav II and Bořivoje II.
“The coins were most likely minted in the Prague mint from silver that was imported to Bohemia at the time,” Lenka Mazačová, director of the Czech Silver Museum in Kutná Hora, said in a statement. The coins are made from an silver alloy that included copper, lead, and trace amounts of other metals. The experts hope to figure out the exact composition of the coins to help determine the origin of the silver.
While we may never know the true intentions—or provenance—of the coin collection, experts still plan to puzzle out as much as possible. Mazačová said that museum staff will now register all the pieces of the collection, clean and restore the coins, and subject them to X-ray imaging and spectral analysis to determine their specific material composition. The goal is to publicly display the collection in 2025, highlighting the 12th century history of the Czech Republic.
Tim Newcomb is a journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. He covers stadiums, sneakers, gear, infrastructure, and more for a variety of publications, including Popular Mechanics. His favorite interviews have included sit-downs with Roger Federer in Switzerland, Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles, and Tinker Hatfield in Portland.
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April 9, 2025
4 min read
Scientists May Have Finally Found the Mysterious Animal Hosts of Mpox
A team of researchers traced the wild animal source of the mpox virus to the fire-footed rope squirrel
By Jane Qiu & Nature magazine
Cuvier's fire-footed squirrel (Funisciurus pyrrhopus) in a tree.
ANT Photo Library/Science Source
One of the great mysteries of the monkeypox virus has been pinpointing its ‘reservoir' hosts—the animals that carry and spread the virus without becoming sick from it.
Now, an international team of scientists suggests that it has an answer: the fire-footed rope squirrel (Funisciurus pyrropus), a forest-dwelling rodent found in West and Central Africa.
Although the name ‘monkeypox' comes from the virus's discovery in laboratory monkeys in 1958, researchers have long suspected rodents and other small mammals in Africa of being reservoir hosts. And studies published in the past year have demonstrated that African outbreaks of mpox, the disease caused by the virus, have been fueled by several transmission events from animals to humans.
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Pinpointing viral reservoirs is crucial to breaking the vicious cycle of transmission, says Placide Mbala, an epidemiologist at the National Institute of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. By identifying the sources, scientists could work with local communities to design strategies to shield people from infection—for instance, safe handling of wild-animal meat.
The identification of the squirrel is “exceptional” detective work and provides compelling evidence, says Alexandre Hassanin, who studies the evolution of monkeypox at Sorbonne University in Paris. He and others who spoke to Nature, however, aren't sure that the study definitively establishes F. pyrropus as a monkeypox reservoir, but they applaud the long-term wildlife-surveillance work.
The report was posted as a preprint, ahead of peer review, to the Research Square server on 8 April. (Research Square is owned by Springer Nature, Nature's publisher.)
Although mpox has affected Africa for decades, it captured headlines worldwide in 2022 when the virus sparked a global outbreak, fueled by human-to-human transmission. Last August, the World Health Organization declared another global emergency after a worrisome strain of the virus spread to previously unaffected African countries.
As these outbreaks have become more common, one question on researchers' minds has been their animal sources. A clue emerged in 2023 in Taï National Park in Côte d'Ivoire, where a team of researchers has been monitoring a group of sooty mangabeys (Cercocebus atys) for many years. In late January that year, Carme Riutord-Fe, a disease ecologist at the Swiss Centre of Scientific Research in Abidjan, noticed an infant mangabey with red skin lesions on its forehead, chest and legs. The fluid-filled lesions, characteristic of mpox, quickly spread across its body, and it died two days later.
Within two months, the disease had spread to nearly one-third of the group of 80 mangabeys; 4 of them died. The team identified the monkeypox virus as causing the outbreak and successfully sequenced the full viral genome from two of the infected animals. They were identical, suggesting that the outbreak originated from a single source, says Livia Patrono, a disease ecologist at the Helmholtz Institute for One Health in Greifswald, Germany, and a study author.
But what was the source?
For most outbreak investigations, scientists begin collecting animal samples weeks or months after the first reported cases. Animals don't always carry detectable levels of the virus, and those responsible for the outbreak might have left the “crime scene” by the time researchers arrive, says Fabian Leendertz, leader of the work and founding director of the Helmholtz Institute. This makes it difficult to pinpoint disease origins, he says.
In the case of the mangabey outbreak, however, “we were there when it happened,” Leendertz says. His team has been monitoring several populations of free-living, non-human primates in the Taï forest on a daily basis since 2001 to better understand pathogens relevant to humans.
When mpox struck in 2023, archived samples of the mangabeys' urine and faeces, as well as tissues and swabs from dead animals found in the forest, proved invaluable. Monkeypox virus showed up in faecal samples collected as early as 6 December 2022 from a mangabey called Bako—the mother of the infant that first drew researchers' attention.
Three pieces of evidence then led the researchers to conclude that Bako, who survived the infection without developing symptoms, had caught the virus after eating a fire-footed rope squirrel. The first was that they observed mangabeys hunt and eat F. pyrropus. The second was that they found an F. pyrropus carcass teeming with a virus identical to the one infecting the mangabeys one month before Bako's faecal samples turned positive. And finally, they identified F. pyrropus DNA in the earliest positive faecal sample from Bako.
“It's unbelievable how well things fit together,” Leendertz says.
Although scientists had occasionally found monkeypox virus in squirrels, this was the first evidence for cross-species transmission.
However, Délia Doreen Djuicy, a disease ecologist at Centre Pasteur of Cameroon in Yaoundé, says that the jury is still out on whether fire-footed rope squirrels are a reservoir host, or whether they are merely a susceptible species that occasionally contracts monkeypox and transmits it.
To prove that a species is a reservoir host, Djuicy says, there must be evidence that most of the animals can maintain and shed the virus without getting sick. But there is not yet proof of this for F. pyrropus, she adds.
Other rodent species, such as pouched rats (Cricetomys spp.), have been implicated in monkeypox transmission, too, Mbala says. So fire-footed rope squirrels might be part of a network of animal species responsible for sustaining the virus.
Leendertz says his team will next investigate both ongoing and past monkeypox infections in small mammals, including squirrels, in the national forest. They will study how these animals use the forest habitat and interact with humans.
Consuming wild animals is popular in many parts of Africa for complex reasons, including tradition, subsistence, civil unrest and commercial demand, Leendertz says. Those factors, he adds, along with waning immunity in people after vaccination against smallpox stopped in 1980, might be driving the acceleration of mpox emergence in humans in the past two decades.
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on April 8, 2025.
Jane Qiu is an award-winning independent science writer in Beijing. She has won a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship, as well as awards from prestigious groups such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association of British Science Writers.
First published in 1869, Nature is the world's leading multidisciplinary science journal. Nature publishes the finest peer-reviewed research that drives ground-breaking discovery, and is read by thought-leaders and decision-makers around the world.
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Long live the queen.
If you ever bought a bottle of vitamins, you've probably seen supplements touting the benefits of royal jelly—a substance worker bees secrete from their glands—on the shelf nearby. It can also be found in anti-aging skincare. And it turns out, there is a reason for the hype.
While it is uncertain whether taking royal jelly capsules or slathering it on your face will slow down the aging process, we do know that queen bees can live up to 20 times longer than workers. And some of that might have to do with royal jelly, which queens and larvae destined for queendom dine on exclusively (0ther factors in their longevity include insulin and their gut microbiomes). Despite having identical DNA to worker bees, queen bees live longer, and humans want in on it, which is the reason all those products exist—and why a new research project is buzzing.
The UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) is funding deeper investigations into how queen bees are able to outlive generations of workers. Unlike the honey and bee pollen worker bees eat, the royal jelly reserved for queens is much lower in sugar and rich in vitamins, nutrients, and fatty acids. It also has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. Gorging on royal jelly isn't going to make you immortal, but the ways in which it affects the biology of queen bees may someday be applied to us.
“If we're able to disentangle, and to reverse engineer, how nature has solved these challenges for them, that can be transformative for pausing aging, human fertility, transport of organs and provide new means of fighting disease,” Yannick Wurm, a newly appointed program director who will join seven others in this endeavor, said in a press release.
This isn't the first time queen bees will be in the spotlight (like most royals), but it will build on previous studies that determined some potential reasons why queens live longer than anyone else in the hive. Their gut health has been found to have a significant role in their extended lifespan. A 2024 study by researchers from the College of Animal Science and Technology at Shandong Agricultural University in Shandong, China, found that microbes in the gut of a queen bee allow her to live long past her workers because they inhibit insulin signaling.
“One of the mechanisms by which queen bees live longer than worker bees would be reducing the degree of oxidative damage by upregulating antioxidant genes' expressions via inhibiting [insulin signaling],” the research team said in that study, published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
The insulin signaling pathway is a metabolic pathway—a series of linked chemical reactions that allows insulin to increase the uptake of glucose, or how much goes into fat and muscle cells. It also regulates blood sugar levels by reducing the amount of glucose synthesized in the liver. Worker bees consume high levels of sugar because of all the honey they eat, and the pancreas releases insulin to help with the uptake of glucose from the bloodstream. Since Queens survive on royal jelly, they're not eating nearly as much sugar.
What the Shandong researchers found was that transplanting gut microbes from a queen into workers without gut microbes extended workers' lives, most likely because the queen's gut bacteria regulates food intake. Insulin signaling and antioxidant pathways were also found to be related. Royal jelly contains antioxidants, which reduce oxidative stress, or cell damage from free radicals—highly unstable and reactive oxygen molecules that can break down parts of DNA, potentially causing cancer and other diseases.
In another 2024 study, published in Scientific Reports, a different team of researchers observed honeybee queens and saw that older queens had larger gut microbes, which suggested that there was a relationship between their gut microbiome and immune health.
Whether or not royal jelly (and other aspects of being a queen bee) can extend our own lives remains a mystery for now. But with the upcoming ARIA project, the queen might finally give up some of her secrets.
Elizabeth Rayne is a creature who writes. Her work has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Ars Technica, SYFY WIRE, Space.com, Live Science, Den of Geek, Forbidden Futures and Collective Tales. She lurks right outside New York City with her parrot, Lestat. When not writing, she can be found drawing, playing the piano or shapeshifting.
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April 9, 2025
5 min read
This More Than 380-Year-Old Trick Can Crack Some Modern Encryption
A little math from the 1600s can make what people send to a printer more vulnerable
By Manon Bischoff edited by Daisy Yuhas
Arkadiusz Warguła/Getty Images
Hardly anyone is interested in my tax return—there's not much to it. And that's a good thing, given that an attacker might have fairly easily intercepted the encrypted communication between my laptop and printer when I printed the return in recent years.
In early 2022 information technology security researcher Hanno Böck discovered that some of these encryptions could be cracked in a process that he went on to describe in a 2023 preprint paperposted to the International Association for Cryptologic Research's Cryptology ePrint Archive. His method can be traced back to one developed by the French scholar Pierre de Fermat in the 17th century.
Fermat—most famous for his mysterious “last theorem,” which vexed experts for decades—contributed all kinds of useful things to the world of science in his lifetime. For example, he laid the foundations for the theory of probability and also worked a lot on prime numbers—those values that are only divisible by 1 and themselves.
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Mathematicians suspected they could use Fermat's work to break encryption—and Böck demonstrated that case.
Modern encryption systems are based on difficult math problems. They work like a padlock: the problem (the lock) cannot be solved without additional information (the key). A common procedure is so-called RSA cryptography, which is related to prime numbers. Decomposing large numbers into a product of prime numbers is difficult, making them useful keys.
Prime numbers are often referred to as the atoms of number theory—indivisible building blocks from which the natural numbers are constructed. Any other number can be written as a unique product of primes, for example 15 = 3 × 5 or 20 = 2 × 2 × 5. For small values, it is easy to determine the prime divisors. But what about, say, 7,327,328,314? So far, no computer program can quickly calculate the prime divisors of arbitrarily large numbers.
This limitation is precisely what RSA cryptography exploits. To understand how that kind of protocol works, consider a simplified example, where RSA is used to encrypts data with the help of large numbers. Suppose a person wants to send the word SCIENCE, which consists of seven letters, to a recipient in encrypted form. To do this, they use a large seven-digit number such as 6,743,214 and shift each letter of SCIENCE by the respective digit—so S shifts six letters over to become Y, C shifts seven letters to become J, and so on. The end result is the encrypted word CJMHPDI. A sender can now dispatch this to another person without a listener being able to decode the message.
The recipient, however, should be able to determine the original word SCIENCE, either with the key itself (6,743,214) or a clue for calculating the key. As the former always carries a risk—an attacker could eavesdrop on the communication between the two parties and thus intercept the key—RSA cryptography offers a way of reconstructing the key securely. The basic idea is that before sending the secret message, the sender and receiver jointly generate a key from publicly available information. Security is guaranteed by the fact that the sender and recipient each secretly use large prime numbers, which they multiply together, and only send each other the results of this calculation. An eavesdropper needs the prime numbers to generate the key. But because that person can only intercept the products and cannot factorize them, the eavesdropper is helpless. (The actual RSA protocol for the key generation is a bit more complicated, but that is the general idea behind it).
Nearly four centuries ago, Fermat was working on related problems. He wanted to know how to factorize numbers into their prime number components. He did this purely out of mathematical curiosity—at the time, no cryptographic methods for secure key exchange were known.
And indeed, Fermat found a way to factorize even large numbers that are the product of two prime numbers. His method is not complicated; you can do it with a calculator (though Fermat, incidentally, did not have one). To impress his contemporaries, Fermat demonstrated the method using the example number n = 2,027,651,281.
Fermat factorization works as follows: You take the number n, in this case 2,027,651,281, and take the root of it. As a rule, this will result in an odd value, as is the case here: √2,027,651,281 ≈ 45,029.45. You round up to get 45,030. This number is squared, and the original value n is subtracted from the result: 45,0302 – 2,027,651,281 = 49,619. Now you have to check whether the result is a square number. As it happens, 49,619 is not square.
So you continue. Start again with the rounded root 45,030, add 1 and then square the result in order to subtract the original value n from it—that is, 45,0312 – 2,027,651,281 = 139,680—and check again whether the result is a square number. Once more, this is not the case.
So you repeat the whole thing. This time you add 2 to 45,030 and square the result, from which you subtract the original value n: 45,0322 – 2,027,651,281 = 229,743. Again, this is not a square number.
Fermat must have had a lot of patience. In his example, you have to carry out the procedure a total of 12 times until you find a square number: 45,0412 – 2,027,651,281 = 1,040,400 = 1,0202.
And how does this help? In the above equation, a squared number y2 (in this case 45,0412) minus n equals another squared number x2 (in this case, 10,202). The equation y2 – n = x2 can be rearranged as y2 – x2 = n. The left-hand side corresponds to an equation known as the third binomial formula, (y – x)·(y + x) = n. This automatically factorizes the number n into two numbers y – x and y + x. For the example with n = 2,027,651,281, the two factors are therefore 45,041 – 1,020 = 44,021 and 45,041 + 1,020 = 46,061. Both are prime numbers.
In fact, this factorization method always works for odd n. But computers can only perform it fast enough if the two prime factors of n are not too far apart. And this was precisely the problem that Böck discovered in a program library used by various companies at the time. The prime numbers generated for encryption were not random enough, and the program often selected two prime numbers that were close to each other. This means that Fermat's factorization method can be used to circumvent the encryption.
Böck realized that the printers of certain companies used such inadequate encryption. They used RSA cryptography, for example, to protect confidential documents that were sent to the printer via a network. After his finding in 2022, these companies issued alerts and fixes to address the problem. We can only hope that other companies have closed such security gaps.
In any case, many companies will have to rethink their encryption standards in the coming years. Even if ordinary computers fail to factorize large numbers, it will be different with powerful quantum computers. Fermat would never have dreamed that more than 380 years after his discovery, computers that rely on complicated principles of quantum mechanics for their calculations might make use of it.
This article originally appeared in Spektrum der Wissenschaft and was reproduced with permission.
Manon Bischoff is a theoretical physicist and an editor at Spektrum der Wissenschaft, the German-language sister publication of Scientific American.
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“Everything points to the catastrophic end of a military operation.” Yikes.
When construction workers started churning up skeletal remains, a project to renovate a soccer field outside Vienna, Austria, morphed into an archaeological dig, and it wasn't long before experts realized this field was actually a major discovery in Roman warfare history.
They dug up the remains of potentially 150 males aged between 20 and 30 years, hinting that a “catastrophic event in a military context” happening at the site at the end of the first century A.D.
The discovery of a Roman mass grave—noteworthy in and of itself because the Romans practiced cremation in Europe until the third century A.D.—could be “evidence from the immediate history of the founding of Vienna,” according to a translated statement from the Wien Museum, which announced the discovery.
The archaeologists, brought in by the Federal Monuments Office after the soccer field renovation project started unearthing human bones, discovered that an oval pit roughly 16 feet in diameter and less than two feet deep contained the remains of around 150 peoples—the team discovered 129 individuals, but due to the damage done by the excavation, experts believe the total number could be over 150.
“The individuals were buried without any recognizable order or orientation,” museum officials wrote in the statement. “Many lay on their stomachs or sides, some adapted to the shape of the pit. The limbs were intertwined with those of other individuals. This indicates a hasty covering of the dead with earth, i.e. not an orderly burial.”
With every individual examined a male, most between the age of 20 and 30 years, and in good health combined with the causes of death due to injuries from blunt and sharp weapons, including spears, daggers, swords, and iron bolts, “the variety of injuries indicates a battle and not an execution site.”
With cremation burial common in the European Roman Empire, finds of Roman skeletons from this period are considered rare, leading to this being one of the most significant Roman war discoveries in Central Europe.
“The creation of a mass grave without cremation of the dead suggests a large number of casualties in combination with a lack of time and resources,” the museum wrote. “The battle wounds, on the other hand, rule out the possibility of executions, such as a punishment for military cowardice. Instead, everything points to the catastrophic end of a military operation.”
Experts dated both the bones and the grave goods to more precisely pinpoint the find to the end of the first century A.D. While most of the dead were robbed of their weapons and equipment, the team still discovered a Roman iron dagger with inlays of silver wire, several scales of armor that show distinct differences from known varieties, the metal cheek piece of a Roman helmet, two iron spearheads (one stuck in a hip bone, mind you), and hobnails from shoes that were made with leather and studded with nails, a type of footwear used by Roman soldiers.
The museum wrote that the dagger was instrumental in the dating because its style was in use from the middle of the first century A.D. to the beginning of the second century A.D.
According to the museum statement, historical sources indicate that Germanic tribes had repeated battles with the Roman Empire near the end of the first century A.D., and some of these skirmishes were extremely costly for the Romans. On the opposing side, the evident victory may have led to the founding of Austria's capital city.
“The mass grave in Simmering is the first physical evidence of fighting form this period and indicates this location of a battle in the area of present-day Vienna,” the museum wrote. “The defeat attested here could therefore have been the immediate reason for the expansion of the formerly small military base into the legionary camp of Vindobona—less than seven kilometers [4.3 miles] from the site of the find. Hasenleitengasse may therefore mark the beginning of Vienna's urban history.”
Tim Newcomb is a journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. He covers stadiums, sneakers, gear, infrastructure, and more for a variety of publications, including Popular Mechanics. His favorite interviews have included sit-downs with Roger Federer in Switzerland, Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles, and Tinker Hatfield in Portland.
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©2025 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
April 9, 2025
4 min read
JWST Spots Giant Spiral Galaxy Shockingly Early in Cosmic History
Nicknamed the “Big Wheel,” a giant, spiral-shaped disk galaxy was spotted in an unusually crowded part of the early universe just two billion years after the big bang
By Gayoung Lee edited by Lee Billings
A giant spiral galaxy, nicknamed “Big Wheel,” as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope from some two billion years after the big bang. Big Wheel's starry disk stretches across more than 100,000 light-years, making it larger than any other galaxy disk confirmed from this cosmic epoch.
Weichen Wang/Sebastiano Cantalupo/ESA/NASA
A newfound object uncovered in the early universe by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is challenging long-held ideas about how galaxies form. Dubbed the “Big Wheel,” it's a galaxy much like our own Milky Way—a humongous, spiraling disk of stars, gas and cosmic dust. But Big Wheel is even bigger than our home galaxy; it's some five times more massive and covers twice as much area.
And the weirdest thing of all about Big Wheel isn't even its size but rather its age. JWST has seen it from when the universe was only about two billion years old, which is remarkably young for a galaxy of such grandeur.
Typically it should have taken the whole age of the universe for a galaxy to have grown so large, says Sebastiano Cantalupo, an astronomer at the University of Milan-Bicocca in Italy, who co-authored a recent Nature Astronomy paper about the discovery. Compared with its much smaller, more nascent contemporaries in that bygone era, “you can clearly see Big Wheel is a true outlier,” he says.
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The discovery is part of a broader trend in astronomy, as ever-larger and more capable telescopes look deeper into the universe, gathering light from cosmic vistas further and further back in time. Using JWST and other powerful facilities, observers have been able to glimpse some early galaxies just a few hundred million years after the big bang, says Vadim Semenov, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. Semenov, who was not involved in the new study, notes that Big Wheel is “one of the most extreme examples” of galaxy formation in the early universe, when that process was expected to be “far more vigorous and chaotic, driven by frequent galaxy mergers and the rapid accretion of material from intergalactic space.”
All that primordial intensity comes from the small size of the early universe, which had a higher density of the raw materials from which galaxies coalesce. But the neighborhood where Big Wheel lives is packed with an exceptional overabundance of matter even for that already-enriched cosmic epoch. That's probably where it got to indulge in a “heavy breakfast,” says Chuck Steidel, study co-author and an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology. According to Steidel, Big Wheel is somewhat like “a child that started off as the biggest on the block and ate everybody else's breakfast.... It looks like an adult galaxy at a time when there were only supposed to be children around.”
The study's lead author Weichen Wang, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Milan-Bicocca, was the first to notice Big Wheel in JWST's data. He initially thought the galaxy was an unhelpful distraction to his other, unrelated studies of this particular patch of the early universe. The giant spiral didn't look like it belonged there, so Wang assumed it was an interloper from much later in cosmic time that just happened to be in JWST's field of view. Upon further analysis, however, Wang and his colleagues were able to gauge Big Wheel's true cosmic distance, and they suddenly realized that the object they were seeing was in fact a faraway galaxy “that has grown really, really fast since the beginning of the universe,” he says.
But it's still unclear how exactly Big Wheel got so big so quickly. Matter pouring into growing galaxies tends to spark intense outbursts of radiation from rapid bouts of star formation and the voracious feeding of accompanying central black holes; such outbursts can cut off the flow of infalling matter, pushing material away from the forming galaxy and stifling further growth. “At the moment, I have to say it's a mystery—a complete mystery,” Cantalupo admits. Perhaps, he says, Big Wheel's crowded environment may have allowed for “some previously unknown physical mechanisms that [help] galaxies to grow.”
Semenov offers a gardening analogy: “It is like entering a garden in spring and discovering a perfectly ripe fruit you would expect in late summer,” he says. “To determine whether existing models can explain such galaxies, we need detailed theoretical and numerical studies that capture both the extreme galaxies and the extreme environments they inhabit.”
So, given that we've seen Big Wheel as it was some 12 billion years ago, what can we say about its status today, in our current cosmic era? Not very much of certainty, Steidel says—but its heavyweight status and population-dense environs hint that the outsized object may have eventually morphed into another, more familiar cosmic form. It may have become a giant elliptical galaxy, an egg-shaped collection of trillions of stars. When multiple large galactic mergers occur, this type of galaxy usually forms as a result.
“When we look at galaxies in a cluster of galaxies, they're almost all elliptical, so they look old, and they look like fuzz balls of stars,” he says. “They don't look like disks, but we don't really know exactly what their history has been. So there could be [known galaxies] lurking there that are descendants of things like Big Wheel.”
“One of the really fun things about astronomy is that you often find things that you were not looking for, and they turn out to be sometimes even more interesting than what you were trying to do,” Steidel says. “It's not a straight path all the time, and [Big Wheel] is what I would call a serendipitous discovery. Now that we know what to look for..., that, I think, will turn out to be quite interesting.”
Gayoung Lee is Scientific American's current news intern. A philosopher turned journalist, originally from South Korea, Lee's interests lie in finding unexpected connections between life and science, particularly in theoretical physics and mathematics. You can read more about her here: https://gayoung-lee.carrd.co
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April 8, 2025
Bacterial Vaginosis Sometimes Acts like an STI
Bacterial vaginosis is an irritating overgrowth of pathogenic bacteria. A new study has found that some cases of the condition should be treated like a sexually transmitted infection.
By Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi & Alex Sugiura
Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific American
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American's Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman.
Research suggests that anywhere from roughly a quarter to more than a third of people with a vagina will contract bacterial vaginosis, or BV, at least once in their lifetimes. It involves an imbalance in the microbes that grow in the vagina, with pathogenic strains beating out healthier bacteria. It's not usually a serious condition, but it can put people at higher risk for contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Now some researchers are arguing that BV itself should be treated like an STI.
Those researchers are my guests today. Lenka Vodstrcil is a senior research fellow at Monash University's Melbourne Sexual Health Center. Catriona Bradshaw is a professor of sexual health medicine at Monash University and Alfred Hospital.
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
Before we dive into our conversation it's important to note that while we'll be discussing treating BV as an STI, people can be diagnosed with BV even if they've never had sex. It's an imbalance of vaginal bacteria—and one we don't really understand very well at that—so there are probably multiple ways it can come about. The point of this new research wasn't to figure out how people acquire BV but rather to understand whether transmission between partners can make treatment more difficult.
Now that that's out of the way, let's talk about Lenka and Cat's new study.
Thank you both so much for coming on to chat today. I'm really looking forward to it.
So I should start by saying I'm personally a big sexual health nerd, and when I saw the news release for your study, I was like, “[Gasps] This is a huge deal.” [Laughs] But I recognize that not all of our listeners spend as much time thinking about this stuff as I do. So here's a, a basic question, maybe for you, Cat: What is BV?
Catriona Bradshaw: Yeah, so bacterial vaginosis really has been considered a microbiome disorder, or a dysbiosis, so we see a shift in that optimal vaginal microbiome. So in women an optimal vaginal microbiome actually is characterized by these bacteria called lactobacilli that secrete lactic acid, and we have a low bacterial diversity and a really acidic pH, so it's actually the opposite of the gut.
But in BV we see these healthy bacteria just vanish—they just disappear, and they're replaced by a range of mixed bacteria that we refer to as BV bacteria. And these bacteria secrete chemicals called amines that produce this smell, and they actually form a biofilm, so they create a little sort of scaffold that they all live in to protect themselves from host responses and antibiotics. And so this creates, also, this characteristic vaginal discharge.
And the problem with BV is that we still haven't found a single infectious cause ...
Feltman: Mm.
Bradshaw: That is only present in women with BV and [is] absent in women without, so it's really what we call a polymicrobial infection. That isn't to say that there isn't a single infectious cause; we just haven't found it yet.
So really that is what characterizes BV in the symptoms and what we see under the microscope. But it's common—it affects, really, one in four women globally.
Feltman: Hmm, and so your new study suggests that BV could be considered a sexually transmitted infection. Could you unpack what you did to determine that?
Bradshaw: So the acquisition of BV is associated with exposure to new sexual partners in a lot of studies, it's associated with lack of condom use, and in fact, it has the incubation period that's quite typical of a bacterial STI, so looking like it's about three to four days.
And conversely, what one sees is that when a woman is treated, her rate of treatment failure or recurrence is actually really high—astonishingly high. If you follow women for three, six months, 12 months, you see more than 50 percent get their BV back again. And in fact, this is even higher if a woman has a regular sexual partner: it's 60 to 80 percent.
So it really speaks to a woman being reinfected. Because if you had chlamydia and you are in a monogamous relationship and you do not treat that regular partner, your rate of recurrence is really high. So this profile was really evident to me for many years as a clinician but then evident to us when we did our studies, and every single treatment strategy we tried that is directed solely at women—which is globally what is recommended: just treat women—really failed to improve cure.
And then when Lenka did all the detailed analysis of our trials, this one factor just kept popping out each time: regular partner was very much driving treatment failure. So this finally got to a point where we felt we needed to do a treatment trial.
Feltman: So, Lenka, could you tell me a little bit about the study design and how you were able to show in the first place that BV had this profile that resembled an STI?
Lenka Vodstrcil: Yeah, sure. So we've conducted many studies over multiple years to acquire this body of evidence that Cat has just told you about. So we thought it was time to revisit partner treatment, and there were partner-treatment trials that had been conducted before, predominantly in the '80s and '90s, and all of these partner-treatment trials, very few of them improved cure for women.
But in around 2012 there was a great review written by Supriya Mehta, and that really highlighted that the failure of these trials was likely due to the limitations of the trials and shouldn't be taken as evidence that sexual transmission isn't occurring.
Feltman: Mm.
Vodstrcil: And another big thing in these trials, and another one since then that was well-designed, was that they all used an oral antibiotic in the male partners of women with BV. But since these trials have been conducted, there was a big body of molecular evidence showing—and this is where they use genetic sequencing, DNA sequencing—and what researchers, including us, have found is that the bacteria that are associated with BV are located in two sites on the male penis as well: so inside the urethra, which is the tube men pee through, and also on ...
Feltman: Mm.
Vodstrcil: The penile skin around the outside of, of the penis. So we decided that we needed to try two different antibiotics to target the two different sites of carriage of these BV organisms.
So in our trial—and we ran a couple of pilot studies before we did the main trial—we used this dual-therapy approach for men, and we recruited women with BV that were in monogamous relationships with a male partner, and we used this concurrent dual-therapy approach for couples and treated them for a week at the same time. And in our pilot trials we found that this had an effect on the BV bacteria in men and women.
Then we had to conduct a randomized control trial to further strengthen the evidence that we were seeing. And this is where we randomized couples to either getting partner treatment or to the current standard practice, which is female-only treatment. We aimed to recruit 342 couples to this trial, and we followed couples for over 12 weeks to see if the partner-treatment strategy had a beneficial effect or not. But in fact, after we had 150 couples recruited, the data were viewed by an independent data safety monitoring board, and what they told us is that we could stop the trial because one of the two groups was what we call inferior, or superior, to the other group. And in fact we then analyzed the data and showed that the partner-treatment group was—significantly improved cure for women.
Feltman: Yeah, so I know that sometimes labeling something as an STI can be kind of controversial—there's so much stigma around them. I mean, back when we had our big mpox outbreak here in the U.S., it was mostly spreading via sex between men, and there were a lot of think pieces about whether it would be harmful or helpful to start talking about it and labeling it as an STI. Have you faced any of that same kind of pushback?
Bradshaw: What I would say, as a clinician and from, also, we have—our group has conducted quite a lot of qualitative studies, is that bacterial vaginosis is not an insignificant condition. It is a condition that is associated with considerable distress for women. It has very significant impacts on women's quality of life, including their relationships, and it is associated with a very broad range of complications: it increases women's risk of catching sexually transmitted diseases, HIV, of transmitting HIV, preterm birth, miscarriage.
So far women are told that this is just an imbalance of their bacteria, and they are given cycle after cycle of antibiotics. It's resulted, for many women, in a lot of distress and frustration with the health care profession. And so I think, when we talk about, “Is it stigmatizing to call bacterial vaginosis—or to actually identify that sexual transmission is key to the development and recurrence of BV?” my answer is simply: “It is a balance, and it is doing women an enormous disservice to withhold that information. It is doing their partners an enormous disservice to withhold that information. And so it is important to actually call out transmission of BV, to be brave enough to do it.” And I use the word “brave” because there is pushback about this.
We are not saying that, for women in a situation with highly recurrent BV, that sexual transmission is solely responsible for their ongoing bacterial vaginosis. We know that for some women, once they've acquired it through a transmission event that they actually fail to clear it. And this is probably related to factors like dense biofilm and intrauterine devices—so foreign bodies that help bacteria persist.
So our messaging is really that this trial has proven that sexual transmission of BV occurs. It has confirmed what we have known for years: that it has the epidemiological profile of an STI. It has also confirmed the results from studies and meta-analysis that condoms are protective against BV, which is a very helpful, empowering message for women and their partners in terms of prevention. But it is important to deliver that information in a sensitive way.
So what we do with couples is we talk about exchanging and sharing bacteria. So we talk about exchanging good bugs and exchanging bad bugs, and we often start with analogies like: sharing a glass of water or a drink bottle, shaking hands, kissing and having sex all results in the exchange of good and bad bugs between humans. This is a dynamic process that happens all the time, and BV bacteria are some of the less optimal bacteria that can get exchanged during sex. Men can carry these bacteria in the absence of obvious symptoms, and there is no test for men, so how would a man know that they had those bacteria? So we try and pull out all the blame and talk about this being a shared responsibility, to bring everyone on that journey so that we really try to remove the stigma of: “This is an STI. You gave me this. I didn't have this until you came along.”
It's complicated, but then, all things in life are actually complicated—or important things like this are complex. And I, on balance, I think it is far worse to withhold this information from women and their partners than to deliver it in a sensitive and thoughtful manner.
Feltman: Absolutely. What else are we still looking to understand about BV? What questions remain to answer?
Vodstrcil: Yeah, so Cat just alluded to this: we still don't know what the actual cause of BV is—so whether there is one kind of founder, or first, organism that has to be present before other organisms can come in and that becomes the polymicrobial, or multi-organism, infection that we see with BV. And getting a better treatment for that persistent biofilm or dense infection is something that we also need to develop. When we find that out, we can improve the diagnostic for BV and also make the treatment more specific to the bug that we can then attribute to BV rather than using sort of what we call broad-spectrum, or broad, antibiotics.
Another thing that we still would like to uncover: Is there something that is transferred between couples that is driving that recurrent infection—so is there a specific organism that's sexually exchanged or sexually transmitted? And also, if there is something that we can find in men that's sexually transmitted, could we develop a test for that organism or group of organisms so that then we can bring men into preventative strategies for BV?
And one other thing is: we've just focused this study on women who have sex with men, but we know from, again, the body of literature and also from our past studies that women and other gender-diverse individuals with a vagina can share these same BV-causing bacteria. In fact, when there's a couple where both have a vagina, their vaginal microbiome is highly concordant ...
Feltman: Mm.
Vodstrcil: So we recognize that partner treatment in this group, it is sort of integrated into clinical guidelines, where if someone has a female partner, they're encouraged to go and get tested and treated. But we're also conducting studies to try and inform guidelines in this space as well. So this isn't an exclusive treatment strategy for couples where it's a penis and a vagina; it's also a strategy that could include all monogamous couples.
Bradshaw: I think, just in terms of our messaging, this is a very big change to clinical practice. So we have built a website at Melbourne Sexual Health Center that provides all the information that consumers and health professionals need to actually understand, have that discussion as a couple, as a doctor and a patient, as a pharmacist dispensing. We've got animations of how to use the medication for men, we've got downloadable treatment instructions, and put it up for everybody to be able to access for free globally and to adapt it to their own needs, for their own populations, their own clinical services. We just want to make this as simple and accessible as possible for people so that they can access it wherever they are.
Feltman: Yeah, we'll definitely link to those resources in our show notes. I think it's incredible that you've made that available.
Thank you both so much for coming on to talk us through this. It's been really interesting and hopefully helpful for some of our listeners.
Vodstrcil: Yes, thank you so much for having us.
Bradshaw: Thank you. We've really enjoyed that opportunity to talk with you.
Feltman: That's all for today's episode. We'll be back on Friday with a fascinating story about how certain prenatal tests can inadvertently detect cancer in pregnant people.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. See you next time!
Rachel Feltman is former executive editor of Popular Science and forever host of the podcast The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. She previously founded the blog Speaking of Science for the Washington Post.
Fonda Mwangi is a multimedia editor at Scientific American. She previously worked as an audio producer at Axios, The Recount and WTOP News. She holds a master's degree in journalism and public affairs from American University in Washington, D.C.
Alex Sugiura is a Peabody and Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, editor and podcast producer based in Brooklyn, N.Y. He has worked on projects for Bloomberg, Axios, Crooked Media and Spotify, among others.
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© 2024 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, A DIVISION OF SPRINGER NATURE AMERICA, INC.ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook's former head of Global Public Policy, testified before the U.S. Senate today about the company's relationship with China.
According to Wynn-Williams, the company now known as Meta worked directly with the Chinese Community Party (CCP) to “undermine U.S. national security and betray American values,” she said.
She alleges that Facebook created custom-built censorship tools for the CCP, which gave a “chief editor” extensive power over content moderation to the point that they could choose to shut off service completely in certain regions of China or on certain dates, like the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Meta denied Wynn-Williams' allegations.
“Sarah Wynn-Williams' testimony is divorced from reality and riddled with false claims,” said Ryan Daniels, a Meta spokesperson, in a statement to TechCrunch. “While Mark Zuckerberg himself was public about our interest in offering our services in China and details were widely reported beginning over a decade ago, the fact is this: we do not operate our services in China today.”
Wynn-Williams' testimony was highly anticipated. In March, she published a book about her time at Facebook called “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism.”
The day after the book was published, Meta won an interim decision from an arbitrator, which said that Wynn-Williams violated a non-disparagement clause that she signed when she left the company. But Meta's desire to limit the book's reach seems to have had the opposite effect — now, the book is No. 2 on The New York Times Best Sellers list under non-fiction.
Meta told TechCrunch that the arbitration order does not prohibit her from speaking to Congress and that the company does not intend to interfere with her legal rights. The company also said it's not a secret that it does business in China.
Toward the end of Wynn-Williams' tenure in 2017, Facebook launched a photo-sharing app called Colorful Balloons in China, as well as an app called Moments. Meta points out that this has been previously reported and that it discloses in government filings that it generates advertising revenue from China, even though its services like Facebook and Instagram are banned there.
Per Meta's own 10-K filing, it made $18.3 billion in revenue for 2024, up from $13.69 billion and $7.4 billion in 2023 and 2022, respectively.
Wynn-Williams claims that Meta's relationship with the Chinese government runs deeper, though.
She shared documents with Congress, and Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) showed some redacted versions of these documents in the hearing.
In one email, it appeared that Facebook executives had discussed granting the CCP access to user data from China and Hong Kong.
“Facebook appears to have been willing to provide the data of users in Hong Kong to the Chinese government at a time when pro-democracy protesters were opposing Beijing's crackdown,” Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said, then asked Wynn-Williams if that is true. She said it is.
“As part of the censorship tool that was developed, there were virality counters — so any time a piece of content got over 10,000 views, that would automatically trigger it being reviewed by what they called the chief editor,” she said. “What was particularly surprising is that the virality counters were not just installed, but activated in Hong Kong and also in Taiwan.”
Senator Blumenthal pointed out that Zuckerberg had previously denied under oath that Facebook had built censorship tools to enter the Chinese market.
Wynn-Williams added that if Meta were to share Chinese user data with the Chinese government, from a technological perspective, she doesn't think there would be a way to avoid sharing user data from Americans who had interacted with Chinese users.
She also claimed that Meta had briefed China on developments with various technologies like AI and facial recognition.
“The greatest trick Mark Zuckerberg ever pulled was wrapping the American flag around himself and calling himself a patriot, and saying he didn't offer services in China, while he spent the last decade building an 18 billion-dollar business there,” Wynn-Williams said before the Senate.
“And he continues to wrap the flag around himself as we move into the next era of artificial intelligence,” she added.
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Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. She has also written for publications like Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos.
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Unless Congress asks for the testimony, which is probably why Meta tried to stop the hearing.
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Has Hawley demonstrated similar interest about Elon's business dealings in China? Elon owes much of his net worth to the CCP's Shanghai factory.
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Then show those documents? It's hard to take these allegations seriously when the mysterious proof is only alluded to, not submitted as part of the testimony.
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> Wynn-Willias told senators that Meta built a “physical pipeline connecting the United States and China” and executives “ignored warnings that this would provide backdoor access to the Chinese Communist Party, allowing them to intercept the personal data and private messages of American citizens.”> She said that China does not currently have access to U.S. user data only because Congress “stepped in.”> The pipeline to China mentioned by the whistleblower, the Pacific Light Cable, was never completed.> The cable, which was first announced in 2016 with support from Facebook, Google and other companies, was envisioned as a high-capacity fiberoptic undersea cable running thousands of miles under the Pacific Ocean connecting Los Angeles and Hong Kong.> Bloomberg reported in 2020 that Facebook, Google and other companies abandoned their plans to link the U.S. to Hong Kong. They revised their proposal to build the link only as far as Taiwan and the Philippines, according to Bloomberg.Real talk, I have zero idea how she could explain this one away, other than with “it came to me in a dream.”
> She said that China does not currently have access to U.S. user data only because Congress “stepped in.”> The pipeline to China mentioned by the whistleblower, the Pacific Light Cable, was never completed.> The cable, which was first announced in 2016 with support from Facebook, Google and other companies, was envisioned as a high-capacity fiberoptic undersea cable running thousands of miles under the Pacific Ocean connecting Los Angeles and Hong Kong.> Bloomberg reported in 2020 that Facebook, Google and other companies abandoned their plans to link the U.S. to Hong Kong. They revised their proposal to build the link only as far as Taiwan and the Philippines, according to Bloomberg.Real talk, I have zero idea how she could explain this one away, other than with “it came to me in a dream.”
> The pipeline to China mentioned by the whistleblower, the Pacific Light Cable, was never completed.> The cable, which was first announced in 2016 with support from Facebook, Google and other companies, was envisioned as a high-capacity fiberoptic undersea cable running thousands of miles under the Pacific Ocean connecting Los Angeles and Hong Kong.> Bloomberg reported in 2020 that Facebook, Google and other companies abandoned their plans to link the U.S. to Hong Kong. They revised their proposal to build the link only as far as Taiwan and the Philippines, according to Bloomberg.Real talk, I have zero idea how she could explain this one away, other than with “it came to me in a dream.”
> The cable, which was first announced in 2016 with support from Facebook, Google and other companies, was envisioned as a high-capacity fiberoptic undersea cable running thousands of miles under the Pacific Ocean connecting Los Angeles and Hong Kong.> Bloomberg reported in 2020 that Facebook, Google and other companies abandoned their plans to link the U.S. to Hong Kong. They revised their proposal to build the link only as far as Taiwan and the Philippines, according to Bloomberg.Real talk, I have zero idea how she could explain this one away, other than with “it came to me in a dream.”
> Bloomberg reported in 2020 that Facebook, Google and other companies abandoned their plans to link the U.S. to Hong Kong. They revised their proposal to build the link only as far as Taiwan and the Philippines, according to Bloomberg.Real talk, I have zero idea how she could explain this one away, other than with “it came to me in a dream.”
Real talk, I have zero idea how she could explain this one away, other than with “it came to me in a dream.”
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This is phrasing is very weaselly. All foreign companies in China either partner with or are operated by a domestic company like Alibaba or Tencent. Saying "we don't operate our services in China" is like saying water is wet to people who know what that really means. It doesn't in anyway invalidate the claims made against them.
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It's not clear to me why it matters that Chinese companies advertise on Facebook, nor in what way this would give them leverage to force Facebook to commit the treason alleged by this article.Without further evidence the story isn't really adding up.
Without further evidence the story isn't really adding up.
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It would not require a partnership to buy stuff outside the country
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Now that the Chinese economy has become so important in the world, the ideological aspects are seeping into the economies of all countries, though it doesn't translate well into western politics. I think this is because the western political system was a limited-trust system, it only worked well when the state was anemic; if the state becomes big (cash-rich), companies will find that they can start to earn significant sums of money from the state, they will redirect their attention to catering to the needs of the state and away from the private sector. Unfortunately the western state has no intrinsic ideology, no intrinsic needs or goals, so it will lead to corruption or faux-adoption of external ideologies (as a means to serve private financial interests).Western governments cannot form genuine ideological movements (besides the ideology of economic pragmatism) IMO because their foundations aren't designed to support anything besides that. They are founded on the principles of individualism and limited state power.
Western governments cannot form genuine ideological movements (besides the ideology of economic pragmatism) IMO because their foundations aren't designed to support anything besides that. They are founded on the principles of individualism and limited state power.
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I'd say CCP and many other governments like Russia and Ukraine are FAR more corrupt than the US. Your argument really doesn't make sense.
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Seven years is a long time. Is the person considered complicit?
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang appears to have struck a deal with the Trump administration to avoid export restrictions on the company's H20 AI chips.
The H20, the most advanced Nvidia-produced AI chip that can still be exported from the U.S. to China, was reportedly spared thanks to a promise from Huang to invest in new AI data centers in the U.S. According to NPR, Huang made the proposal during a dinner at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort sometime last week.
Nvidia declined to comment.
Many in the semiconductor industry feared H20s, which are modified to have lower performance than other Nvidia chips, were headed for restrictions because they were reportedly one of the chips China-based DeepSeek used to train its R1 open AI model. Released in January, R1 made headlines for its strong performance relative to models from U.S.-based AI labs, including OpenAI.
Senators from both sides of the aisle have called for restrictions on the H20. Even the Trump administration was said to have been preparing H20 export controls prior to its reversal in course, according to NPR.
While it isn't totally surprising that Trump allegedly agreed to shelve some potential chip restrictions in exchange for a commitment from Nvidia to invest in U.S. AI infrastructure, allowing Nvidia to continue exporting H20s to China would appear to counter the administration's goal of securing U.S. dominance in AI.
Making the move even more perplexing is the Trump administration's decision to keep in place the set of AI chip export rules introduced by outgoing President Joe Biden in January. Those rules layer chip export limits on nearly every country outside the U.S. — including U.S. allies — with harsher restrictions on China and Russia.
Nvidia has called those guidelines “unprecedented and misguided” and said that they're likely to stifle global innovation.
Many AI companies besides Nvidia have leaned into Trump's “America-first” approach to AI in bids to curry favor with the administration. OpenAI teamed up with SoftBank and Oracle for a $500 billion U.S. data center initiative dubbed the Stargate Project in January. Microsoft pledged $80 billion to build AI data centers in its 2025 fiscal year, with 50% of that earmarked for the U.S.
Trump has strong-armed certain partners to get his desired outcome. He reportedly told Taiwanese semiconductor company TSMC that it would have to pay a tax up to 100% if the company didn't build new chip factories in the U.S.
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Some 100 MHz boosts seem to be the only difference over OG Dragon Range.
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AMD has officially announced its Ryzen 8000HX Series of mobile CPUs today, intended for gaming and other high-end applications. Codenamed Dragon Range Refresh, the chips serve as a refresh of AMD's Ryzen 7000HX family, AMD's highest-performance laptop CPU line that has been in production since mid-2023.
Coming in four unique SKUs, all aiming for high-end performance, the Ryzen 8000HX series comes in up to 16 cores and 32 threads, clocked at up to 5.4 GHz. The chips come with up to 80MB of total cache and are paired with Radeon 610M onboard graphics, a two-core graphics solution meant to be supplanted by a dedicated GPU.
Model
Cores / Threads
Boost / Base Frequency (GHz)
Total Cache
Graphics Model
Configurable TDP
Ryzen 9 8945HX
16 / 32
5.4 / 2.5
80MB
Radeon 610M
55-75W
Ryzen 9 8940HX
16 / 32
5.3 / 2.4
80MB
Radeon 610M
55-75W
Ryzen 7 8840HX
12 / 24
5.1 / 2.9
76MB
Radeon 610M
45-75W
Ryzen 7 8745HX
8 / 16
5.1 / 3.6
40MB
Radeon 610M
45-75W
Dragon Range Refresh was leaked several times by AMD partners before its announcement today, with MSI and Asus prematurely announcing the chips in their new products several times since January. Originally expected to be announced at CES 2025, the Ryzen 9 8940HX was prematurely leaked in a listing for the ROG Strix G16 2025 yesterday, confirming its stats and speeds.
As a refresh of the Dragon Range 7000HX series, the 8000HX doesn't offer anything consumers haven't seen before, besides a refined polish on a successful laptop CPU family. Built on the 5nm node, Dragon Range Refresh uses AMD's Zen 4 architecture to bring chiplet tech to high-end gaming laptops. Reviews of the 7000HX series found it to be a fierce competitor against lacking Intel competition, and the 8000HX is expected to be a continuation of the same impressive run.
The refresh doesn't seem to provide consumers with any serious boosts or differences in performance over Dragon Range's first go-around, as can be seen in the chart below. The only change visible from these basic speeds and feeds is a 100 MHz increase in boost clock to the Ryzen 9 8940HX from the 7940HX.
Model
Cores / Threads
Boost / Base Frequency (GHz)
Total Cache
Graphics Model
Configurable TDP
Ryzen 9 8945HX
16 / 32
5.4 / 2.5
80MB
Radeon 610M
55-75W
Ryzen 9 7945HX
16 / 32
5.4 / 2.5
80MB
Radeon 610M
55-75W+
Ryzen 9 8940HX
16 / 32
5.3 / 2.4
80MB
Radeon 610M
55-75W
Ryzen 9 7940HX
16 / 32
5.2 / 2.4
80MB
Radeon 610M
55-75W+
Ryzen 7 8840HX
12 / 24
5.1 / 2.9
76MB
Radeon 610M
45-75W
Ryzen 7 7840HX
12 / 24
5.1 / 2.9
76MB
Radeon 610M
45-75W
Ryzen 7 8745HX
8 / 16
5.1 / 3.6
40MB
Radeon 610M
45-75W
Ryzen 7 7745HX
8 / 16
5.1 / 3.6
40MB
Radeon 610M
45-75W
Part of Dragon Range Refresh seems to be consolidation. Where the Ryzen 7000HX series offered 7 SKUs, the refresh cuts this down to 4. We will be interested to see if 8000HX ever offers an X3D model like the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D, but for now it does not seem like the case.
The refresh was also carried out with relatively little fanfare; where Intel's lackluster 2024 Raptor Lake Refresh was highly advertised and marketed, Dragon Range Refresh was heralded by a simple, graphic-less press release and a few new product pages on the AMD website. Clearly, the 8000 HX series is not seeking to be a bold new step for AMD, but a simple sidegrade, likely at some cost advantage thanks to reusing old wafer designs.
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Major laptop brands will likely begin offering laptops containing the Ryzen 8000HX series soon. We already know from their leaks that MSI and Asus will be among the first to bring Ryzen 9 8940HX to market. Those looking for the best in laptop performance will likely seek out 8000HX, but those not needing the best and brightest can turn to now-last-gen 7000HX machines as long as they hang around.
Dallin Grimm is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has been building and breaking computers since 2017, serving as the resident youngster at Tom's. From APUs to RGB, Dallin has a handle on all the latest tech news.
Tom's Hardware is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site.
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An unsigned agreement between the US DOGE Service (USDS) and the Department of Labor (DOL) provides significant insight into the evolving working protocols between DOGE and federal agencies.
Notably, the agreement, obtained by WIRED, calls for the DOL to reimburse the USDS up to $1.3 million for work done by four DOGE affiliates, or “a slightly different number,” over an 18-month period. The agreement also includes a section titled “scope of work” that details how DOGE will operate with the DOL. Together, these aspects of the agreement give the clearest look yet at how DOGE's relationships with government agencies may be structured.
The USDS is the renamed US Digital Service, an Obama-era agency originally set up to attract private-sector tech workers to the federal government. It has been refitted as Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency's (DOGE) home in the federal government.
The agreement is backdated to start on January 20, the day President Donald Trump was inaugurated, and ends on July 4, 2026—a timeline consistent with the executive order that created DOGE. Paying the USDS an estimated $1.3 million for the services of four employees, or their equivalent, over that timespan would establish an implied annualized pay of about $217,000. (The federal pay scale for career civil servants tops out at $195,200.)
DOGE has spent the last few months ripping through the government, gutting agencies, and pushing out tens of thousands of federal workers in an effort, Musk has said, to eliminate “waste and fraud” and achieve savings of about $1 trillion. As part of this plan, Musk has previously stated that DOGE staffers would cost taxpayers nothing. This $1.3 million figure, coupled with previous WIRED reporting about DOGE salaries, tells a different story. Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
While the agreement does not include the names of individual DOGE operatives, Aram Moghaddassi, Miles Collins, and Marko Elez are named as being at the agency in notes from a March 18 meeting previously reported by WIRED. In addition to other documents obtained by WIRED, the meeting notes, marked “Internal/Confidential,” detail an audit the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is conducting of DOGE's work throughout a number of federal agencies.
“So far they do not have write access,” the meeting notes read about DOGE's access at the DOL. “They have asked; we've held them at bay. We've tried to get them to tell us what they want & then we do it. They only have read access.”
Moghaddassi and Elez have appeared as DOGE operatives at other federal agencies. Moghaddassi has worked at a number of Musk's companies, including X, Tesla, and Neuralink; according to previous WIRED reporting tracking DOGE operatives, he has also been linked to the Treasury Department. Elez, a 25-year-old engineer who has worked at Musk's X and SpaceX, has also gained access at the Treasury and Social Security Administration. While at the Treasury, WIRED reported, Elez had both read and write access to sensitive Treasury systems. Elez briefly resigned from DOGE after racist comments posted by an account he was linked to were discovered by The Wall Street Journal. Elez returned to DOGE after Musk and Vice President JD Vance posted in defense of him on X.
Moghaddassi, Collins, and Elez did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The interagency agreement goes into highly specific detail about what DOGE affiliates are and aren't allowed to do at the DOL.
In the section detailing the “scope of work” DOGE will undertake, the interagency agreement states that “USDS employees will work to support DOL's DOGE team IT modernization under the executive order.” (DOGE teams housed within agencies are distinct from USDS and can include career civil servants as well as DOGE affiliates, who may be directly employed by or detailed to the agency in question.)
The following is listed under DOGE's “scope of work”:
Terms on the interagency agreement require DOGE to provide DOL with 24 hours' notice before “seeking access to each DOL system.” USDS workers are also required to review and sign a form for access to different processes or systems at the agency and cannot use data, information, or documents from DOL systems without written permission from DOL's Office of the Chief Information Officer. USDS workers are also, according to the terms, to report to DOL supervisors.
The DOL did not respond to WIRED's requests for comment, which included questions about whether the agreement has been signed or enacted.
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NSO Group's notorious spyware Pegasus was used to target 1,223 WhatsApp users in 51 different countries during a 2019 hacking campaign, according to a new court document.
The document was published on Friday as part of the lawsuit that Meta-owned WhatsApp filed against NSO Group in 2019, accusing the surveillance tech maker of exploiting a vulnerability in the chat app to target hundreds of users, including more than 100 human rights activists, journalists, and “other members of civil society.”
At the time, WhatsApp said around 1,400 users had been targeted. Now, an exhibit published in the court document shows exactly in what countries 1,223 specific victims were located when they were targeted with NSO Group's Pegasus spyware.
The country breakdown is a rare insight into which NSO Group customers may be more active, and where their victims and targets are located.
The countries with the most victims of this campaign are Mexico, with 456 individuals; India, with 100; Bahrain with 82; Morocco, with 69; Pakistan, with 58; Indonesia, with 54; and Israel, with 51, according to a chart titled “Victim Country Count,” that WhatsApp submitted as part of the case.
There are also victims in Western countries like Spain (12 victims), the Netherlands (11), Hungary (8), France (7), United Kingdom (2), and one victim in the United States.
The court document with the list of victims by country was first reported by Israeli news site CTech.
“Numerous news articles have been written over the years documenting use of Pegasus to target victims around the world,” said Runa Sandvik, a cybersecurity expert who's been tracking victims of government spyware for years.
“What's often missing from these articles is the true scale of the targeting — the number of victims who were not notified; who did not get their devices checked; who opted not to share their story publicly. The list we see here — with 456 cases in Mexico alone, a country with documented, well-known civil society victims — speaks volumes about the true scale of the spyware problem,” Sandvik told TechCrunch.
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Another piece of data that shows the scale of the government spyware problem is that the hacking campaign targeting WhatsApp users occurred over a period of only two months, “between in and around April 2019 and May 2019,” as WhatsApp wrote in its original complaint.
In other words, in just two months, NSO Group's government customers targeted more than a thousand WhatsApp users.
It's important to note that it is not clear if the fact that there is a victim located in a certain country means that specific country's government was the customer using NSO Group's spyware against those victims. It's possible that a government customer could be using Pegasus to target someone outside of the country.
As CTech noted, Syria appears on the victim list, but NSO Group cannot export its technology to Syria, a country that's sanctioned by countries all over the world.
The number of victims also gives an insight into who may be NSO Group's highest-paying customers. Companies like NSO Group, and other predecessors like Hacking Team and FinFisher, determine what price to offer their surveillance products to their customers in part by the number of targets that can be concurrently infected with the spyware.
Mexico, for example, was reported to have spent more than $60 million on NSO Group's spyware, according to a 2023 New York Times article that cited Mexican officials, which could explain why there are so many Mexican targets in this list.
Last year, WhatsApp scored an historic victory when the judge presiding over the lawsuit ruled that NSO Group had breached U.S. hacking laws by targeting WhatsApp users. The next step in the lawsuit is an upcoming hearing that will determine the damages that the spyware maker will have to pay to WhatsApp.
Apart from this list of victims, the court case brought by WhatsApp has led to other revelations, including the fact that NSO Group disconnected 10 government customers after reports that they abused the spyware, and that the WhatsApp hacking tool produced by NSO Group cost up to $6.8 million for a one-year license, which in total netted the company “at least $31 million in revenue in 2019.”
WhatsApp spokesperson Zade Alsawah declined to comment. NSO Group did not respond to a request for comment.
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The Department of Homeland Security will start monitoring the social media accounts of all immigrants to the U.S. for “antisemitism,” effective immediately, according to a statement from the government agency released Wednesday. The announcement comes as DHS continues to purge the United States of any immigrants who criticize the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza, where over 50,000 people have been killed since late 2023.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is a part of DHS, will monitor social media content that it says is “endorsing, espousing, promoting, or supporting antisemitic terrorism, antisemitic terrorist organizations, or other antisemitic activity,” according to the statement.
“There is no room in the United States for the rest of the world's terrorist sympathizers, and we are under no obligation to admit them or let them stay here,” said DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin. “Sec. Noem has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can come to America and hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for anti-Semitic violence and terrorism—think again. You are not welcome here.”
Peaceful activism was previously protected in the U.S. under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, though that's changed rapidly since President Donald Trump took power again on January 20, the same day Elon Musk made Nazi-style salutes to kick off his presidency. The definition of “antisemitism” isn't defined by DHS and has been used as a pretext by U.S. authorities in recent weeks to revoke the visas of international students who have done nothing antisemitic, but instead have simply spoken out against the war in Gaza.
Rumeysa Ozturk, a PhD student at Tufts University, was recently abducted by masked agents of the state near Boston. The secret police wore no uniform and yet just picked up Ozturk because the government says she engaged in “antisemitism,” and support for “terrorists.” But her only crime appears to have been writing an opinion piece in the student newspaper calling for an end to Israel's war on Gaza. Ozturk was quickly flown to an ICE detention facility thousands of miles away in Louisiana, and she has reportedly been denied access to an inhaler during asthma attacks, a clear human rights violation. Ozturk's case is currently being litigated in Vermont, where a judge has denied a request that she be released.
Other activists who've said and done nothing even remotely antisemitic have also been abducted by secret police in recent weeks, including Mahmoud Khalil who's married to a U.S. citizen. Khalil, who led pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University, has been charged with no crime but the U.S. government is still trying to deport him under the guise of fighting antisemitism. Columbia University, like many other universities around the U.S., had $400 million in federal funding threatened by the Trump regime before it agreed to place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department into federal receivership, effectively allowing Trump's government to determine how the department functions.
The U.S. is also shipping people to an El Salvador torture prison under the pretext of going after gangs, though a recent analysis by Bloomberg News found that 90% of the people sent by the U.S. to the country have committed no crime in America. The Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, recently visited the notorious prison, posing for a photo-op that will certainly be in textbooks of the future about America's descent into fascism under President Trump.
For his part, Trump has repeatedly said extremely antisemitic things while still pledging support for Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump shocked the world when he said at a press conference with the Israeli leader in February that the U.S. will “own” Gaza and that the territory should be emptied of all Palestinians so that it can be developed anew.
Prominent accounts on X have called for an investigation into Ms. Rachel, an online influencer who's extremely popular with toddlers. Ms. Rachel, whose real name is Rachel Griffin Accurso, has been accused of disseminating “Hamas-aligned propaganda to her millions of followers” by @StopAntisemitism, which says it has made a referral to the U.S. Department of Justice. Ms. Rachel's “propaganda” includes such inflammatory lines as, “I care deeply for all children. Palestinian children, Israeli children, children in the US—Muslim, Jewish, Christian children—all children, in every country. Not one is excluded.”
The war in Gaza rages on, with the latest airstrike in Gaza City killing at least 23 people on Wednesday, including eight children, and leaving dozens more wounded, according to the New York Times. Roughly 20 people are reportedly missing in the rubble of this new airstrike, but there isn't enough equipment to search, the newspaper reports.
Israel imposed a total blockade on food and supplies entering Gaza at the start of March, the longest ban on food entering the territory since the war began on October 7, 2023. Markets are empty, bakeries are closed and food is running out, according to the latest reporting from Reuters. But if you're an immigrant to the U.S., pointing out this simple fact might not only get you denied entry to the country. You could be sent to an ICE concentration camp or possibly worse, based on the trajectory of the Trump regime's actions.
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"We will track down leakers and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law," a spokesperson for DHS said.
The promise comes as a Tufts student faces deportation over an op-ed.
The fires been described as terrorism by federal authorities.
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OpenAI thinks AI benchmarks are broken. Now the company is launching a program to fix how AI models are scored.
The new OpenAI Pioneers Program will focus on creating evaluations for AI models that “set the bar for what good looks like,” as OpenAI phrased it in a blog post.
“As the pace of AI adoption accelerates across industries, there is a need to understand and improve its impact in the world,” the company continued in its post. “Creating domain-specific evals are one way to better reflect real-world use cases, helping teams assess model performance in practical, high-stakes environments.”
As the recent controversy with the crowdsourced benchmark LM Arena and Meta's Maverick model illustrate, it's tough to know, these days, precisely what differentiates one model from another. Many widely used AI benchmarks measure performance on esoteric tasks, like solving doctorate-level math problems. Others can be gamed, or don't align well with most people's preferences.
Through the Pioneers Program, OpenAI hopes to create benchmarks for specific domains like legal, finance, insurance, healthcare, and accounting. The lab says that, in the coming months, it'll work with “multiple companies” to design tailored benchmarks and eventually share those benchmarks publicly, along with “industry-specific” evaluations.
“The first cohort will focus on startups who will help lay the foundations of the OpenAI Pioneers Program,” OpenAI wrote in the blog post. “We're selecting a handful of startups for this initial cohort, each working on high-value, applied use cases where AI can drive real-world impact.”
Companies in the program will also have the opportunity to work with OpenAI's team to create model improvements via reinforcement fine tuning, a technique that optimizes models for a narrow set of tasks, OpenAI says.
The big question is whether the AI community will embrace benchmarks whose creation was funded by OpenAI. OpenAI has supported benchmarking efforts financially before, and designed its own evaluations. But partnering with customers to release AI tests may be seen as an ethical bridge too far.
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- Low Vitamin D Status despite Abundant Sun Exposure (https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/92/6/2130/2597445)- Vitamin D deficiency can still occur despite supplementation (https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/128762-overview?form=..., https://www.ccjm.org/content/89/3/154, https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/9-things-that-can-...)Thus, you can be deficient despite sun exposure and/or supplementation.You should probably get tests done to be sure.I have MS, I take daily 10k IU. I should probably get some tests done myself.
- Vitamin D deficiency can still occur despite supplementation (https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/128762-overview?form=..., https://www.ccjm.org/content/89/3/154, https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/9-things-that-can-...)Thus, you can be deficient despite sun exposure and/or supplementation.You should probably get tests done to be sure.I have MS, I take daily 10k IU. I should probably get some tests done myself.
Thus, you can be deficient despite sun exposure and/or supplementation.You should probably get tests done to be sure.I have MS, I take daily 10k IU. I should probably get some tests done myself.
You should probably get tests done to be sure.I have MS, I take daily 10k IU. I should probably get some tests done myself.
I have MS, I take daily 10k IU. I should probably get some tests done myself.
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Okay, so the 95% confidence interval is reduction from 0% to 12%, but since this barely is on the other side of p=0.05 the conclusion is fully that the claim is not supported.
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A lot of previous Vitamin D research was dismissed with the claim that Vitamin D would be more effective if you only looked at people with low baseline Vitamin D status. This paper does not show that to be true.
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High-dose Vitamin D reduces disease activity in early multiple sclerosis onset (91 points, 15 days ago, 52 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43469661Over 80% of Covid-19 patients in a hospital study have Vitamin D deficiency (654 points, 4 years ago, 363 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24912172Adequate Vitamin D Levels Cuts Risk of Dying from Covid-19 in Half, Study Finds (372 points, 5 years ago, 211 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24607645
Over 80% of Covid-19 patients in a hospital study have Vitamin D deficiency (654 points, 4 years ago, 363 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24912172Adequate Vitamin D Levels Cuts Risk of Dying from Covid-19 in Half, Study Finds (372 points, 5 years ago, 211 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24607645
Adequate Vitamin D Levels Cuts Risk of Dying from Covid-19 in Half, Study Finds (372 points, 5 years ago, 211 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24607645
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>Vitamin D supplementation to prevent acute respiratory infections: systematic review and meta-analysis of stratified aggregate dataWhat with HN's 80 character limit something had to go!I apologize for making it "misleading" but what would you have done?
What with HN's 80 character limit something had to go!I apologize for making it "misleading" but what would you have done?
I apologize for making it "misleading" but what would you have done?
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In peak summer with being outdoors 2+ hours every day my Vit D was 30 (<30 is inadequate) and drank fortified almond milk daily. In winter it drops to 20 with similar outdoor time. Been on a 50,000 pill once a week since.Maybe someone will share a well informed diet that contradicts my doctor.I get the sense that you have to eat a lot of fish, which introduces heavy metal concerns because of modern fishing, which is why my doctor went the route he did. And how do you know the one type of mushroom actually gets the right light to have natural Vit D—-raw ingredients like mushrooms don't usually have nutrition labels.
Maybe someone will share a well informed diet that contradicts my doctor.I get the sense that you have to eat a lot of fish, which introduces heavy metal concerns because of modern fishing, which is why my doctor went the route he did. And how do you know the one type of mushroom actually gets the right light to have natural Vit D—-raw ingredients like mushrooms don't usually have nutrition labels.
I get the sense that you have to eat a lot of fish, which introduces heavy metal concerns because of modern fishing, which is why my doctor went the route he did. And how do you know the one type of mushroom actually gets the right light to have natural Vit D—-raw ingredients like mushrooms don't usually have nutrition labels.
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FYI, spiking Vitamin D levels in the blood weekly might not be the best idea, though it's not exactly proven. There's a theory that spiking Vitamin D like that can promote blood vessel calcification. There's some more theory that Vitamin K administered at the same time might help.It could be safer to do 5,000 IU seven days a week than spikes of 50K once a week.Watch out, though. I was on a similar daily dose and ended up with Vitamin D levels touching the upper limit. Too much Vitamin D is not good for you.> and drank fortified almond milk daily.Can't say without seeing the labels, but I wouldn't expect a cup of almond milk to have more than 10-20% of your daily value.
It could be safer to do 5,000 IU seven days a week than spikes of 50K once a week.Watch out, though. I was on a similar daily dose and ended up with Vitamin D levels touching the upper limit. Too much Vitamin D is not good for you.> and drank fortified almond milk daily.Can't say without seeing the labels, but I wouldn't expect a cup of almond milk to have more than 10-20% of your daily value.
Watch out, though. I was on a similar daily dose and ended up with Vitamin D levels touching the upper limit. Too much Vitamin D is not good for you.> and drank fortified almond milk daily.Can't say without seeing the labels, but I wouldn't expect a cup of almond milk to have more than 10-20% of your daily value.
> and drank fortified almond milk daily.Can't say without seeing the labels, but I wouldn't expect a cup of almond milk to have more than 10-20% of your daily value.
Can't say without seeing the labels, but I wouldn't expect a cup of almond milk to have more than 10-20% of your daily value.
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see https://www.qeios.com/read/479KRZ
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Well made cod liver oil is tasty and you can add it to food together with whatever else kind of oil you prefer (after food is cooked, not before, as it is heat sensitive). No more than 10 mL/day is necessary.At least at the analysis reports that I have seen in the EU, fish oil has never been found with high content of mercury, even if the fish from which it has been extracted are likely to have been contaminated with mercury. Moreover, cod liver oil is sold in the EU as recommended for children and pregnant women. I doubt that any company would have the guts to sell such products here without taking care to make frequent chemical analyses to ensure that the product is never contaminated.Chicken liver is also rich in vitamin D, but it is not advisable to eat great quantities, because it may contain too much vitamin A (which is toxic in excessive amounts). The amount of vitamin A in chicken liver or turkey liver is pretty much unpredictable, because it may vary by more than an order of magnitude between various producers, depending on how they feed the birds.Most vitamin D3 pills contain vitamin D3 that is produced from sheep wool (i.e. from lanolin).
At least at the analysis reports that I have seen in the EU, fish oil has never been found with high content of mercury, even if the fish from which it has been extracted are likely to have been contaminated with mercury. Moreover, cod liver oil is sold in the EU as recommended for children and pregnant women. I doubt that any company would have the guts to sell such products here without taking care to make frequent chemical analyses to ensure that the product is never contaminated.Chicken liver is also rich in vitamin D, but it is not advisable to eat great quantities, because it may contain too much vitamin A (which is toxic in excessive amounts). The amount of vitamin A in chicken liver or turkey liver is pretty much unpredictable, because it may vary by more than an order of magnitude between various producers, depending on how they feed the birds.Most vitamin D3 pills contain vitamin D3 that is produced from sheep wool (i.e. from lanolin).
Chicken liver is also rich in vitamin D, but it is not advisable to eat great quantities, because it may contain too much vitamin A (which is toxic in excessive amounts). The amount of vitamin A in chicken liver or turkey liver is pretty much unpredictable, because it may vary by more than an order of magnitude between various producers, depending on how they feed the birds.Most vitamin D3 pills contain vitamin D3 that is produced from sheep wool (i.e. from lanolin).
Most vitamin D3 pills contain vitamin D3 that is produced from sheep wool (i.e. from lanolin).
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https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/resources/2020-2025-dietar...I recommend saving a copy of .gov website sources in case the regime decides it is unacceptable speech.
I recommend saving a copy of .gov website sources in case the regime decides it is unacceptable speech.
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Note the article is "food sources" so it includes fortified (dairy, juice) which do not contain vitamin D naturally.
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Nevertheless, it seems that it is not able to substitute vitamin D in all its functions. Therefore it is not advisable to count on it as a source of vitamin D.There has been a company that has claimed that they have discovered a species of lichen that contains true vitamin D. Nevertheless, their advertising has seemed highly suspicious and it looked more like a scheme to separate naive vegans from their money.Even if it were true, exploiting wild lichen would be much more unethical than eating the normal vitamin D3 supplements made from sheep wool. The reason is that wild lichens grow very slowly and exploiting a species for a food supplement would cause a very high risk of extinction for that species.In any vertebrate animal, the liver is the part with the greatest content of vitamin D.
There has been a company that has claimed that they have discovered a species of lichen that contains true vitamin D. Nevertheless, their advertising has seemed highly suspicious and it looked more like a scheme to separate naive vegans from their money.Even if it were true, exploiting wild lichen would be much more unethical than eating the normal vitamin D3 supplements made from sheep wool. The reason is that wild lichens grow very slowly and exploiting a species for a food supplement would cause a very high risk of extinction for that species.In any vertebrate animal, the liver is the part with the greatest content of vitamin D.
Even if it were true, exploiting wild lichen would be much more unethical than eating the normal vitamin D3 supplements made from sheep wool. The reason is that wild lichens grow very slowly and exploiting a species for a food supplement would cause a very high risk of extinction for that species.In any vertebrate animal, the liver is the part with the greatest content of vitamin D.
In any vertebrate animal, the liver is the part with the greatest content of vitamin D.
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P.S. most milk sold in the US is Vitamin D fortified.
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* Adding more Vit D doesn't appear to meaningfully prevent upper respiratory infections.* However, being deficient in Vit D appears to be correlated with a meaningful number of D deficient people who do happen to get an upper respiratory infection having a more serious impact. Basically, a higher percentage of deficient people (but certainly far from all) appear to have worse symptoms for longer and have more trouble fighting the infection off. Whether that just means an extra day of feeling under the weather or that you join the very small percentage of those hospitalized for upper respiratory infection depends on the other factors you already know (age, overall health, etc) much more than on Vit D deficiency. But Vit D deficiency is very probably in the top 5 somewhere behind the two statistical Godzillas at the top, age and overall health (which are overwhelmingly correlated).This is only worth talking about because a fairly significant number of people are Vit D deficient at least some of the time (probably more than 20% but less than half). Who and how much depends on where they live, lifestyle, age, diet, time of year and there is also a genetic propensity for deficiency that's primarily based on race.Bottom line: If you're Vit D deficient then it may be a good idea to supplement a little Vit D which is cheap, easy and extremely low risk (Note: nothing is ever zero risk across a large enough population but supplementing a small amount of Vit D is about as safe as these things ever get). It may be especially worth considering if you're in a statistically higher risk group, location and/or season. So, if you're at elevated risk and can't be younger or healthier, at least don't be Vit D deficient too. Once you're not deficient, taking even more Vit D won't help more (and can be harmful). Mega-dosing can definitely be harmful, so please don't. Starting oral supplements once you have symptoms is also too late to matter.In terms of confidence levels, my sense was there's pretty clearly a meaningful correlation here but causation and relative effect are fuzzy. The correlation mostly comes from looking retrospectively at the Vit D levels of those who have infections serious enough to get hospitalized. However, the Vit D correlation is far less than age or overall health (which are overwhelmingly large). The challenge is looking at it the other way, from the front end, where it gets pretty fuzzy trying to tease out high confidence causal data, narrow other factor's contributions or derive a degree of impact specific to Vit D. There are a lot of potentially confounding factors and Vit D is not usually checked in many blood work panels unless there's a reason to. Worse, long-term diary studies of diet are notoriously inexact. So much so that as an armchair amateur scientist just trying to objectively assess data, I have to attach error bars to longitudinal diary diet studies so large they usually swamp any signal. For example, the question: "Does being Vit D deficient meaningfully increase susceptibility to infection?" I don't think there's sufficiently clear data to make any judgement.
* However, being deficient in Vit D appears to be correlated with a meaningful number of D deficient people who do happen to get an upper respiratory infection having a more serious impact. Basically, a higher percentage of deficient people (but certainly far from all) appear to have worse symptoms for longer and have more trouble fighting the infection off. Whether that just means an extra day of feeling under the weather or that you join the very small percentage of those hospitalized for upper respiratory infection depends on the other factors you already know (age, overall health, etc) much more than on Vit D deficiency. But Vit D deficiency is very probably in the top 5 somewhere behind the two statistical Godzillas at the top, age and overall health (which are overwhelmingly correlated).This is only worth talking about because a fairly significant number of people are Vit D deficient at least some of the time (probably more than 20% but less than half). Who and how much depends on where they live, lifestyle, age, diet, time of year and there is also a genetic propensity for deficiency that's primarily based on race.Bottom line: If you're Vit D deficient then it may be a good idea to supplement a little Vit D which is cheap, easy and extremely low risk (Note: nothing is ever zero risk across a large enough population but supplementing a small amount of Vit D is about as safe as these things ever get). It may be especially worth considering if you're in a statistically higher risk group, location and/or season. So, if you're at elevated risk and can't be younger or healthier, at least don't be Vit D deficient too. Once you're not deficient, taking even more Vit D won't help more (and can be harmful). Mega-dosing can definitely be harmful, so please don't. Starting oral supplements once you have symptoms is also too late to matter.In terms of confidence levels, my sense was there's pretty clearly a meaningful correlation here but causation and relative effect are fuzzy. The correlation mostly comes from looking retrospectively at the Vit D levels of those who have infections serious enough to get hospitalized. However, the Vit D correlation is far less than age or overall health (which are overwhelmingly large). The challenge is looking at it the other way, from the front end, where it gets pretty fuzzy trying to tease out high confidence causal data, narrow other factor's contributions or derive a degree of impact specific to Vit D. There are a lot of potentially confounding factors and Vit D is not usually checked in many blood work panels unless there's a reason to. Worse, long-term diary studies of diet are notoriously inexact. So much so that as an armchair amateur scientist just trying to objectively assess data, I have to attach error bars to longitudinal diary diet studies so large they usually swamp any signal. For example, the question: "Does being Vit D deficient meaningfully increase susceptibility to infection?" I don't think there's sufficiently clear data to make any judgement.
This is only worth talking about because a fairly significant number of people are Vit D deficient at least some of the time (probably more than 20% but less than half). Who and how much depends on where they live, lifestyle, age, diet, time of year and there is also a genetic propensity for deficiency that's primarily based on race.Bottom line: If you're Vit D deficient then it may be a good idea to supplement a little Vit D which is cheap, easy and extremely low risk (Note: nothing is ever zero risk across a large enough population but supplementing a small amount of Vit D is about as safe as these things ever get). It may be especially worth considering if you're in a statistically higher risk group, location and/or season. So, if you're at elevated risk and can't be younger or healthier, at least don't be Vit D deficient too. Once you're not deficient, taking even more Vit D won't help more (and can be harmful). Mega-dosing can definitely be harmful, so please don't. Starting oral supplements once you have symptoms is also too late to matter.In terms of confidence levels, my sense was there's pretty clearly a meaningful correlation here but causation and relative effect are fuzzy. The correlation mostly comes from looking retrospectively at the Vit D levels of those who have infections serious enough to get hospitalized. However, the Vit D correlation is far less than age or overall health (which are overwhelmingly large). The challenge is looking at it the other way, from the front end, where it gets pretty fuzzy trying to tease out high confidence causal data, narrow other factor's contributions or derive a degree of impact specific to Vit D. There are a lot of potentially confounding factors and Vit D is not usually checked in many blood work panels unless there's a reason to. Worse, long-term diary studies of diet are notoriously inexact. So much so that as an armchair amateur scientist just trying to objectively assess data, I have to attach error bars to longitudinal diary diet studies so large they usually swamp any signal. For example, the question: "Does being Vit D deficient meaningfully increase susceptibility to infection?" I don't think there's sufficiently clear data to make any judgement.
Bottom line: If you're Vit D deficient then it may be a good idea to supplement a little Vit D which is cheap, easy and extremely low risk (Note: nothing is ever zero risk across a large enough population but supplementing a small amount of Vit D is about as safe as these things ever get). It may be especially worth considering if you're in a statistically higher risk group, location and/or season. So, if you're at elevated risk and can't be younger or healthier, at least don't be Vit D deficient too. Once you're not deficient, taking even more Vit D won't help more (and can be harmful). Mega-dosing can definitely be harmful, so please don't. Starting oral supplements once you have symptoms is also too late to matter.In terms of confidence levels, my sense was there's pretty clearly a meaningful correlation here but causation and relative effect are fuzzy. The correlation mostly comes from looking retrospectively at the Vit D levels of those who have infections serious enough to get hospitalized. However, the Vit D correlation is far less than age or overall health (which are overwhelmingly large). The challenge is looking at it the other way, from the front end, where it gets pretty fuzzy trying to tease out high confidence causal data, narrow other factor's contributions or derive a degree of impact specific to Vit D. There are a lot of potentially confounding factors and Vit D is not usually checked in many blood work panels unless there's a reason to. Worse, long-term diary studies of diet are notoriously inexact. So much so that as an armchair amateur scientist just trying to objectively assess data, I have to attach error bars to longitudinal diary diet studies so large they usually swamp any signal. For example, the question: "Does being Vit D deficient meaningfully increase susceptibility to infection?" I don't think there's sufficiently clear data to make any judgement.
In terms of confidence levels, my sense was there's pretty clearly a meaningful correlation here but causation and relative effect are fuzzy. The correlation mostly comes from looking retrospectively at the Vit D levels of those who have infections serious enough to get hospitalized. However, the Vit D correlation is far less than age or overall health (which are overwhelmingly large). The challenge is looking at it the other way, from the front end, where it gets pretty fuzzy trying to tease out high confidence causal data, narrow other factor's contributions or derive a degree of impact specific to Vit D. There are a lot of potentially confounding factors and Vit D is not usually checked in many blood work panels unless there's a reason to. Worse, long-term diary studies of diet are notoriously inexact. So much so that as an armchair amateur scientist just trying to objectively assess data, I have to attach error bars to longitudinal diary diet studies so large they usually swamp any signal. For example, the question: "Does being Vit D deficient meaningfully increase susceptibility to infection?" I don't think there's sufficiently clear data to make any judgement.
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Too much vitamin D can cause pretty serious symptoms, including neurological symptoms. This condition has been getting more common since so many people are supplementing.
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This leads a lot of people into slowly overdosing over several years. They start with low levels, get up to mid-range on their next blood test, and think they're on the right track. Continuing the same dose for years can easily put you over the top if you're not careful.
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Everyone's different: what's right for me isn't right for you. I just mean that to demonstrate that it's possible for some healthy adults to take a pretty significant amount every single day and have perfectly reasonable blood levels.
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https://www.health.com/vitamin-d-and-k-8427006
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More does not help by to little will harm.I live where the sun does not shine, so I take some.
I live where the sun does not shine, so I take some.
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It's fat soluble, rather than water soluble
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I have not checked this, but I assume that most excess vitamin D, which is stored in the liver, is excreted by the liver together with cholesterol and other cholesterol derivatives, in the biliary secretion, reaching thus the intestine, and not by the kidneys in urine.
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Therefore a deficiency here is an indicator of sedentary, indoor, face-in-a-screen lifestyles that risk all sorts of poor health conditions.The solution to D deficiency is to manufacture it by touching grass, enjoying sunlight (unprotected!!!) and exercising—not in a gym—but in that extremely large room, lit by a bright, warm lamp that's 93 million miles away.
The solution to D deficiency is to manufacture it by touching grass, enjoying sunlight (unprotected!!!) and exercising—not in a gym—but in that extremely large room, lit by a bright, warm lamp that's 93 million miles away.
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This isn't all about "oooh sooo much indoors too much screen time stop sitting so much lol lol lol". You can go outside all day in the middle of winter at the 45 degree latitude, where a lot of people live, and you will generate zero vitamin D, no matter what you do, because it isn't the visible spectrum you need. You need something that isn't in the winter sunlight at all. AIUI, it's technically not the same part of the UV spectrum that causes sun burns, but you're at least on the right track if you think of it as if you can't burn (modulo melanin), you can't generate vitamin D at all.
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Research out this week might help you plan your own version of the Ozempic diet, with the results of a survey revealing the foods that people tend to avoid, or eat less of, once they start taking GLP-1 drugs.
Scientists at the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station led the study, a survey of past, current, and potentially future GLP-1 users. They found that people were most likely to reduce their consumption of certain food groups, such as soft drinks and beef. Notably, though, people's desires for these foods didn't completely go away.
Ozempic and similar drugs mimic the natural GLP-1 hormone, which helps regulate our hunger and metabolism. The most popular GLP-1 agent today is semaglutide, the active ingredient in type 2 diabetes medication Ozempic and the higher-dose obesity drug Wegovy. Semaglutide and newer GLP-1 drugs help people lose substantially more weight than diet and exercise alone, primarily through reducing people's appetite and cravings.
Ozempic and Similar Drugs Could Help Ward Off Dementia, Study Suggests
According to the study researchers, however, there's still a lot we don't know about exactly how GLP-1 drugs change people's behavior and eating patterns. To learn more, they conducted a survey of roughly 2,000 people across four groups: people who are currently taking a GLP-1 drug for weight loss, people who have taken a GLP-1 drug in the past, people who are planning to take a GLP-1 drug, and people who haven't and aren't planning to take these drugs.
All of the respondents were asked to estimate their daily caloric intake over the past seven days, along with questions about how much they desired specific food groups. The current and former GLP-1 users were also asked if and how their consumption of specific foods had changed while taking these drugs.
As expected, people on GLP-1 therapy appeared to eat less overall than others and less than they did prior to starting the medication. The researchers estimated that people taking GLP-1 drugs ate between 720 and 990 fewer calories than before they started treatment. They also observed that GLP-1 users tended to consume fewer processed foods, sugar-sweetened beverages, refined grains, and beef. People also overall reported eating more fruits and leafy greens, as well as drinking more water, while taking these drugs.
“In conclusion, this study provides evidence that GLP-1s support weight management through calorie reduction and influence food consumption patterns by diminishing intake of high-calorie and processed foods,” the researchers wrote in their paper, published last month in the journal Food Quality and Preference.
Does Ozempic Really Cause Thyroid Cancer? What the Science Actually Says
Interestingly enough, though, people taking GLP-1 drugs still reported having a high desire for these foods. That suggests, the researchers say, that GLP-1s might change people's eating patterns by enhancing their taste sensitivity and/or altering their pleasure response to food. But more research is needed to work out the “specific physiological and metabolic pathways” affected by GLP-1 use, they add.
Either way, these findings should help inform people about what to expect when starting GLP-1 therapy, not to mention the junk and snack food industry. Some companies have already started to prepare for this impact, with the launching of less sugary products aimed at people taking GLP-1 drugs.
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A new review of clinical trial data finds evidence that GLP-1 drugs can meaningfully reduce dementia risk in people with type 2 diabetes.
Stanford Medicine researchers have identified a promising, naturally occurring molecule that could help people lose weight—without the nauseating symptoms now commonly seen with GLP-1 drugs.
New research suggests humans and labradors might be predisposed to gaining weight for similar reasons.
Recent research throws into question whether GLP-1 drugs increase the risk of certain types of thyroid cancer.
A new study is the latest to find no evidence that GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic increase the risk of suicide.
A new case study is the latest to suggest that GLP-1 therapy can tamp down people's unhealthy cravings of drugs like alcohol and cocaine.
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Shopping for streaming devices for your TV almost always boils down to just two questions: How fast is it, and how much does it cost? When we're talking about the Amazon Fire TV Cube, the answers are “extremely” and “21% less than usual,” at least as long as Amazon's limited-time deal that drops the price of the Fire TV Cube to just $110 is in effect.
Blazing, lag-free speed is the hallmark of the Fire TV Cube, with an octa-core processor that's twice as powerful as the Fire TV Stick 4K Max, which is certainly no slouch in the speed department. The Fire TV Cube is also the first streaming device to be Wi-Fi 6E compatible, so the pedal will always be planted on the metal when you're watching your favorite shows and movies.
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When you connect your compatible devices to the Amazon Fire TV Cube, your wish is Alexa's command. You can switch from streaming to cable and from cable to your gaming console by using only voice commands. The included Alexa Voice Remote Enhanced also virtually eliminates the need for multiple remotes — power, volume, channel surfing, and more are all unified in one voice-activated remote.
When you upgrade your streaming to the Fire TV Cube, you're also able to upgrade your HD shows and movies to 4K with Amazon's Super Resolution Upscaling. Your favorite movies and shows that you've only seen in HD will take on a new life entirely when you see them in 4K for the first time.
Nothing kills a streaming experience like a slow connection that causes content to load slowly, and then pause or stop repeatedly just when you're getting into the show. The Fire TV Cube is the first Wi-Fi 6E streaming device, and when you pair it with a 6E compatible router, your days of laggy performance are over. This latest version of the Fire TV Cube also has an Ethernet port for wired network connections.
The Fire TV Cube is universally connectible with all of Amazon's many smart devices, including Echos that can be used as speakers and Ring video doorbells. This blazing-fast streaming device is the ideal hub for your entire smart home, not just the home theater setup. With this 21% deal in place you can upgrade your streaming to the Amazon Fire TV Cube for just $110, but it's a limited-time offer, so be as fast as the Fire TV Cube and head to Amazon now.
See at Amazon
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A newly discovered asteroid is on track for a close brush with Earth—and it might even slam into the Moon. Recently, astronomers got a closer look at the giant space rock, revealing its violent origin story.
Using the Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island, a team of astronomers was able to identify the physical properties of asteroid 2024 YR4 and uncover its potential origin. The menacing asteroid may have broken off from a larger space rock following a collision. It also likely originated from an asteroid family in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter—an unlikely place for Earth-crossing asteroids to come from.
“The shape of the asteroid provides us with clues as to how it formed, and what its structural integrity is,” Bryce Bolin, research scientist with Eureka Scientific, said in a statement. “Knowing these properties is crucial for determining how much effort or what kind of technique needs to be used to deflect the asteroid if it is deemed a threat.” This research is set for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in Chile discovered asteroid 2024 YR4 on December 27, 2024. Shortly after its discovery, NASA designated it a potentially hazardous object, with a nearly 3% chance of hitting Earth on December 22, 2032. After giving us quite the scare (or something to look forward to), NASA removed 2024 YR4 from its naughty list when calculations showed that the asteroid had a near-zero chance of hitting Earth.
Earth Is Safe From Menacing Asteroid—but Our Moon Might Take the Hit
The Moon, however, is still not safe from the flying space rock. NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies recently updated the odds of asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting the Moon, raising the risk from 1.7% in late February to 3.8% based on recent data collected by the Webb telescope and observations from ground-based telescopes.
If it does hit, the asteroid will not alter the Moon's orbit, and instead leave behind a fresh and sizable impact crater. “It's one of the largest objects in recent history that could hit the Moon,” Bolin, the lead author of the new study, said. “If it does, it would give scientists a rare chance to study how the size of an asteroid relates to the size of the crater it creates—something we haven't been able to measure directly before.”
Asteroid 2024 YR4 is estimated to be between 174 and 220 feet (53 to 67 meters) wide—about the size of a 10-story building. It has a flattened, irregular shape, and is about the same density as a solid rock, according to the new study. The asteroid spins in a retrograde direction once every 20 minutes.
Larger asteroids that are 100 meters (328 feet) or more are often called “rubble piles,” and are the remaining fragments that broke off from a larger parent asteroid in the aftermath of a collision. Rubble piles are, as the name suggests, broken-off pieces that clump together to form a loosely held asteroid. There are often large boulders that sit at the top of rubble pile asteroids. At its smaller size, 2024 YR4 may have once been a boulder that sat on the surface of a large rubble pile asteroid, according to the study.
The team behind the study also compared the newly discovered asteroid's orbit with that of near-Earth objects, and found that 2024 YR4 likely originated between the inner and central main belt. Earth-crossing asteroids—those whose orbits intersect with Earth's—often originate from the inner region of the main belt. As their orbits evolve, the asteroids are then kicked off onto a trajectory that sends them toward Earth.
The asteroid may have originated in the central main belt and drifted inward due to its retrograde spin, meaning it moves in the opposite direction of most objects in the solar system. That could explain why 2024 YR4 is unlike most other celestial visitors that cross Earth's path.
When it was first spotted, asteroid 2024 YR4 was 515,116 miles (829,000 kilometers) away from Earth. Since then, the space rock has moved away from us, and its next close approach won't be until December 2028. Ground-based telescopes from the International Asteroid Warning Network have been tracking the asteroid, but it will be too faint to observe until June 2028, according to NASA. That's why it was crucial to direct Webb's attention toward the asteroid, as well as the Keck Observatory telescopes, to gather as much data as possible before it is too difficult to spot.
“The data from our study will be used to assess the physical properties and shapes of potentially impacting asteroids, providing a great test case on the kind of rapid response observations that are necessary to characterize a potential threat like this object,” Bolin said. “The physical information about an asteroid's physical property (rubble pile vs solid rock) is crucial for planning mitigation efforts if necessary.”
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New Webb Telescope data confirms that asteroid 2024 YR4 poses no threat to Earth during its 2032 flyby. As for the Moon, not so much.
Under the new administration, the agency is moving away from promoting its efforts to diversify its Artemis crew.
Firefly's Blue Ghost watched the Sun setting on the Moon's horizon before powering down.
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Instagram appears to be quietly testing locked reels that viewers would have to unlock with a code and a provided hint. The feature is a simple way to increase engagement with the creator's content, but it could also offer creators and celebrities a way to share exclusive reels with their most dedicated fans, who are more likely to know the answer to hints.
For example, a creator may lock a reel with the hint, “my birthday” or “my dog's name” in order to share exclusive content with loyal followers.
The Meta-owned social network was spotted testing the feature on its Design account, where it shared a locked reel that prompts viewers to “Enter secret code.” The hint for the code is “1st # in the caption.” In this case, the code is “threads” — a reference to the first hashtag mentioned in the caption. Once you unlock the reel, you'll see a banner that says “coming soon,” which appears to be the Design account's announcement that it's launching a profile on Threads.
Instagram did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment to learn more about this feature, but the test was spotted being tested on a public account.
The new feature could also be used by creators and brands to launch promotions or marketing campaigns in a fun way. For instance, they could use locked reels for product reveals or to create buzz around launches.
As for regular users, the new feature could be a fun way to share content with specific friends.
Of course, some people may not want to engage with locked reels and spend time trying to find secret codes, especially since Instagram is already flooded with tons of different types of content and features.
It's worth noting that the new test feature is somewhat similar to Instagram's “Reveal” feature that lets you post a hidden Story for your followers to uncover by sending you a DM. That feature launched last year as a way to create more intimate connections on the app and boost engagement.
As with any other test feature, it's unknown when or if Instagram plans to roll out locked reels widely.
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Aisha is a consumer news reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining the publication in 2021, she was a telecom reporter at MobileSyrup. Aisha holds an honours bachelor's degree from University of Toronto and a master's degree in journalism from Western University.
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Hang onto your stuff. That's the advice right-to-repair advocates are giving anyone worried about how the tariffs will hit their wallets—and collections of electronic gadgets.
Trade tariffs touch nearly every product, especially when they're as widespread and sky-high as the ones president Trump announced on April 3. But electronics are especially dependent on worldwide trade. Components used to assemble devices are usually built in manufacturing plants in countries like China, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Cambodia, which are now being hit with tariffs of 30 to 50 percent.
While the price increases as a result of this have not yet gone into effect—and are difficult to fully predict—these economic proclamations have already had broad repercussions. The stock market tanked in the days after Trump's announcement due to “extreme fear” in the market, according to CNN, and there have already been delays while companies assess the tariff impact, like the preorder for the recently announced Nintendo Switch 2.
The economic turmoil and uncertainty make the prospect of buying a new device, especially an already pricey smartphone, laptop, or gaming console, seem like it's going to become a lot more expensive. And if buying something new becomes harder and harder, it makes more sense to keep what you already have going strong.
“Right to repair could not have come sooner,” says Kyle Wiens, CEO of the repairability company iFixit.
Right-to-repair efforts—actions by consumer advocates intended to raise public awareness and force companies to make devices more repairable—have been in the works for decades. In recent years, the push has made great strides. In 2024, the European Union instituted a ruling that requires companies to make devices more repairable. The right to repair has also garnered widespread bipartisan support in the US, even while in the throes of a chaotic federal administration that seems intent on dismantling many of the systems that keep the country running.
Wiens compares the moment to the early days of the Covid pandemic, a time when the future of how people would be able to get the new stuff they wanted looked similarly bleak. In 2020, Wiens wrote for WIRED that the right to repair would help foster resilience in times of uncertainty. As tariffs kick in and a global trade war ignites, the parallels start to feel very similar.
“We don't know what's going to happen,” Wiens says. “So what do we do? Well, repair is just the default.”
Wiens suggests that people should prepare for new device prices to increase by 50 percent or more. If you apply that same logic to the stuff you already have, it means that hanging onto your smartphone or laptop for another couple of years may be a much better investment then trading it in for something new.
"Just expect to keep anything that you have that's durable in any way,” Wiens says. “So durable goods—microwaves, toasters, cell phones, Nintendo Switches, whatever it is, they're worth 50 percent more now than you thought they were.”
The tariff era will require a shift in how products are produced and reduced. Wiens says he has also been talking to workers at electronics recycling facilities and telling them not to harvest discarded products if they're still working.
“Hey, whatever you are going to shred, stop shredding it,” Wiens says. “Whatever materials you're going to export, stop exporting it. That product's going to have more value than you thought.”
Despite the doom and gloom that watching the stock market plummet might invoke in our collective psyche, right-to-repair advocates hope this moment helps make the case for keeping devices in working order.
“I don't feel like the sky is falling,” says Nathan Proctor, who helms the campaign for the right to repair at the consumer advocacy group PIRG. “First of all, Wall Street people are the 13-year-old girls of social commentary. Everything is total drama all the time. Let's not go overboard. Let's see how this plays out.”
Like Wiens, Proctor believes that repair makes society more resilient and will help people get through this where it can.
“It's going to be very disruptive in the short term,” Proctor says. “I'm not sure how long that's going to last or what the impact's going to be. But I do know that a more resilient society is better.”
Leo Gebbie, a principal analyst at the research firm CCS Insights says that another segment of the market that could benefit from higher tariffs are secondhand markets that sell used devices, like Backmarket. They've been doing quite well even before the tariffs were announced, with secondhand devices frequently bought and sold within the US. Now, that popularity is likely to increase.
“They are more cost-effective,” Gebbie says. “There is a strong supply of secondhand iPhones within the US, so for US consumers there shouldn't be a need to import those devices from elsewhere and have them subject to tariffs.”
Backmarket in particular seems to be well aware of its place in this trend, as right now it is cheekily offering a Recession Special where customers can use a code (ELON) to save 10 percent on their purchase. However, if demand for secondhand devices goes up, there could be a knock-on effect where more phones being sold in the US could lead to prices being raised across the board—including in European markets that have tended to have stronger demand for used devices than the US.
“Really we will [only] know more once we see prices change,” Gebbie says. “Obviously consumers are then in a position where they have something to react to.”
Rethinking how we repair and replace our devices already has an analogue for how to guide that behavior. The automotive industry (which is bound to feel its own impacts from the tariffs) offers an example of how to care for products long term.
“Do people buy new cars? Sure,” Wiens says. “Do they keep cars for 20 years? Absolutely. Yeah. Does anyone throw away a car because the windshield's broken? No.”
Sadly, even the repair side of things is bound to feel the effects of tariff inflation. Spare parts and tools needed to fix things depend on global manufactures as much as finished products do. Wiens, who runs a business that sells tools meant for repairing devices, says he will also directly feel the effects of the tariffs and be forced to pass the increased cost onto customers. Even then, he hopes that a silver lining in the tariff chaos will be consumers changing their buying habits.
“Let's stop buying cheap crap. Let's have fewer, nicer things, and let's use them for a long time,” Wiens says. “And so then you say, well, if we're going to stop buying new things, what do we do with the stuff? How do we take care of the things that we have? Well, that's where the right-to-repair world comes in.
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Storage is a hot commodity. No one knows this better than the professionals working with large files on a regular basis. Be it you are a photographer, videographer, or even a gamer, you may be interested in this new offering at Amazon. Right now, the Crucial X9 Pro portable SSD has been marked down by 33%. This brings this 2TB SSD down from $180 to just $120. That's a savings of $60.
Capable of high speeds of up to 1,050 MB/s, the Crucial SSD comes in approximately 5.6 times faster than most hard drives on the market. This makes it ideal for transferring larger data files and high resolution photos or videos. It can even be used for gaming. The SDD is compatible with the PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox consoles, PC, Mac, and Android devices, offering you storage across a wide range of platforms which you can connect to via USB-C. A USB cable is included.
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The Crucial SSD is designed for portability. For all the videographers, photographers, or any professional on the go, you'll have access to a full 2TB of data right in your pocket—without sacrificing speed. It's compact and lightweight so you can take it with your wherever you need. It can even handle capturing 4K and 8K videos from an iPhone directly onto the SSD.
You have no need to worry, taking it outdoors and exposing it to the elements. The SSD is durable, shock-resistant, and vibration-proof. It's built to withstand drops from up to two meters so you can have peace of mind that your data is protected in the event of an accident.
Crucial has been around in the memory and storage industry for a good 25 years. The company has an award-winning lineup of products which aim to maximize storage capacity while minimizing lag times. Crucial is part of Micron which is the fifth largest semiconductor company in the world, holding over 54,000 different patents and compatible with more than 180 thousand systems.
The Crucial X9 Pro SSD is available in 1TB, 2TB, or 4TB, with read and write speeds of up to either 1,050 MB/s. You can get this super compact and portable solid state drive over at Amazon for the reduced price of $100. The 33% discount brings the X9 Pro SSD down from $120, which means you save and whopping $60 on your purchase. For Mac users, you can get the X9 Pro 2TB for Mac for just $130 for a limited time.
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Intended to improve connector alignment and reduce wear.
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Corsair has addressed a growing concern among PC builders regarding the slight play in the 12V-2x6 connector's terminals. The manufacturer clarifies that this wiggle room is standard, falls within their specifications, is intended to improve cable seating, and reduces wear based on their data. It is important to clarify these subtle nuances, especially considering how reports of RTX 50-series GPU connectors melting continue to surface, even when users follow the guidelines.
While it might seem counterintuitive that loose terminals would benefit such high-power connectors, they accommodate minor misalignments and relieve stress. If the cable conforms to the specifications, the primary reason for the slight wiggle room is that the 12V terminals make complete contact with the male pins on the GPU.
To clarify the terminology, "pins" or "terminals" refer to the electrical contact points within the connector housing. The housing or outer shell remains in place, but the internal pins or terminals have been shown to move slightly if force is applied to the cable.
Assuming the terminals were completely rigid, repeated forceful insertions and removals to achieve perfect contact would induce unwanted wear, thus reducing the connector's lifespan. Corsair verified this during its testing. For a more visual demonstration, we can refer to an X-ray shot shared by Jonny Guru, Corsair's PSU expert and renowned hardware enthusiast. The evident slack in several connector pins to the left doesn't translate to any negative impact in practice, as the X-ray scans on the right show all terminals making proper contact with the GPU.
Corsair uses three different vendors for the cables supplied with its PSUs. All of them meet their standard of 0.25mm to 0.55mm of play, including thicker individually sleeved cables. Some are rated at 0.25mm and 0.55mm, with the majority being 0.44mm.
If you find your terminals have too much wiggle room, it's best to contact customer support. RTX 50 reference GPUs cannot detect if each 12V pin is making proper contact. Potential suspects here are internal breaks in the pins or a connector that's not seated correctly. As these topics are closely related, many unsuspecting consumers might mistake the intentional play for a faulty cable or a potential fire hazard, hence Corsair's clarification.
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Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he's not working, you'll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.
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Tariffs are hitting companies hard.
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Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan is projected to have lost around $5.28 million in value as the company's shares took a tumble alongside the rest of the market. When Mr. Tan took the reins of the chip giant in March 2025, he needed to purchase $25 million of Intel stock to make him eligible for the nearly $68 million in bonuses. The stock price around this time was $23.96, allowing him to buy 1,043,406 shares. However, Intel's stock price at the time of writing is $18.90, putting the value of Mr. Tan's investments at less than $20 million.
The board likely required Lip-Bu Tan to purchase this stock to ensure he's invested in the company's performance, which is tied to his results as its chief executive. However, this recent drop has nothing to do with his performance, as he has only been on the job for around one month. Instead, this dip is part of the market chaos brought on by Trump's tariffs, with Intel and many other chip companies hitting record lows.
Some analysts wonder if Tan will purchase more Intel stock at this low price or if the company will launch a stock buyback plan to help reverse this trend. After all, Broadcom just announced a $10 billion stock buyback plan, which helped its stock price go up by 3%. The fabless chip maker said it made this move because it was confident in its products and services despite the ongoing upheaval in the American economy.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan is down 21.12% on his $25 million investment—1,043,406 shares bought at $23.96, now at $18.90, a $5.28 million loss. Is he buying more at this lower price, or will Intel announce a buyback like Broadcom to shore things up?$INTC pic.twitter.com/7errZwLUBNApril 8, 2025
It's unlikely that cash-strapped Intel will copy this strategy, though. The company's finances have reached the point that its former CEO was frustrated with the delays in releasing its CHIPS Act funding. Aside from that, it would be better for the company to focus on its 18A process node, which has already entered risk production, instead of playing with its stock price.
The $5 million reduction in value might seem like a significant sum, but CCN estimates that the Intel CEO is worth at least $593.2 million, which is just a drop in the bucket for him. Furthermore, anyone invested in the market, in general, will likely see a similar drop in the percentage. We'll have to wait and see how the tariffs will play out before we can truly determine if Mr. Tan lost a lot of money today, but hopefully, Intel and the rest of the industry will be able to bounce back from this chaos.
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Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He's been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he's been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.
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While some companies are developing what most people would call holograms, none have allowed for direct manipulation like the kind seen in sci-fi movies—until now.
Researchers from the Public University of Navarra claim to be the first to have developed holograms, officially known as volumetric displays, that users can directly manipulate with their hands. Possible manipulations include grabbing and dragging virtual 3D objects, similar to tapping and dragging icons on a 2D smartphone screen. This technology could have practical applications in educational settings such as classrooms and museums. The researchers will present their work at the 2025 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, taking place in Yokohama, Japan, from April 26 to May 1. The study describing the breakthrough now appears in HAL.
Traditional volumetric displays use a rapidly oscillating sheet called a diffuser. The display projects images onto the diffuser at different points in its oscillation, but it happens so fast that our eyes see all the projections at once as a complete volume. While this produces reliable 3D graphics, they can't be manipulated directly.
“The problem,” the researchers explained in a university statement, “is that the diffuser is usually rigid, and if it comes into contact with our hand while oscillating, it may break or cause injury.”
As such, traditional volumetric displays are usually exhibited beneath a safety dome, meaning that viewers can only interact with the 3D graphics in indirect ways. These indirect interactions include using a 3D mouse, pointing into the dome, or using cameras to track hand movements and replicate them with an avatar, as first author Elodie Bouzbib explained in a video.
To overcome the safety hazards of a rigid diffuser, Bouzbib and her colleagues used an elastic one. As detailed in a university video, the novel design consists of multiple elastic strips lined up side by side, allowing users to interact with the 3D graphics by inserting their fingers between the strips as the diffuser oscillates. Because elastic material distorts graphics, the team had to adjust the images in real time.
With this approach, possible manipulations include “grasping a cube between the index finger and thumb to move and rotate it, or simulating walking legs on a surface using the index and ring fingers,” the researchers explained in the statement. If someone tried doing this with a traditional, solid diffuser, they'd probably break a finger.
Furthermore, “having three-dimensional graphics that can be directly manipulated has applications in education—for instance, visualising and assembling the parts of an engine,” the researchers pointed out. “These displays could be particularly useful in museums, for example, where visitors can simply approach and interact with the content.”
In other words, a real-world holodeck, like the one portrayed in Star Trek, might not be so far off.
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Lazarus' premiere episode on Adult Swim lays the groundwork for a classic in the making.
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TSMC set to spend $200 billion on U.S. manufacturing site
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U.S. President Donald Trump stated that TSMC would be hit with tariffs as high as 100% if it failed to construct production sites in the U.S., reports Reuters. The company now plans to spend $200 billion on its U.S. manufacturing site, according to President Trump. He also denounced a $6.6 billion financial package provided to TSMC to build fabs in Arizona under the CHIPS Act enacted by the former President Joe Biden, arguing it was unnecessary.
"TSMC, I gave them no money, great company, most powerful in the world, biggest chip company in the world," Trump said at the event. "They are spending $200 billion in Arizona building one of the biggest plants in the world. All that without money. All I did is say '...if you don't build your plant here you are going to pay a big tax 25% maybe 50% maybe 75% maybe 100%.'"
Trump says that when he threated Taiwanese chipmakers with massive import duties on their products in the U.S., TSMC agreed to increase its investments in its American operations from $65 billion till 2030 to $165 billion over an unspecified amount of time. TSMC's original plan included four chip production modules at its Fab 21 site near Phoenix, Arizona. The new plan is to build semiconductor chip production modules, two advanced packaging facilities, and an R&D center in the U.S.
This time around Trump mentioned "$200 billion in Arizona," which is higher than $165 billion that TSMC committed to spend in March.
Considering that now Trump mentions $200 billion and up to 100% import tariffs, this might be seen by TSMC and other semiconductor companies as another threat from the U.S. administration. This comment is made as the industry braces itself for Trump's 'chip tariffs' that are starting 'very soon'. the same industry that is trying to digest the 20% tariff on lithography equipment crucial for chip production that U.S. chipmakers (including but not limited to Intel and TSMC) will have to pay from now on. Perhaps, now the most important fab tools got 20% more expensive for producers of semiconductor, Trump mentions $200 billion instead of $165 billion.
Speaking at an event held by House Republicans, Donald Trump said that companies in the semiconductor industry are financially capable and should not get support from the U.S. taxpayers to build fabs in America, thus again criticizing the CHIPS and Science Act imposed by the former administration to motivate chipmakers to build production sites in the USA. The CHIPS Act has attracted over $450 billion in planned private investments in the U.S. from companies like Intel, GlobalFoundries, Micron, Samsung, SK hynix, Texas Instruments, TSMC, as well as their peers from the supply chain, according to SIA.
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Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom's Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
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Impact on costs is expected.
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Intel is introducing new compliance policies for its suppliers, now that the U.S. has imposed new 25% tariffs on aluminum and stainless steel and eliminated all exemptions -- materials that are of surprising importance to the semiconductor industry.
On the surface, one might associate the company with silicon and little else. In fact, Intel uses quite a lot of metals beyond its semiconductor production facilities. Intel's integrated heat spreaders (IHS) use nickel-plated copper or aluminum for cheap SKUs, and CPU sockets and stiffening frames use stainless steel, as do brackets for various add-in-boards (accelerators, graphics cards, ethernet cards, etc.).
Heatsink fasteners are made of stainless steel, and screws are of course made of stainless steel too, whereas cooling systems use heatsinks made of aluminum and copper (including the Laminar RH1 and RH2) as well as fasteners made of steel.
Since Intel uses quite a lot of aluminum and stainless steel, the company has implemented strict requirements for suppliers shipping products containing steel or aluminum into the United States due to updated U.S. tariff regulations effective March 12, 2025. These updates include a 25% additional duty on covered aluminum and steel products and their derivatives.
To comply with customs and avoid shipment delays or penalties, Intel requires suppliers to provide detailed information about the materials used in their products. This includes the weight and value of aluminum and/or steel, as well as specific details about the origin of the metal.
For aluminum and its derivatives, suppliers must declare the primary and secondary countries of smelt and the country of the most recent cast. In the case of recycled aluminum products, the country of origin of the imported article must be specified. For steel components, suppliers must report the country where the steel was first melted and poured and must continue providing a steel mill certificate.
Intel has made available an official affidavit form that suppliers must complete and submit to the provided email address to support customs clearance.
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Suppliers using third-party manufacturers or brokers or purchasing ready-made items from local markets are still responsible for tracing and reporting this information. The lack of traceability does not exempt a product from compliance as suppliers must take steps to gather the data regardless of how the item was acquired.
Even parts like warranty replacements or tools and pre-facility kits are subject to these duties, with metal value defined by its purchasing price before any processing. Intel emphasizes working closely with the supply chain to maintain transparency and regulatory compliance, encouraging all partners to use official channels and documentation to support smooth and lawful importation.
Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom's Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
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Beyond athletic performance and chronic fatigue, some neurologists and psychiatrists have recently suggested that every mental disorder (literally, the entire DSM) has a single underlying cause: mitochondrial dysfunction. If that's true, mitochondria transplants could solve the mental health crisis.
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Here is an article about this (future) technology:https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5511681/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5511681/
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Tim-3 is an immune checkpoint molecule involved in immunity and inflammation recently linked to late-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD), but its role in the brain was unknown until now. In a paper published in Nature, researchers from Mass General Brigham used preclinical models to uncover Tim-3's role in microglia, the brain's resident immune cells, and have identified it as a promising therapeutic target for Alzheimer's disease.
Immune checkpoint inhibitors have revolutionized cancer immunotherapy, and it is exciting that we might be able to repurpose them to treat Alzheimer's disease. Microglia are pivotal in neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration, and therapeutic targeting of Tim-3 in microglia may alter them to an optimal state to fight the disease pathology in AD. "
Vijay Kuchroo, PhD, DVM, senior author of the Gene Lay Institute of Immunology and Inflammation at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital
Using a mouse model of AD, the Kuchroo lab together with Oleg Butovsky lab, at the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at BWH, determined that Tim-3 is only expressed in microglia in the central nervous system, where it helps the cells maintain a healthy state of homeostasis. Tim-3 can also, however, prevent the brain from effectively clearing out the toxic plaques that accumulate during AD. The researchers found that deleting Tim-3 helped kickstart plaque removal by prompting the microglia to eat up more of the plaques, while also producing anti-inflammatory proteins to reduce neuroinflammation, and limiting cognitive impairment.
Over a half-dozen clinical trials are currently testing therapeutics that target Tim-3 to treat patients with immunotherapy-resistant cancers. According to the authors, the new study highlights the therapeutic potential of adapting these treatments to enhance plaque clearance and mitigate neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's disease.
Mass General Brigham
Kimura, K., et al. (2025). Immune checkpoint TIM-3 regulates microglia and Alzheimer's disease. Nature. doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08852-z.
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Investigators from Mass General Brigham and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center have developed STITCHR, a new gene editing tool that can insert therapeutic genes into specific locations without causing unwanted mutations. The system can be formulated completely as RNA, dramatically simplifying delivery logistics compared to traditional systems that use both RNA and DNA. By inserting an entire gene, the tool offers a one-and-done approach that overcomes hurdles from CRISPR gene editing technology-which is programmed to correct individual mutations-offering a promising step forward for gene therapy. Results are published in Nature.
"CRISPR has revolutionized how we think about gene editing, but it has limitations. CRISPR can't target every location in the genome, and it can't fix the thousands of mutations present in diseases like cystic fibrosis," said co-senior author Omar Abudayyeh, PhD, an investigator at the Gene and Cell Therapy Institute (GCTI) at Mass General Brigham and Engineering in Medicine Division in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH). "When we started our lab, one of the big things we wanted to figure out was how to insert large pieces of genes, or even entire genes, to replace faulty ones. This would allow us to target every mutation for a disease with a single gene editing construct."
STITCHR harnesses the power of enzymes from genetic elements called retrotransposons, which are found in all eukaryotic cells, including animals, fungi, and plants. They are often called "jumping genes" for their tendency to move around and insert themselves into the genome. The researchers recognized how the copy-and-paste mechanism they use to move could be repurposed to edit genes at specific locations.
The research team, with lead study author Christopher Fell, PhD, also of the GCTI and BWH Division of Engineering in Medicine, then used a computational approach to screen thousands of retrotransposons to identify some that could potentially be reprogrammed, which they tested in the lab. They narrowed down to a final candidate, which was combined with the nickase enzyme from the CRISPR gene editing system to help seamlessly insert the genes, to form the final STITCHR system.
The researchers plan to continue enhancing efficiency of the system and are working towards translating STITCHR for clinical applications.
By studying basic biology in our cells, we can find inspiration for new tools. These can expand our cell engineering capabilities and lead to creation of new medicines and therapies for both rare and common diseases."
Jonathan Gootenberg, PhD, co-corresponding author of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at BIDMC, member of the Gene and Cell Therapy Institute at Mass General Brigham, and member of the faculty at Harvard Medical School
Mass General Brigham
Fell, C. W., et al. (2025). Reprogramming site-specific retrotransposon activity to new DNA sites. Nature. doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08877-4
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A new study, published in JAMA Neurology, finds that people with type 2 diabetes who take two common anti-diabetes medications had a reduced risk of Alzheimer's and associated dementias.
The drugs in question were glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RAs), like Ozempic and Wegovy, and sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitors (SGLT2is), like Jardiance.
Specifically, GLP-1RA was linked to a 33% lower risk of dementia, and SGLT2i was linked to a 43% lower risk. Other diabetes medications, however, were not associated with a change in risk.
As the average age of the population steadily rises, the number of dementia cases rises in step. Despite decades of intensive research, a cure remains elusive. Although some treatments can slow progress, we are far from a breakthrough.
Adding to these challenges, if an effective drug were found, it would take many years to build up a sufficient evidence base and millions of dollars to bring it to market.
For these reasons, some researchers are focusing on existing drugs. If they can identify a drug that is already widely used and helps lower the risk of dementia, it would be a much shorter road to wider availability.
Some recent research has suggested that type 2 diabetes and dementia may share some physiological similarities, including inflammation and impaired insulin signalling in the brain. People with diabetes also have a higher risk of developing dementia.
This raises an interesting question: If a drug reduces the impact of type 2 diabetes, might it also reduce the risk of dementia? Scientists have now investigated this question, and some evidence does suggest that diabetes medication may reduce dementia risk.
However, as the authors of the latest study explain, we need more evidence. To build the clearest picture to date, they used “a more rigorous methodological approach and robust adjustment for confounding factors.”
To investigate, the scientists accessed data from Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. In total, this amounted to 92,160 people aged 50 or older with type 2 diabetes.
Participants were followed until they died or developed dementia, including Alzheimer's, vascular dementia, frontotemporal dementia, and Lewy body dementia.
They focused on three comparisons:
The scientists concluded that GLP-1RAs and SGLT2is were associated with a reduced risk of developing dementias compared with second-line diabetes drugs.
“GLP-1RA use was associated with a 33% lower risk of [dementia], while SGLT2i use was associated with a 43% lower risk compared with other [glucose-lowering drugs],” the authors write.
Medical News Today contacted William Kapp, MD, a longevity expert and CEO of Fountain Life, not involved in tis study.
Kapp shared his thoughts on the findings, saying:
“The results didn't shock me — but they did give more credence to what we've been observing. Brain and body don't age separately. Metabolic problems such as insulin resistance are linked to inflammation, oxidative stress, and altered blood flow — all of which impact brain health.”
Although scientists do not know for sure how GLP-1RA and SGLT2i may reduce dementia risk in people with type 2 diabetes, the authors suggest some potential mechanisms.
For instance, GLP-1RAs have been shown to:
Similarly, SGLT2is may protect the brain by:
The scientists also explain that both drugs are associated with improved metabolic and vascular health, both of which may support healthy brain function.
Additionally, there is some evidence that these drugs can reduce levels of amyloid-beta and tau proteins in the brain — the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease.
Speaking with the Science Media Center, Prof. David Strain,MD, FRCP, associate professor of cardiometabolic health at the University of Exeter Medical School in the United Kingdom, similarly not involved in the study, explained that:
“GLP-1 receptor antagonists and SGLT-2 inhibitors have been demonstrated to control the sugar, and also reduce the inflammation (a key driver of Alzheimer's disease) and reduce vascular risk (a key driver of vascular dementia) more than would be expected by the sugar control alone.”
“It is therefore no surprise that these data show a lower risk of dementia in people who receive them as part of her routine care,” Strain continued.
This study, which analyzed data from almost 100,000 people is supported by a number of previous studies. However, a paper published in the same journal and on the same day casts a small portion of doubt on the results.
The paper in question, also published in JAMA Neurology, is a systematic review and meta-analysis of 26 clinical trials including data from 164,531 participants.
According to its authors, “glucose-lowering therapy with GLP1-RAs, but not SGLT2is, was associated with a statistically significant reduction in dementia or cognitive impairment.”
So, their conclusions on GLP1-RAs mirror those from the original paper, but they did not find the same effect for SGLT2is. This may be partly due to the short duration of follow-up. The average study follow-up in the meta-analysis and the follow-up in the original study were under 5 years.
As dementia takes many years to develop, this may not be long enough.
“It's still early, and we're still not seeing all the long-term data,” Kapp told MNT. But what we're seeing is that regulating insulin and inflammation might also slow down some of the changes in the brain tied to dementia.”
The inevitable next question is: Will these drugs reduce dementia risk in people without diabetes?
“If the benefit is from reducing insulin resistance or inflammation, it's possible that these drugs could be good for people without diabetes,” Kapp told MNT before injecting some caution.
“Just because something is good for one group doesn't mean it is for others. And there are always risks to long-term use,” he warned.
For now, the jury is — at least in part — out. We may have to wait for longer studies before we can draw solid conclusions. Still, it is looking increasingly likely that GLP1-RAs might reduce the risk of dementia for people with type 2 diabetes, which is certainly a positive finding.
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A study carried out by researchers from the University of Granada (UGR), in collaboration with the Andalusian Association of Midwives, has determined that the healthcare provided by these qualified professionals has a positive impact on health and on the functioning of healthcare systems internationally.
The umbrella review was based on a sample of 228,509 pregnant women, 72,388 postpartum women and 7,931 midwives from various countries, including Australia, Iran, Spain, the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Canada and China. The article, which appears in Matronas Hoy, a journal published by the Spanish Association of Midwives, was written by Rafael Caparrós González, a researcher at the UGR's Department of Nursing, and his team.
«Midwifery is an internationally recognised profession in all health systems and midwives are considered essential figures in the sexual and reproductive health of women throughout their lives, and in the overall health of newborns up to 28 days after birth,» says Caparrós.
Every year, more than 134 million childbirths take place around the world, often benefiting from the assistance of qualified midwives. The UGR researcher points out that the healthcare provided by midwives favours normal childbirth (eutocia) and reduces the need for medical intervention. Midwives are also able to reduce the number of induced births. In this regard, there is scientific evidence that children born through induced labour are at a higher risk of developing neurological disorders by age 12.
«In addition, according to the World Health Organization, women assisted by qualified midwives are more likely to continue breastfeeding six months after giving birth, which has been shown to be neuroprotective for babies,» adds Caparrós.
This professional care also has a positive impact on perinatal mental health, i.e. the mental health of women during pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period, by reducing levels of tokophobia (fear of childbirth), anxiety, and stress, which in turn leads to less frequent use of epidurals and medical instruments during childbirth. According to this macro-study, qualified midwives are also able to detect and screen for certain perinatal mental health problems.
The research shows that these professionals save healthcare systems around the world millions of euros. «In Australia, it has been calculated that midwives generate savings of 12 million dollars a year. With regard to breastfeeding in Spain, the savings could reach 5.6 million euros per year for each percentage point increase in exclusive breastfeeding rates. And in England, the savings from improved perinatal mental health generate savings of approximately 6.6 million pounds per year,» the researcher concludes.
University of Granada
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Cancer diagnoses traditionally require invasive or labor-intensive procedures such as tissue biopsies. Now, research published in ACS Central Science reveals a method that uses pulsed infrared light to identify molecular profiles in blood plasma that could indicate the presence of certain common cancers. In this proof-of-concept study, blood plasma from more than 2,000 people was analyzed to link molecular patterns to lung cancer, extrapolating a potential "cancer fingerprint."
Plasma is the liquid portion of blood, depleted of any cells. It carries diverse molecules such as proteins, metabolites, lipids and salts throughout the body. Some molecules carried by blood plasma indicate potential health conditions. For example, unusually high levels of prostate-specific antigen are used to screen for prostate cancer. Theoretically, a medical test that measures a broad range of molecules could identify a pattern specific to different cancers, leading to quicker diagnoses and reduced costs. To look for telltale chemical patterns of cancer, Mihaela Žigman and colleagues tested a technique called electric-field molecular fingerprinting that uses pulsed infrared light to profile complex molecular mixtures in blood plasma.
First, the researchers used the electric-field molecular fingerprinting technique to send ultra-short bursts of infrared light through plasma. They analyzed samples from 2,533 study participants, including people with lung, prostate, breast or bladder cancer and those without cancer. For each sample, they recorded the pattern of light emitted by the molecular mixtures in the plasma - called an "infrared molecular fingerprint."
Using these complex patterns from individuals with and without cancer, the researchers taught a machine learning model to identify molecular signatures associated with the four types of cancer. The computer model was tested on a separate subset of participants' samples to see how well the model could perform on unseen test data. The analytical technique demonstrated a convincing level of accuracy (up to 81%) in detecting lung cancer-specific infrared signatures and differentiating them from control samples obtained from individuals without cancer. However, the computer model's performance had lower success rates detecting the other three cancers. In the future, the researchers aim to expand and test the approach to identify additional cancer types and other health conditions.
Laser-based infrared molecular fingerprinting detects cancer, demonstrating its potential for clinical diagnostics. With further technological developments and independent validation in sufficiently powered clinical studies, it could establish generalizable applications and translate into clinical practice - advancing the way we diagnose and screen for cancer today."
Mihaela Žigman
American Chemical Society
Kepesidis, K. V., et al. (2025) Electric-Field Molecular Fingerprinting to Probe Cancer. ACS Central Science. doi.org/10.1021/acscentsci.4c02164.
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COMMENTARY
DISCLOSURES Authors and DisclosuresAuthor
Bonnie Word, MD
Retired Director, Houston Travel Medicine Clinic, Houston, Texas
Disclosure: Bonnie Word, MD, has disclosed the following relevant financial relationships:Serve(d) as a director, officer, partner, employee, advisor, consultant, or trustee for: Infectious Diseases Society of AmericaServe(d) as a speaker or a member of a speaker's bureau for: Infectious Diseases Society of AmericaReceived income in an amount equal to or greater than $250 from: Infectious Diseases Society of America
| April 09, 2025
Disclosure: Bonnie Word, MD, has disclosed the following relevant financial relationships:Serve(d) as a director, officer, partner, employee, advisor, consultant, or trustee for: Infectious Diseases Society of AmericaServe(d) as a speaker or a member of a speaker's bureau for: Infectious Diseases Society of AmericaReceived income in an amount equal to or greater than $250 from: Infectious Diseases Society of America
The United States immunization program stands as a notable public health accomplishment. As pediatricians, we have spearheaded efforts to educate parents and support vaccine recommendations, leading to significant reductions or eliminations of numerous infectious diseases in the United States. In January 2025, Texas reported a measles outbreak. We were unprepared for the report of an unvaccinated child's death, the first measles-related fatality since 2019. Many were alarmed by the response of Health and Human Services Head Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, who downplayed the severity of the situation by stating, "Outbreaks happen all the time... healthy children don't die from measles," and suggested that diet and vitamins could prevent infectious diseases without urging vaccination.
Tables 1 and 2 show the impact of administering immunizations. The US program has achieved a level of success such that many healthcare providers have never encountered patients with several of the listed diseases. The recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) are based on scientific evidence. A review of vaccine development and the rationale behind the CDC's involvement in the US immunization program follows.
Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine in 1796, marking the start of the vaccine era. Between 1914 and 1955, seven vaccines were licensed in the US, including rabies, typhoid, pertussis, influenza, tetanus, diphtheria toxoids, and polio. After the severe polio epidemic in 1952, parents eagerly sought the inactivated polio vaccine approved in 1955. Congress passed the Polio Vaccine Assistance Act to fund CDC efforts to provide vaccines. In 1962, President Kennedy signed the Vaccination Assistance Act for mass immunization campaigns. The Federal Immunization Grant Program followed in 1963, funding states to purchase vaccines and support immunization programs authorized under section 317. At that time, only diphtheria-tetanus-polio and smallpox vaccines were available.
The CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) was established in 1964. It is a federal advisory committee charged to review current licensed vaccines and all newly licensed vaccines, and to make recommendations for their use to the CDC director for the US civilian population.
Between 1963 and 1969, oral polio, rubella, and both live and inactivated measles vaccines were licensed. The inactivated measles formulation was withdrawn from the market in 1967. In 1964, a significant rubella epidemic occurred, resulting in 12.5 million infections, including 50,000 pregnant women. This outbreak led to the birth of 20,000 neonates with congenital rubella syndrome, along with an increase in fetal losses (11,250) and neonatal deaths (2100). Measles remained a concern, with 500,000 cases occurring annually. In 1966, the CDC launched its first measles eradication campaign; within 2 years, the incidence had dropped by 90%.
In the US, because of our immunization program, the last case of naturally acquired smallpox occurred in 1949, and in 1971, ACIP no longer recommended the routine administration of the smallpox vaccine. However, smallpox remained an issue globally, and proof of vaccine receipt was often required for international travel.
In 1966, the World Health Organization launched a global smallpox eradication program, with 44 countries participating. The global eradication of smallpox was officially declared in 1980, following the last reported case in Somalia in October 1977.
Vaccine development remained robust from 1977 to 2024. Over 20 new vaccines or new formulations of older ones were licensed, and ACIP recommendations for use were published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Not all licensed vaccines are recommended for routine use; many are intended for international travel or specific populations, such as military personnel or laboratory staff.
In 1995, the first harmonized childhood immunization schedule was issued by ACIP, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. This schedule is subsequently updated every January. As an intern in the early 1980s, I saw three vaccines on the schedule providing protection against seven diseases. Currently, there are 12 vaccines providing protection against 16 diseases on the routine childhood schedule, and four vaccines providing protection against six diseases on the routine adolescent schedule. Many, including myself, have observed the decline in cases of Haemophilus influenzae type b, invasive pneumococcal disease, rotavirus, and varicella since the vaccines were licensed.
However, the current measles outbreak is concerning. Historically, we have experienced small outbreaks, typically secondary to international travel in unvaccinated individuals. In 2024, the CDC reported a total of 285 cases of measles from 33 jurisdictions, 198 of which were associated with 16 outbreaks. As of March 24, 2025, 350 outbreak-related cases have been reported from Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma alone. There are additional unrelated measles cases from 10 other jurisdictions.
New leadership at the CDC, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s suggestion to review the link between vaccines and autism, may unnecessarily raise parents' concerns about vaccine safety. Extensive research has consistently demonstrated that vaccines are both safe and effective. The question he raises has been answered. Extensive scientific research has demonstrated that there is no correlation between vaccines and autism. Conducting this study again diverts resources from essential research, such as determining the causes of autism. It may also result in lower immunization rates, potentially leading to a resurgence of preventable diseases.
For the 2023-2024 school year, CDC reported US kindergarten immunization rates: DTaP (92.3%), HBV (93%), MMR (92.7%), polio (93%), and varicella (92.6%), all showing declines from 2022-2023. Vaccine exemptions increased to 3.3%, with nonmedical exemptions rising from 1.9% to 3.1%. As the primary care provider, you are a highly trusted information source. We must continue to safeguard our patients and educate their families to ensure they have the opportunity to lead a full and productive life. Our goal is to prevent additional measles cases and other vaccine-preventable diseases from resurfacing. Mr Kennedy has limited the vaccine information routinely available on the CDC website. Additional sources:
CDC/ACIP: Vaccines and Immunizations American Academy of Pediatrics Immunize.org National Foundation for Infectious Diseases
Parental information:
HealthyChildren.org VaccineInformation.org Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Vaccine Education Center
Vapourtec's pioneering eBPR is an innovative, self-contained, electronically adjustable back pressure regulator that does not require any external reference gas pressure.
Back pressure regulators (BPR) have, until now, been fixed and manually or electronically adjustable through the external control of gas pressure.
Vapourtec MD Duncan Guthrie explained: "A BPR is a critical part of any flow chemistry system. It regulates the pressure at the inlet by opening up as necessary to precisely maintain the desired upstream pressure which is usually the reactor pressure.
"Additionally, the BPR has applications in most chemical processes for providing pressure relief for liquid, gas or mixed fluids.
"The wetted flow path of the Vapourtec eBPR has only Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) and Perfluoroalkoxy alkanes (PFA) fluoropolymers contact surfaces," he added.
The stats are impressive with Vapourtec's eBPR delivering precise control of back pressure in the range 0.5 to 20 bar (g) over a flowrate range of 0.05 ml/min to 30 ml/min. It works with fluid temperatures up to 100 C.
The eBPR is available with or without an integrated user interface with both options having the choice of remotely setting back pressure by serial commands using RS232 protocols.
The eBPR is a game changer when it comes to back pressure regulation offering flexibility, precise control and increased scope for novel chemistry."
Duncan Guthrie, MD, Vapourtec
Vapourtec
Posted in: Device / Technology News
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Dr. Pascale Allotey advocates for comprehensive maternal health policies, stressing the importance of women's voices in shaping effective healthcare solutions.
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Oregon State University researchers have discovered a way to get anti-inflammatory medicine across the blood-brain barrier, opening the door to potential new therapies for a range of conditions, including Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease and cancer cachexia.
The delivery method involves specially engineered nanoparticles, tiny bits of matter no larger than 100 billionths of a meter.
Tested in a mouse model, the dual peptide-functionalized polymeric nanocarriers reached their intended destination, the hypothalamus, and delivered a drug that inhibits a key protein associated with inflammation.
"Our work presents a significant breakthrough," said Oleh Taratula, professor in the OSU College of Pharmacy.
Findings were published today in Advanced Healthcare Materials.
The hypothalamus is a small but vital part of the brain situated below the thalamus and above the brainstem, and it plays a key role in maintaining homeostasis – the body's internal balance. It regulates body temperature, manages sleep cycles, hormone production and emotional responses, and controls hunger and thirst.
In this study, researchers specifically looked at the hypothalamus as it pertains to cachexia, a deadly weight-loss condition associated with cancers of the ovaries, stomach, lungs and pancreas and other chronic conditions such as renal failure, cystic fibrosis, Crohn's disease, rheumatoid arthritis and HIV.
People with cancer cachexia will lose weight even if they eat, and not just fat but muscle mass as well. The debilitating syndrome affects up to 80% of advanced cancer patients and kills as many as 30% of the cancer patients it afflicts.
Inflammation of the hypothalamus plays a pivotal role in dysregulating those patients' appetite and metabolism. As cachexia progresses, it significantly impacts quality of life, treatment tolerance and overall survival chances."
Oleh Taratula, Professor, OSU College of Pharmacy
The systemic delivery of anti-inflammatory agents, including the IRAK4 inhibitors used in this research, to the hypothalamus presents significant challenges, Taratula said, mainly because of the restrictive nature of the blood-brain barrier.
The blood-brain barrier, often referred to as the BBB, is a protective shield separating the brain from the bloodstream. The BBB is made up of tightly packed cells lining the blood vessels in the brain and controls what substances can move from the blood to the brain.
It allows essential nutrients like oxygen and glucose to pass through and blocks harmful substances such as toxins and pathogens, keeping the brain safe from infections and damage. But it can also deny entry to therapeutic agents.
"An additional hurdle, even if you can get through the BBB to the hypothalamus, is hitting the bullseye within the hypothalamus – the activated microglia cells that act as key mediators of inflammation," Taratula said. "Our nanocarriers show a dual-targeting capability, and once in the microglia, drug release is triggered by elevated intracellular glutathione levels. We demonstrated, for the first time, that nanocarriers can successfully deliver an IRAK4 inhibitor to the hypothalamus of mice with cancer cachexia."
The scientists observed substantial reductions in key inflammatory markers in the hypothalamus, and the nanocarriers led to a 94% increase in food intake and significantly preserved body weight and muscle mass. And the implications extend far beyond cancer cachexia, Taratula added.
"The nanoplatform's ability to deliver therapeutics across the BBB and target microglia opens new possibilities for treating neurological conditions characterized by brain inflammation, including Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis," he said.
Taratula was joined in the study by College of Pharmacy colleagues Yoon Tae Goo, Vladislav Grigoriev, Tetiana Korzun, Kongbrailatpam Shitaljit Sharma, Prem Singh and Olena Taratula, and by Daniel Marks from Endevica Bio.
The National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Research Foundation of Korea funded the research.
Oregon State University
Goo, Y. T., et al. (2025). Blood‐Brain Barrier‐Penetrating Nanocarriers Enable Microglial‐Specific Drug Delivery in Hypothalamic Neuroinflammation. Advanced Healthcare Materials. doi.org/10.1002/adhm.202500521.
Posted in: Medical Science News | Medical Research News | Medical Condition News
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A team of researchers from the Rice Biotech Launch Pad at Rice University has developed an implantable "cytokine factory" that safely triggers potent immune responses against hard-to-treat cancers, including metastatic melanoma, pancreatic and colorectal tumors.
The study, published in The Journal of ImmunoTherapy of Cancer, details how an immunoprotected device near the tumor microenvironment containing cells engineered to locally release interleukin-12 (IL-12) - an "IL-12 cytokine factory" - successfully induces the recruitment of specialized immune cells called precursor exhausted T cells (Tpex cells). This Tpex cell recruitment results in a large, durable population of tumor-targeting T cells with broad molecular profiles, both in isolation and in an enhanced manner when implemented in combination with other immunotherapy approaches.
The IL-12 cytokine factories in combination with checkpoint inhibitors successfully eliminated local and distal tumors in preclinical models of metastatic melanoma and colorectal and pancreatic cancers. In addition to this robust efficacy signal, the IL-12 cytokine factory demonstrated safety in both mouse and nonhuman primate models.
This published research will serve as the foundation for an investigational new drug application (IND) with the U.S. FDA in early 2026, and RBL LLC expects to launch an emerging biotech company centered on the groundbreaking IL-12 cytokine factory technology.
"We designed the IL-12 cytokine factory to enhance immunotherapy approaches while minimizing toxicity, a critical need in the treatment of particularly aggressive cancers," said Omid Veiseh, professor of bioengineering, faculty director of the Rice Biotech Launch Pad and senior corresponding author of the publication. "IL-12 is particularly impactful compared to other cytokines, as our research demonstrates that other cytokines primarily recruit homogeneous T cell populations and show reduced efficacy over time, while IL-12 generates a more robust antitumor response by recruiting a more durable, broader repertoire of tumor-targeting T cells.
"We are incredibly grateful to ARPA-H for their support in advancing this groundbreaking project and are hopeful that this technology will significantly impact the lives of cancer patients by enhancing the efficacy of immunotherapy approaches in the clinic."
Harnessing the cellular immune system to target solid tumors is a common but often fraught approach to fighting cancer as the associated challenge of efficacious treatment without toxicity remains elusive. Our study demonstrates not only the efficacy of this technology in preclinical models but also its safety profile, which is a critical aspect as we move toward clinical trials. This research represents an important step forward in the quest to provide more effective treatments for patients battling metastatic cancers."
Nathan Reticker-Flynn, assistant professor of otolaryngology at Stanford University
The research was supported through an Avenge Bio Sponsored Research Award to Rice, the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas (RR160047), the National Institutes of Health (R01CA272769, DP2 AI177915) and ARPA-H (AY1AX000003). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funding institutions.
Rice University
Nash, A., et al. (2025). IL-12-producing cytokine factories induce precursor exhausted T cells and elimination of primary and metastatic tumors. Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer. doi.org/10.1136/jitc-2024-010685.
Posted in: Medical Science News | Medical Research News | Medical Condition News
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A recent publication in the International Journal of Cardiology, Pulmonary artery denervation in pulmonary hypertension: A comprehensive meta-analysis, has shed light on the potential of pulmonary artery denervation (PADN) as an innovative intervention for pulmonary hypertension (PH), a condition that places patients at risk for right heart failure and death. Co-authored by Dr. James Jenkins, a cardiologist at Ochsner Health, the study analyzed data from multiple clinical trials to assess the therapeutic and clinical impact of PADN in PH patients.
PADN has emerged as a promising treatment, showing significant improvements in several key hemodynamic parameters and clinical outcomes. The meta-analysis, which reviewed 14 studies involving 372 patients, revealed that PADN could reduce metrics such as mean right atrial pressure (mRAP), mean pulmonary artery pressure (mPAP), and pulmonary vascular resistance (PVR). Simultaneously, it improved cardiac output (CO) and performance on the six-minute walk test (6MWT), highlighting its potential to enhance overall patient health.
Despite these encouraging results, the authors emphasize the importance of conducting larger-scale clinical trials to confirm PADN's efficacy, establish its safety profile, and refine treatment protocols. Future research should also investigate the procedure's long-term effects on patient outcomes and quality of life.
Pulmonary artery denervation has become a promising therapeutic intervention in the management of pulmonary hypertension. While our findings suggest a substantial role for PADN in treatment protocols, continuous research is crucial to fully understand its broader implications and long-term benefits."
Dr. James Jenkins, cardiologist at Ochsner Health
As cardiovascular disease remains a leading cause of death globally, advancements like this represent critical progress in addressing life-threatening conditions. This study not only underscores the value of innovation in cardiology but also highlights the ongoing need for rigorous research to develop more effective and life-changing treatments for patients with complex conditions like pulmonary hypertension.
Ochsner Health System
Abouzid, M. R., et al. (2025). Pulmonary artery denervation in pulmonary hypertension: A comprehensive meta-analysis. International Journal of Cardiology. doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcard.2025.133078.
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The intermittent fasting diet, which involves periods of severe calorie restriction, may be on the way out, as new research from the University of Surrey is suggesting that rather than drastically reducing calories, people can achieve similar metabolic benefits by cutting back on carbs.
In Surrey's study, participants aged 20-65 years who were overweight or obese, followed three different diet plans for one day: a normal carb diet, a low-carb diet with balanced calorie intake, and a low-carb diet with significant calorie restriction.
Researchers found that both low-carb diets, regardless of calorie reduction, led to improvements in the participants' metabolic markers, and better handling of a high fat meal, including reduced levels of triglycerides - a type of fat in the blood that may lead to heart disease - and a shift towards burning fat for energy.
We found that by simply restricting carbohydrates, without enduring extreme calorie restriction, we can reap the metabolic effects associated with short-term fasting. This suggests that periodically reducing our carbohydrate intake could be a more accessible and sustainable way for people to manage and improve their metabolic health."
Dr. Adam Collins, co-author of the study and Associate Professor of Nutrition at the University of Surrey
The study, published in the European Journal of Nutrition, also highlighted that while participants experienced increased hunger on the low-carbohydrate days, it didn't translate into increased food intake over the following two days. This suggests that the body may adapt to the reduced carb intake, potentially making it easier to adhere to this diet in the long term.
Dr. Collins added:
"This research offers a promising new perspective on dietary interventions for metabolic health and could have an impact on managing conditions such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease and obesity."
University of Surrey
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Using real-world data from over 300,000 cases, scientists uncovered a significant link between semaglutide and reported vision problems—raising new concerns about the safety profile of this blockbuster medication.
Study: Increased vision impairment reports linked to semaglutide: analysis of FDA adverse event data. Image Credit: memorisz / Shutterstock
A team of researchers at the University of Bern, Switzerland, recently reported that the use of the antidiabetic medicine semaglutide is associated with an increased risk of vision impairment. The study findings were published in the journal BMC Medicine.
Semaglutide is a widely prescribed antidiabetic medicine that acts as a glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonist (GLP-1 RA) for the treatment of type 2 diabetes and obesity. A 2024 study by Hathaway et al., which investigated more than 16,000 patients over a period of six years, raised ocular safety issues related to semaglutide. The study found that the medicine can potentially increase the risk of non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION), a potentially vision-threatening condition.
The Hathaway study reported higher hazard ratios for NAION in patients with obesity (7.64) compared to those with type 2 diabetes (4.28). However, the current analysis of FDA data did not directly compare risks between these groups. Given the rapidly increasing use of semaglutide and other GLP-1 RAs worldwide, these observations warrant further investigation.
In the current study, a team of researchers at the University of Bern analyzed data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Adverse Event Reporting System, a post-marketing, open-access pharmacovigilance database. The main aim was to compare the medical reports of semaglutide-related vision impairment to those associated with other antidiabetic and weight loss medicines.
The study found semaglutide's vision impairment signal held even after adjusting for age, sex, and concurrent diabetic retinopathy, suggesting the risk isn't solely explained by underlying diabetes complications.
The team analyzed 302,706 reports, including 17,853 mentioning obesity as an indication, 283,238 mentioning type 2 diabetes, and 1,615 mentioning both conditions.
The comparative analysis revealed that semaglutide use is associated with a significantly higher risk of vision impairment compared to other GLP-1 RAs. Among 11,558 semaglutide-related reports, researchers identified 417 cases specifically related to visual impairment, retinopathy, or ischemic optic neuropathy.
The researchers observed a more pronounced risk of vision impairment when comparing semaglutide with other antidiabetic medicines, including dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4) inhibitors, sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 (SGLT2) inhibitors, and metformin.
They also noticed higher reporting of vision impairment related to semaglutide use compared to other weight loss medications, including phentermine and orlistat. The only exception was topiramate, which exhibited higher reporting of vision impairment than semaglutide (rOR 0.30, 95% CI 0.20–0.45).
Patients with pre-existing eye conditions were overrepresented in vision impairment reports, hinting that semaglutide might exacerbate vulnerabilities in already compromised ocular systems.
The findings reinforce the rising concern about the risk of vision impairment associated with semaglutide use. By analyzing the FDA database, the study finds significantly elevated risks of general vision impairment, retinopathy, and ischemic optic neuropathy with semaglutide use compared to other antidiabetic and weight loss medicines.
A supplementary analysis focusing specifically on retinopathy found consistent results, with semaglutide showing higher reporting odds compared to other drugs.
Previous clinical trials that investigated the safety and efficacy of semaglutide did not report significant vision complications except for the SUSTAIN-6 trial and a subsequent meta-analysis of 23 trials, which reported a higher risk of diabetic retinopathy complications in patients receiving semaglutide. SUSTAIN-6 documented absolute rates of 3.0% for retinopathy complications with semaglutide versus 1.8% with placebo.
This discrepancy between the current post-marketing findings and prior clinical trial evidence highlights the significance of ongoing pharmacovigilance and real-world evidence studies in identifying rare but potentially serious adverse effects that may not be captured in pre-approval clinical trials.
Given the fact that diabetes is frequently associated with diabetic retinopathy and that this comorbidity can serve as a potential confounding factor, researchers separately analyzed the semaglutide-related risk of visual impairment in patients with and without type 2 diabetes.
The findings reveal that although patients with type 2 diabetes more frequently report vision impairment, the risk of impairment relative to other antidiabetic medications is more pronounced in patients receiving semaglutide.
These observations collectively highlight the need for further investigations and attentive post-marketing surveillance. Healthcare professionals should be aware of this potential side effect while prescribing semaglutide for patients with type 2 diabetes or obesity.
The study focused primarily on semaglutide formulations for diabetes (e.g., Ozempic), as data for the obesity-specific formulation Wegovy were limited.
Rapid weight loss (>10% body weight in 6 months) correlated with higher vision impairment reports, raising questions about whether metabolic shifts play a role in ocular side effects.
The FDA Adverse Event Reporting System database analyzed in this study has some limitations. The database allows voluntary data reporting from various sources, including healthcare professionals, consumers, and manufacturers, which might induce bias.
In most cases, the dataset provides incomplete health reports of patients, which might also induce bias because of prescription preferences between classes due to relevant adverse event risk factors.
The study utilized an odds ratio-based analysis approach to determine the risk of vision impairment following semaglutide use. One limitation of this approach is that medications with substantially different adverse event profiles may generate ratios that do not entirely capture their true visual impairment risk.
Moreover, the study could not provide absolute rates of vision complications with semaglutide using FAERS data, limiting clinical interpretation. However, SUSTAIN-6 trial data previously reported higher absolute rates of retinopathy (3.0% vs. 1.8%). Future studies are required to assess the absolute clinical impact of this potential side effect.
Despite these limitations, the FDA database offers real-world data on clinically relevant adverse events associated with medication use, broadening the pharmacovigilance landscape.
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Dr. Sanchari Sinha Dutta is a science communicator who believes in spreading the power of science in every corner of the world. She has a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) degree and a Master's of Science (M.Sc.) in biology and human physiology. Following her Master's degree, Sanchari went on to study a Ph.D. in human physiology. She has authored more than 10 original research articles, all of which have been published in world renowned international journals.
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Before the U.S. Women's National Team split a pair of matches with Brazil in April, head coach Emma Hayes was both optimistic and realistic about the development of Catarina Macario in her second camp back from various injuries that kept her out of international play for almost three years.
Hayes simply said, “Have we seen the best of Catarina Macario? Absolutely not.”
In the second match of the two-game series against Brazil in San Jose, Calif., Macario showed a glimpse of what that best looks like when she scored within the first minute, the seventh-fastest goal in USWNT history.
Macario recorded goal No. 10 with the USWNT as she earned her 23rd cap. She was a bright spot as the U.S. fell to Brazil 2-1 after beating the South Americans, 1-0, in the first match.
“I think Cat's been really good this camp, really shown her qualities to hold the ball up and play,” Hayes said Tuesday. “In fact, I felt we just didn't get enough support around her. The longer the game went on, and once she went out of the game, it showed. We missed that ability to hold the ball up in the way she does. I think it's been really, really good progress for her.”
The 26-year-old forward returned to international play against Colombia in the Americans' SheBelieves Cup opening game in February. That was her first national team match in three years after she tore her ACL in 2022. Macario also scored in that game.
Two camps back and two goals scored. Slowly, but surely, Macario is getting more comfortable on the pitch again.
“I think it just gives me a little bit extra confidence in knowing that I'm doing something right,” Macario said. “That was my job as a nine to be there and score goals. I think whatever way I that I can help the team, that's my job.”
This camp in particular, and the game in San Jose, carried an even deeper meaning for Macario. The Brazilian-born Macario played Brazil for the first time in her international career on Tuesday night. The forward moved to the U.S. when she was 12 years old, and in 2021 FIFA granted her eligibility to suit up in the red, white and blue.
Macario also scored the historic goal in a place where she'svery familiar. Just about 20 miles down the road she played at Stanford where she won two NCAA Women's College Cups (2017, 2019). In fact, she played her final collegiate game in the same stadium, Paypal Park, to win her second national championship.
“A lot of good memories, and I'm very happy to have scored and to be able to do that in front of the crowd, in front of my Stanford coach and friends,” Macario said. “ ... It's a special place for sure.”
It helps that Macario also has familiarity playing for Hayes. The head coach recruited her to play in 2023 for Chelsea FC where Macario still plays. If that alone doesn't raise Macario's confidence, Hayes will ensure she does.
“I will keep reminding her of all the brilliant things she brings to this team,” Hayes said.
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FIFA President Gianni Infantino said Orlando hosting 2025 Club World Cup matches is “definitely regarded by us as a test” for the city to potentially host matches during the 2031 Women's World Cup, according to Ryan Lynch of the ORLANDO BUSINESS JOURNAL. Infantino said, “If the results of this test, the Club World Cup, is positive … then I think the conditions for being a host for the 2031 Women's World Cup would be met.” Lynch notes Orlando during the Club World Cup will host four matches at Camping World Stadium and two at Inter&Co Stadium. Infantino said that Orlando's “growing soccer community, investment in a soccer-specific stadium and its status as an international hub were all reasons it stood out.” Lynch notes Orlando leaders have “signaled interest in being a host city” for 2031 Women's World Cup. This comes as the region “also works to score a role in hosting matches for the 2031 Rugby World Cup and 2033 Women's Rugby World Cup.” Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said that the addition of games for the 2031 Women's World Cup “could complement those events should Orlando be selected.” Florida Citrus Sports CEO Steve Hogan said that the upcoming $400M investment in Camping World Stadium is “key,” but “investment in other infrastructure for transportation and housing will also be key” (ORLANDO BUSINESS JOURNAL, 4/9).
When the Olympic Games head for Los Angeles in 2028, the City of Angels will bear witness to a groundbreaking event. This is because, on Wednesday, the International Olympic Committee agreed to expand the women's soccer tournament to 16 teams while shrinking the men's to 12.
As such, the total number of female athletes will surpass those of their male counterparts at an Olympic Games for the first time. All in all, there will now be 5,333 female athletes and 5,167 male athletes competing in California.
“Gender equality was a key consideration when deciding on the athlete quota and the number of events,” the IOC explained.
The decision to expand the women's soccer event will mean the U.S. Women's National Team, which won gold in Paris under head coach Emma Hayes just 75 days into her tenure via a 1-0 win against Brazil, may have a tougher time defending their title in 2028. While the details of the format are not yet official, presumably it will simply expand from three groups to four before resuming the usual play-off structure - as was the case with the men's event.
As for the men's event, qualifying for the event could now be that much more tricky given the loss of four openings for the group stage. However, this won't affect the U.S. Men's National Team, with the hosts usually automatically granted a spot by UEFA.
The USMNT will be looking to improve upon their underwhelming event in France, where Marko Mitrovic's side finished second behind the host nation in Group A before being knocked out by Morocco via a 4-0 loss in the quarter-final.
Listen to our All Out Soccer podcast on both Apple and Spotify.
It has also emerged that the prompt for this major shift in Olympic soccer “was made more compelling” as a result of the women's event usually attracting the sport's best talent, while the men's typically does not, as per ESPN.
With 10,500 athletes set to descend on LA, this also marks a major increase on Paris by a total of 698, thanks to the additions of five new team events - baseball/softball, cricket, flag football, squash, and lacrosse. The athletes will be spread across 351 events - an increase of 22 on the 2024 Olympics - 161 of which will be women's events, 165 of which will be men's, while the final 25 will be mixed.
Elsewhere in team sports news, it was announced that there would be two additional women's water polo teams competing in 2028 to 12 (same as the men's), meaning that for the first time, no team event will have fewer women's teams than men's. As for the 3x3 basketball, which first appeared at the Olympics in Tokyo, it will expand from eight teams to 12 for both men and women.
The 2028 Olympic Games are scheduled to be held between July 14 and July 30, with the opening and closing ceremonies to be held at both the Memorial Coliseum and SoFi Stadium.
Depending how this summer's Club World Cup goes this summer in Orlando, the tournament could serve as a test to the city's Women's World Cup hopes, FIFA President Gianni Infantino told reporters on Wednesday.
Infantino said, "We know that in America there are many venues, potential venues, many stadiums, many cities. And you know the reason we are also organizing now a [Club] World Cup here in Orlando is definitely regarded for us, as well as a test on what could happen in 2031."
He added, "So if the results of this test, of this Club World Cup that takes place now are positive, which I'm convinced they will be, with not just full stadiums, but also a welcoming atmosphere in the city to welcome the fans from all over the world, then I think that the prerogatives and the conditions for being a host city in Women's World Cup in 2031 will certainly be met.”
Infantino visited Orlando's Inter&Co Stadium and Camping World Stadium to commemorate the Club World Cup, scheduled to kick off June 15.
The tournament is being held across the United States with Orlando's Inter&Co Stadium and Camping World Stadium scheduled to host a slew of games.
Inter&Co Stadium will host Ulsan HD FC versus Mamelodi Sundown FC on June 17 and SL Benfica versus Auckland City FC on June 20.
Meanwhile, Camping World will see Flamengo versus a to-be-determined team on June 24. On June 26, Manchester City will play Juventus. The venue will also host a Round of 16 and quarterfinal game.
All 63 games of the tournament can be viewed for free on DAZN.
Last week, FIFA announced the United States along with another Concacaf nation will co-host the 2031 Women's World Cup.
WESH 2 learned this week that several Orlando leaders are aiming to bid to host 2031 games following a disappointing bid to host 2026 FIFA Men's World Cup games.
Caesar Lopez, the COO and general counsel for Orlando City Soccer Club, told WESH 2 on Wednesday that the club will be aggressively pushing for a 2031 bid.
"We are more than excited about the opportunity to host and an honor to have a prestigious tournament like the Women's World Cup in our market," Lopez said. "We've had the success of our game really explode with the 1994 World Cup and now having it again, an opportunity to be a catalyst for the women's game would be an amazing opportunity. We're going to be aggressive about it. We want to make sure we serve our community and fans with the best soccer in the world."
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Depending how this summer's Club World Cup goes this summer in Orlando, the tournament could serve as a test to the city's Women's World Cup hopes, FIFA President Gianni Infantino told reporters on Wednesday.
Infantino said, "We know that in America there are many venues, potential venues, many stadiums, many cities. And you know the reason we are also organizing now a [Club] World Cup here in Orlando is definitely regarded for us, as well as a test on what could happen in 2031."
He added, "So if the results of this test, of this Club World Cup that takes place now are positive, which I'm convinced they will be, with not just full stadiums, but also a welcoming atmosphere in the city to welcome the fans from all over the world, then I think that the prerogatives and the conditions for being a host city in Women's World Cup in 2031 will certainly be met.”
Infantino visited Orlando's Inter&Co Stadium and Camping World Stadium to commemorate the Club World Cup, scheduled to kick off June 15.
The tournament is being held across the United States with Orlando's Inter&Co Stadium and Camping World Stadium scheduled to host a slew of games.
Inter&Co Stadium will host Ulsan HD FC versus Mamelodi Sundown FC on June 17 and SL Benfica versus Auckland City FC on June 20.
Meanwhile, Camping World will see Flamengo versus a to-be-determined team on June 24. On June 26, Manchester City will play Juventus. The venue will also host a Round of 16 and quarterfinal game.
All 63 games of the tournament can be viewed for free on DAZN.
Last week, FIFA announced the United States along with another Concacaf nation will co-host the 2031 Women's World Cup.
WESH 2 learned this week that several Orlando leaders are aiming to bid to host 2031 games following a disappointing bid to host 2026 FIFA Men's World Cup games.
Caesar Lopez, the COO and general counsel for Orlando City Soccer Club, told WESH 2 on Wednesday that the club will be aggressively pushing for a 2031 bid.
"We are more than excited about the opportunity to host and an honor to have a prestigious tournament like the Women's World Cup in our market," Lopez said. "We've had the success of our game really explode with the 1994 World Cup and now having it again, an opportunity to be a catalyst for the women's game would be an amazing opportunity. We're going to be aggressive about it. We want to make sure we serve our community and fans with the best soccer in the world."
Hearst Television participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.
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Orlando's momentum could be an asset as it looks to host more events for global soccer governing body FIFA.
Fédération Internationale de Football Association President Gianni Infantino paid a visit to Orlando on April 9 in the run-up to the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup, which will start in June. Orlando will host six of the 32-team tournament's games and is the only city of the 11 hosts with two stadiums where matches will take place.
Related to picking Orlando for the upcoming event, Infantino said the region's growing soccer community, investment in a soccer-specific stadium and its status as an international hub were all reasons it stood out.
Click here to read the full story on the Orlando Business Journal's website.
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ORLANDO, Fla. — Editor's note: This story is available as a result of a content partnership between WFTV and the Orlando Business Journal.
Orlando's momentum could be an asset as it looks to host more events for global soccer governing body FIFA.
Fédération Internationale de Football Association President Gianni Infantino paid a visit to Orlando on April 9 in the run-up to the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup, which will start in June. Orlando will host six of the 32-team tournament's games and is the only city of the 11 hosts with two stadiums where matches will take place.
Related to picking Orlando for the upcoming event, Infantino said the region's growing soccer community, investment in a soccer-specific stadium and its status as an international hub were all reasons it stood out.
Click here to read the full story on the Orlando Business Journal's website.
Click here to download our free news, weather and smart TV apps. And click here to stream Channel 9 Eyewitness News live.
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“We mustn't always measure progress by outcome,” Hayes said after her team conceded the winning goal in second-half stoppage time.
SAN JOSE — Emma Hayes is as competitive as they come. Losing grates on her. The sounds of opponents celebrating nearby — as Brazil did in PayPal Park's center circle Tuesday night after a 2-1 victory over the U.S. women's national soccer team — are not soon forgotten.
But the London-born coach also understands the importance of strengthening the sport's preeminent program. It will not always be perfect. Tossing inexperienced players onto the pitch against an elite foe comes with short-term risk and potentially long-term reward.
“We mustn't always measure progress by outcome,” Hayes said after her team conceded the winning goal in second-half stoppage time. “I'm playing the long game with this, and I feel we're much better off for it.”
It was, after all, a friendly, which offers opportunity without consequence. With the Olympic gold medal behind her and the World Cup more than two years away, Hayes sees a window to experiment. She did it, to some extent, during a 2-0 victory over Brazil on Saturday in Southern California and more so Tuesday before a sellout crowd of 18,000 in Northern California.
The U.S. lineup was the least experienced in 24 years. Seven starters had five or fewer prior appearances. Left back Avery Patterson and forward Michelle Cooper, both 22, made their first starts, and 19-year-old midfielder Claire Hutton played the entire match. Right back Gisele Thompson, 19, also went the distance, and Lily Yohannes, a 17-year-old midfielder from Springfield, Virginia, played the first half.
“As I kept saying to the team, I want to put players in the frying pan, and I want you to feel the heat,” Hayes said. “This camp was always about expanding and experimenting that player pool. I really feel like it is becoming so clear to me which players are really ready for us right now and which ones are not.”
Over the two matches, 18 players started and four others entered as subs only. (Two remained on the bench.) Just four players started both games. Defender Emily Sonnett and midfielder Korbin Albert were the only starters Tuesday who started against Brazil in the Olympic final.
Hayes also tried less-seasoned players in three SheBelieves Cup matches in February.
“She's giving [young players] like me more experience,” said Hutton, a second-year pro with the NWSL's Kansas City Current. “We're going to have games like this — new groups of players, different chemistry on the field. Just to have the opportunity to be out there and play against a world-class opponent like Brazil is amazing. And to go out there and have her trust in us is something I just am so grateful for.”
Hayes was particularly impressed by Hutton, saying, “She is ready to progress with us.”
Thompson's sister Alyssa, a 20-year-old winger, was electric and elusive in the first half. Hayes said the elder Thompson has “taken another step” after making the 2023 World Cup team but being left off the Olympic squad last year.
Alyssa Thompson's swift dash led to the U.S. goal 34 seconds into the match, scored by Catarina Macario, the Brazil-born forward whose U.S. career has been hampered by knee injuries for much of three years. It was the seventh-fastest goal in program history.
It quickly became clear that this match, between teams that love to attack, was going to accelerate into a blinding back-and-forth affair bursting with dynamic runs and glorious opportunities. The top-ranked Americans, however, wasted several other chances during a wild first half. Eighth-ranked Brazil drew even on Kerolin's lovely goal in the 24th minute.
The remainder of the half was bonkers: near misses, bad misses, mad scrambles and the elder Thompson dashing down the left flank like an Olympic sprinter.
The second half was a different story.
“Maybe that [first half] was quite a big effort for a lot of players — mentally, physically — but I felt we started the second half so flat and never recovered,” Hayes said.
Through grit and grace, Brazil controlled the second half. The U.S. attack fell silent. Mandy McGlynn, in her third start, made two terrific saves in the dying moments.
In the fifth of seven additional minutes, Brazil got what it deserved. A booming clearance launched a counterattack. Luany, a sub, crossed perfectly to Amanda Gutierres, another sub, for an easy finish and Brazil's first victory over the United States since 2014.
“It's okay to go for the winner, but I want us to have a more ruthless mentality to say, ‘If we cannot win, we do not lose,'” Hayes said. “I felt the way we conceded the goal was really poor from us.”
The last U.S. gasp was Ally Sentnor driving a nine-yard shot over the crossbar.
“You have to go through this stage of development to make progress for the next level,” Hayes said. “I genuinely think in this camp, we've seen so many good things to know we're heading in the right direction. Just the result sucks, and it's okay to feel that, but we will get better in the end.”
Notes: Washington Spirit star Trinity Rodman, who scored the opening goal Saturday, was not in uniform. Given Rodman's injury history, Hayes planned all along to limit her playing time in this camp. … The U.S. team will next face No. 17 China on May 31 in St. Paul, Minnesota, and June 3 in St. Louis.
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A week into FIFA's “Ticket Packs” promotion and already some feel the deal isn't as sweet as presented.
Earlier this month, FIFA unveiled a ticket promotion which looks on the level — until you read the fine print.
Dubbed “ticket packs,” FIFA's latest offer gives purchasers of tickets to this year's Club World Cup early access to a presale for tickets to next summer's FIFA World Cup. There are two options to choose from in a straightforward standard ticket pack and the “super” pack.
Buyers of a standard pack had to pick a minimum of two Club World Cup games with an option to buy a third. Each ticket purchased offered the opportunity to get hands on tickets to next year's matches.
The super pack allowed up to 20 games, but purchases had to be made for either the opening match of the tournament between Major League Soccer's Inter Miami FC and Al Ahly FC, of the Saudi League or a ticket to either the semifinal or final at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.
Same thing in the sense that each ticket sold opens up an opportunity to get first dibs on World Cup tickets in 2026.
According to a clause in FIFA's Terms and Conditions, FIFA has the right to assign both the games and the availability of seats in a stadium. For example, if you're located in Seattle and was hoping that securing Club World Cup tickets at Lumen Field ensured tickets to the venue for World Cup games next year, you might be locked out of availability for that stadium and for even the same section of seating.
Assuming you long onto the presale fast enough next year to get your hands on tickets.
The clause, listed as 2.4 in the terms of sale read:
Tickets available to be included within Ticket Packages shall be subject to availability and available for purchase on a first-come first-served basis. By way of these Terms of Sale, FIFA Ticketing makes no guarantees as to the availability of Tickets and any indication on the availability of Tickets by FIFA Ticketing is for guidance purposes.”
Seats are available in a tiered format with “Category 1” seats cater to seats in a stadium's lower bowl start at around $140 and go to as much as $2,500 as of April 8 for tickets for the final. “Category 2” in the upper bowls start at $70 and up before all of the bells and whistles of fees and taxes are added.
What FIFA didn't bury under multi-paragraph clauses was that the deal is void if fans sell their tickets on the secondary market or refuse to attend matches in which they've paid for. Also, no deal if the seats weren't purchased directly via FIFA's ticket portal or on its website fifa.com/tickets.
Also the ticket pack promotion was only lasting for 25 days after its initial release on April 3, or until supplies run out, according to FIFA.
It's safe to say that buy the time you read this if it's still within the governing body's 25-day window, you'll be safe to purchase tickets at FIFA's face value. Reports suggest that demand for the Club World Cup has been stagnant for many of the matches across the 11 cities scheduled to host the World Cup.
This isn't FIFA's first foray into offering exclusive presale access. Earlier this year, they used gamification to entice people to purchase digital player cards that could give the opportunity to purchase tickets to next year's World Cup as well.
Bundle Rewards are back in the Surprise Pack!You might find a Bundle Reward that includes both a FIFA Club World Cup 2025™ CAT1 ticket and, for the first time, a Right to Buy for the Round of 16 of FIFA World Cup 26™ – all in the same reward!Each Bundle Reward contains:•… pic.twitter.com/sE5B9Zo4Z9
Known as “bundle rewards,” each pack of cards could contain access to purchase category 1 seats to the Club World Cup, and offer an early opportunity to secure tickets for the round of 16.
“It all looks cool, but it's also confusing,” said Ryan Schwartz, who already purchased his seats for two Club World Cup matches through the standard pack promotion. “I only did it to make sure I can get first crack at World Cup tickets, but I'm still waiting on next steps from FIFA. I know, I have a foot in the door, but I don't really know what that means — if that makes any sense.”
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FIFA has announced its referees will be wearing body cameras during the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup in a step toward using the cameras for live match broadcasts as well as to help train referees. The move comes after the cameras were approved for use on a trial basis by the International Football Association Board to "identify possible future use and develop quality and safety standards."
The body cameras, which offer a first-person view of what the referee sees, will be integrated into the broadcasts of the Club World Cup games, and they will also be used as a tool for referee coaching and training. With the use of the cameras, fans as well as FIFA officials will be able to get a direct idea of what the referee saw and what influenced their calls.
"We think that it is a good chance to offer the viewers a new experience, in terms of images taken from a perspective, from an angle of vision which was never offered before," said chair of the FIFA Referees' Committee Pierluigi Collina, emphasising it was a trial. "It also has a purpose in terms of referee coaching. Because, of course, having the possibility to see what the referee sees is important in the debriefing, to evaluate how the call was made by the referee, which was his view, and so on. So it's a combination of new experience for broadcasters and also for coaching purposes."
Referee cameras come to the Club World Cup after being piloted in English grassroots football, where they were introduced in 2023 as a means of improving conduct toward referees from players and supporters. The cameras made their way to the Premiere League last season, as they were worn by a referee during a fixture between Crystal Palace and Manchester United, and they have also been tried in Bundesliga.
FIFA has also announced a rule change for the Club World Cup, as the referees will now award corners instead of indirect free-kicks if a goalie attempts to waste time by holding onto the ball for more than eight seconds.
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Manchester United manager Ruben Amorim was spotted overseeing a training session by standing almost 150 metres away from his players.
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By SIMON JORDAN
Published: 12:00 EDT, 9 April 2025 | Updated: 12:43 EDT, 9 April 2025
3
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Donald Trump's trade wars are probably a moment in time, although currently challenging the world order and undermining trust in the superpower that America once was.
When the North American World Cup comes around in 2026, you'd hope we'd have worked through all the casino economics.
That doesn't mean many people won't suffer in the short term, it's just not occurred to me the ramifications of changing the world order will genuinely impact on elite sport, unless certain owners wanted to try and choose to use it as a smokescreen.
A bit like when certain politicians used horrible world events as a 'good day' to release news on a policy they knew would be unpopular.
Whether fair or not, Premier League football doesn't catch the same heat as different industries. It seems to be insulated from world events that challenges others. Even during Covid - and could there be a bigger tariff than the shutdown of commerce - it didn't really have an impact on football.
Clubs complained about the challenges of paying wages but the status quo prevailed, didn't it?
When the North American World Cup comes around in 2026, you'd hope we'd have worked through all the casino economics
I am thinking of the Glazers potentially using the uncertainty as an opportunity to explain how little money Manchester United have and why everything for the fans needs a price increase
Call me cynical but have we not just heard the witterings of Jim Ratcliffe about United running out of cash?
History has taught us that the super-wealthy tend to become even wealthier during the world's greatest crises, and you have to include Premier League owners in that group. Private equity players or nation states, they have assets that are diversified.
The only caveat would be those owners, and I am thinking of the Glazers at Manchester United, potentially using the uncertainty as an opportunity to explain how little money United have and why everything for the fans needs a price increase. Call me cynical but have we not just heard the witterings of Sir Jim Ratcliffe about United running out of cash?
It was noticeable we saw an increase in billionaires during the last global calamity we faced, Covid. The guys who run the top English clubs, valued at hundreds of millions, buy stocks during the dips on Wall Street and wait for the market to correct itself.
Prices dropped during Covid because of the pandemic, not because underlying aspects of the business were flawed and distressed. Markets create an opportunity for those who hold the wealth. This, while man-made (again, likely like Covid), has a similarity in the current shockwaves reverberating post-Trump's so-called liberation day.
Television rights are classified as services rather than manufacturing, so won't be affected in the same way by tariffs. And these rights are global, not dependent on the American market. As are the reasons major brands align themselves to the World Cup.
I have heard it argued the currency exchange will impact on borrowing rates of the Glazers. Good job then they have a partner like Sir Jim with deep pockets. Big-hitters, like them or Stan Kroenke or John W Henry, have bigger fish to fry commercially than prioritising the cash they may have to pony up into their football clubs every season.
As for the World Cup, it is 14 months away, by which time the Trump tariff effect is likely to have dissipated and solutions and adjustments made.
Not that I feel particularly sympathetic to FIFA if they are anxious. They were keen to give it to the USA, and Canada and Mexico, primarily because Trump Mark I gave them an assurance it would generate $15billion and certainly not because of his care and concern for the well-being of the world´s biggest sport.
Big-hitters, like Arsenal owner Stan Kroenke (pictured with Super Bowl trophy), have bigger fish to fry commercially than the cash they have to pony up into their football clubs
As for the World Cup, it is 14 months away, by which time the Trump tariff effect is likely to have dissipated. Not that I feel sympathetic to FIFA if they are anxious
FIFA and Gianni Infantino wanted to dance with Trump because of the money. It is their problem if they get less than expected in their coffers
FIFA and Gianni Infantino wanted to dance with Trump because of the money. It is their problem if they get less than expected in their coffers. I don't think it will play out that way because the world will have returned by then, as Trump's policy position is an experiment and probably not his end game.
He is just pulling levers to achieve outcomes so I don't see it impacting on sport unless owners like the Glazers use it for their own advantage.
They've spent their time at United – from the moment they bought the club with only a very small amount of money – loading their obligations elsewhere and using the club to enhance their own wealth.
In truth, they are sufficiently wealthy to trade their different portfolios to make as much money in distressed times as they would in good. But the opportunity is there to exploit the eroding of global trust created by Trump to play possum with their fan base and cite it as a reason not to invest.
Although trust and the Glazers are not bedfellows that the United fans will recognise anyway!
How Chelsea played PSR cards right
Timing is everything and while Manchester City await the result of 115 alleged financial breaches, Chelsea are set to drive a coach and horses through the value of Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR).
They have sold their women's team to another part of their business for something akin to the entire income of the world's 20 biggest women's teams.
While the cases aren't identical, the motivations perhaps are, both driven by an ability to spend and compete at the highest level.
Chelsea have sold their women's team to another part of their business for something akin to the entire income of the world's 20 biggest women's teams
They benefited from Roman Abramovich taking over in 2003 when there were no restrictions on investment and he could do what he wanted
Chelsea owner Todd Boehly was at the White House this week to celebrate his LA Dodgers team winning last year's World Series
City have been accused in part of disguising equity investment as commercial deals that never happened or were massively over-valued. Chelsea have been open about how and why they valued their women's team for £200million. Their auditors cleared it so I'll be fascinated to see if the Premier League meaningfully disapprove.
Where Chelsea have been luckier – twice – is WHEN their changes in ownership occurred.
They benefited from Roman Abramovich taking over in 2003 when there were no restrictions on investment and he could do what he wanted. By Sheik Mansour's time in 2008, the authorities were adamant – for reasons the big five clubs may explain even better (note sarcasm) – they didn't want the industry to fall prey to another Abramovich who had set the system on fire with his spending.
Hence, Manchester City found they were in an industry being policed more robustly, but without them having the visibility of how FFP and PSR would actually work. If they'd realised what was in the offing, they would perhaps have bought City via a structure that had a whole load of assets to dispose of within the wider group.
When Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital bought Chelsea in 2022, they had the benefit of seeing what had happened to City and prepared outcomes to fit rules while still investing heavily.
They have been able to hide in plain sight, offering what they consider a fair market value for their women's team when there has previously been no benchmark for the asset's worth.
I spoke to several investors 18 months ago who felt buying a woman's football club, stripping it away from an existing framework (ie men's football) and giving it separate management and ownership, would be a significant opportunity.
Why? Because women's football can be acquired at an economic price and will increase in value with bigger attendances, revenue streams and interest from broadcasters.
Women's football can be acquired at an economic price and will increase in value with bigger attendances, revenue streams and interest from broadcasters
The fact Chelsea can pick up a valuation of their women's team and use it to overcome what governance is supposed to be shows how ridiculous it is
That wasn't the thinking behind the aforementioned Chelseanomics model inflating the marketplace!
I don't look at Chelsea as liberty-takers. I look at the overall ideals behind financial governance of football and say it's a joke. The fact Chelsea can pick up a valuation of their women's team and use it to overcome what governance is supposed to be shows how ridiculous it is.
City's regret as they await their potential punishment is that they didn't know then what is clear now.
My favourite ground? Wherever I could get out quick!
I wouldn't have been much of a travel companion. As Crystal Palace chairman, I had one favourite stadium – Selhurst Park – and didn't like any of the others or their fans
Congratulations to Oliver Holt, my Padel partner in Qatar, for visiting all 92 league grounds.
I wouldn't have been much of a travel companion. As Crystal Palace chairman, I had one favourite stadium – Selhurst Park – and didn't like any of the others or their fans.
I'd turn up at five-to-three, get called a 'w*****' by the away supporters and leave as quickly as possible at full time, preferably with three points.
If pushed, I'd have to acknowledge Elland Road had an impressive atmosphere but it wasn't state-of-the art, and I didn't much like their chairman at the time, Ken Bates, either! Despite him pinching my cheek and saying we were alike, much to my chagrin.
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Compared to the bright, breezy environment of SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles for game one, the United States women's national team's (USWNT) swift rematch with Brazil at San Jose's PayPal Park carried an inverted energy, atmospherically and competitively.
The latter ended in a 2-1 defeat for the U.S. before a packed house of 18,000 in California's Bay Area on Tuesday night, the booming, sold-out crowd competing with the periodic sound of planes touching down at the nearby airport. The first, in the sunshine of Saturday afternoon, brought 32,303 people to a venue that holds 70,000 to see what turned out to be a secure 2-0 win for the hosts.
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Match two also embodied the classic traits of a return fixture against the same opponent, with noticeable changes to the previous lineup. But as U.S. head coach Emma Hayes has reiterated throughout this window, experimentation was going to be the prevailing theme of these two fixtures. She is working toward identifying a core group of players by the end of June who will eventually compete in the 2027 World Cup.
“I wanna put players in the frying pan and I want you to feel the heat,” Hayes said in her post-game news conference late Tuesday night. “This camp was always about expanding and experimenting (with) that player pool. I really feel like that is becoming so clear to me on which players I think are really ready for us right now, which ones are not.”
With that mandate, this could, arguably, have been a period better enjoyed behind closed doors for the team.
Of the 22 players (including alternates) selected for the 2024 Olympics, headlined by Sophia Wilson, Mallory Swanson and Trinity Rodman as the Triple Espresso forward line, only 10 made the most recent roster. The starting 11 on Tuesday averaged just 17 caps and formed the youngest USWNT roster in 24 years. It was bound to look as challenging as it felt — especially when that group, unlike Saturday's squad, was tasked with handling 2023 National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) MVP Kerolin Nicoli for 90-plus minutes.
When caterpillars retreat to their cocoons, part of the process of transformation can be aesthetically unbecoming and grotesque. For the USWNT, though, that metamorphosis is happening in real-time and out in public view. The revolution is being televised, and Hayes is unconcerned with how it might look to an untrained eye.
“We could play 11 relatively experienced players now and build those connections, there's no problem,” Hayes had told reporters on Friday. “But if we get to a World Cup in two years and all of a sudden, an Ally Sentnor or Lily Yohannes are completely underprepared, then you're going to say, ‘Well, why didn't we give them the opportunities in that period?'”
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Hayes shared that Sentnor — a 21-year-old striker and No. 1 NWSL draft pick of the Utah Royals in 2024 who is known for scoring long-range bangers — had told her that February's SheBelieves Cup finale, which saw the USWNT fall to Japan 2-1, had been the most difficult game she'd played in her career. The manager also pointed out Yohannes, whose skill and promise as a midfielder became popular knowledge following her Champions League debut at 16 (she is now 17) for Dutch club Ajax, had not been involved in the U.S. youth national team system very long and thus has limited experience with international competition outside of Europe.
“It's a completely different situation that we have to expose them to,” Hayes continued, “and if I put on the field (a lot of) 17, 18, 19, 20-year-olds, I'm setting them up to fail, in my honest opinion, so we have to drip-feed it in, whether it's some of them in one game, some of them in another game, (or) some of them from the bench.”
The four halves of soccer against Brazil this week have provided that.
Saturday's game kicked off with the five most-capped players on the roster — Lindsey Heaps, Crystal Dunn, Emily Sonnett, Emily Fox and Rodman — in the starting 11. The second half, however, saw the entries of Yohannes and 20-year-old Jaedyn Shaw, plus a national-team debut for Houston Dash defender Avery Patterson, 22. Last night, by contrast, 31-year-old Sonnett was the most-capped player at kickoff with 106. Next in line? Midfielder Korbin Albert with 25, aged 21.
Claire Hutton watched the first match from the bench as an unused substitute, then started the second to double her number of international caps. The 19-year-old, who plays for the Kansas City Current, roamed about central midfield Tuesday night with Albert and distinguished herself with her brave defending and positioning, according to Hayes.
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“We've done a lot of film with her this week, a lot of detailing,” said Hayes. She added that the Americans' goal, scored by Catarina Macario in the first minute of the game, came as a result of Hutton stepping up further away from the back line, allowing her to intercept the ball and initiate the decisive counter-attack — something Hayes and the coaching staff have been working on with her.
Hutton, for her part, spoke with Sentnor, who did play in that first match, on the team's flight up to the Bay Area from LA. The pair are good friends. She knew what she experienced Tuesday night would be “a whole different beast” compared to Saturday.
“It's international football. You're gonna get clobbered if you take too many touches on the ball,” Hutton said. “So it's just a learning moment and a moment to move forward on.”
It's no secret that the state of the USWNT's midfield has for years been shrouded in concern, but the teenager's aggression toward an opposing team that relishes one-versus-one duels demonstrated for Hayes that she is suited for this level.
“For a 19-year-old to play like that against Brazil is a superb performance from her. One in which I know she is ready to progress with us,” Hayes said.
And while the second half of Tuesday's game saw the return of more veteran players — Heaps, Sam Coffey, Dunn and Alana Cook, and even Shaw, subbed on for her 25th cap — Hayes found the group's performance flat. The USWNT's expected goals figure for the second half was zero, and Hayes said only one player broke into the top 10 for pass completion.
Patterson's determined performance as a left back crackled with possibility, but concerns remain in the middle defensively — both in terms of the ongoing audition to be Naomi Girma's co-conspirator and the ability of both goalkeepers who played in this window, Phallon Tullis-Joyce and Mandy McGlynn, to distribute the ball with precision.
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“I think both her (McGlynn) and Phallon have had the opportunity to play against a top opponent, just like Jane (Campbell) had the opportunity to play against a top opponent with Japan, and I think it's fair to say I'm a lot clearer,” Hayes said Tuesday night.
It's hard to imagine these players returning to their clubs after these two games without stacks of notes and feedback from Hayes and, for the younger set, the veteran teammates around them.
“Every time I go into camp, it's definitely a learning experience and developing as a player,” 19-year-old defender Gisele Thompson told reporters in the mixed zone. “I think I can learn so much from all of these players, especially Crystal, (and) Emily Fox. They've helped me so much along the way. Just being in these camps helps me as a player, even (at) club.”
Thompson and Hutton both spoke of confidence in their reflections on camp, how the experience and what they learned from it bolstered their toolbox as players, imbuing them with excitement about how they'll integrate their notes.
“That was a battle. I've never played a game like that before,” Hutton said of last night's game, the beginnings of a laugh escaping from her response in the mixed zone. “So knowing that I had that, I can do anything now.”
(Top photo: Brad Smith/ISI Photos/USSF/Getty Images for USSF)
Tamerra Griffin is a women's soccer writer for The Athletic covering the women's game around the world. She also hosts the weekly “Full Time” women's soccer podcast. As a freelance journalist, she covered the 2023 World Cup in Australia and the CONCACAF W Gold Cup for The Athletic, as well as women's soccer stories for ESPN Andscape, USA Today's Pro Soccer Wire, and other publications. Prior to that, she was an international correspondent based in Kenya, where she reported on presidential elections and political movements, LGBTQ and women's rights, climate change, and much more across East and Southern Africa. Follow Tamerra on Twitter @tamerra_nikol
In the 55-page decision on the appeal lodged by both Mexican clubs, FIFA justifies the decision on the grounds that Pachuca and Club Leon share the same owner, something that is prohibited by the competition's regulations.
Pachuca and Club Leon, who, according to the appeal committee, are both in breach, "are controlled by the same people, who exercise significant influence over their respective decision-making processes."
Club Leon were in Group D of the Club World Cup, along with Chelsea (England), Esperance (Tunisia) and Flamengo (Brazil) and their replacement will have to come from CONCACAF, although they don't have to be a Mexican club.
Last Friday, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) confirmed that it had received individual appeals from Mexican clubs Leon and Pachuca, requesting a declaration that both are eligible to take part in the Club World Cup, contradicting FIFA's decision to exclude the former.
The FIFA Appeals Committee ruled last month that both sides had violated the Competition Regulations in relation to multiple club ownership and, due to this infraction, Leon, coached by Argentinian Eduardo Berizzo and with Colombian ex-FC Porto player James Rodriguez in their squad, was excluded from the competition.
The TAD also explained that Leon had also lodged an additional appeal against the FIFA Secretary General's decision to be reinstated as a participant in the Club World Cup.
Andre Onana has hit back at Nemanja Matic with a 'trophy' jibe ahead of Manchester United's Europa League clash with Lyon.
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Tuttosport newspaper confirms that Juventus are discussing a double shirt deal with Jeep and Visit Detroit, hoping to secure agreements before the 2025 Club World Cup begins.
Juventus aims to have a new main sponsor for the first team's shirts during the Club World Cup this summer.
According to the latest Tuttosport report, it could even be a double deal for the Bianconeri, who have resumed talks with Jeep.
The company is also owned by Juventus' holding company, Exor, but the two companies' previous agreement ended last season.
According to the report, Jeep is ready to send Juventus a new offer with financial support from Visit Detroit and an organisation that promotes activities in the largest city in the midwestern state of Michigan, US.
Tuttosport, however, notes that Juventus would only be allowed to show one sponsor in Champions League games next season, provided that they qualify.
The rules in Serie A are slightly different, as other clubs have previously been allowed to show a double sponsor on their shirts.
Jeep had been Juventus' main sponsor from 2012-13 until last season, paying up to €45m in each of the previous three campaigns. According to Tuttosport, the new agreement would be worth less than half that sum.
Car companies will not be spending big on kit sponsorships, nor will Italians be visiting Detroit any time soon…
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USWNT manager Emma Hayes believes the quality of the senior players in her squad allow the youngsters to play with confidence. (2:10)
INGLEWOOD, Calif. -- Goalkeeper Phallon Tullis-Joyce made six saves while earning a clean sheet against Brazil on Saturday in her first appearance for the U.S. women's national team.
Her toughest test of the day, however? "The first whistle," the 28-year-old said, smiling as she spoke about nerves ahead of that game.
Such is the current state of the USWNT's goalkeeping position: For the first time in decades -- maybe ever -- the squad now faces an extended period of uncertainty without a clear No. 1 emerging. A fabled position of strength is now one of the team's biggest question marks.
Two-time World Cup winner and 2024 Olympic champion Alyssa Naeher retired from international duty at the end of last year at age 36. Since then, USWNT head coach Emma Hayes has effectively been conducting an open tryout for the position over the past six months.
Tullis-Joyce firmly entered her name into that open audition on Saturday. The Manchester United goalkeeper had been watching the goalkeeper race from a slight distance up until recently, but even after earning her first senior cap, Tullis-Joyce is as much of a contender to become the new No. 1 as any other goalkeeper in the pool.
Jane Campbell, 30, had ostensibly become the favorite for the job in recent months, but she did not play in either match against Brazil during this window. Mandy McGlynn made her international debut in goal last October. The three goalkeepers, plus uncapped training goalkeeper Angelina Anderson, entered this April training camp with 12 combined caps.
Casey Murphy, with 20 caps at 28 years old, is the most experienced goalkeeper available for selection in the USWNT pool. But she has not received a call-up in 2025, and it's increasingly fair to wonder if her absence is more about an incumbent successor falling out of favor than it is simply Hayes testing out new goalkeepers.
Hayes had promised she would dole out opportunities in this two-game window against Brazil, and she did that by turning to Tullis-Joyce in the first game and McGlynn in Tuesday's rematch, the two biggest USWNT games of the year.
For months, Hayes has said that by July she should have a clearer picture of who will be her new starting goalkeeper. By then, Hayes will have seen the USWNT in pairs of games against Brazil, China and the Republic of Ireland, and another against Canada. If the timeline holds, Hayes' preferred starter will have two years to refine herself in the role ahead of the 2027 Women's World Cup.
"If you think about this, prior to when even Alyssa made the No. 1 [job] her own, it takes a period of time to be able to solidify that," Hayes said prior to this training camp. "And I think it's fair to say we've got a lot of really good quality goalkeepers.
"Who will emerge from that as the No. 1? Don't know, but they have to take their chances when they get them. This is a performance-related business, and each and every opportunity they get, they have to make the most of it because, of course, that will impact my decision making as we progress."
Hayes is correct in pointing out that Naeher took time to make the position her own. Naeher took over the No. 1 job in the years ahead of the 2019 World Cup under immense scrutiny as she tried to fill the boots of Hope Solo, who won a World Cup, two Olympic gold medals, and was arguably the best net-minder the world has ever seen.
Naeher is a quiet, calm personality -- the antithesis of Solo, and the dichotomy between their personalities added to the outside skepticism of Naeher ahead of, and during, the 2019 World Cup. Those questions were ultimately squashed when she started and played every minute as the USWNT captured a second straight crown. She followed that up with dazzling performances at the 2023 World Cup and last year's Olympics.
So yes, goalkeeper successions -- especially in the shadows of departed legends -- are nothing new to the USWNT. Solo followed Briana Scurry, who was also a World Cup winner and two-time Olympic winner, in an infamous USWNT goalkeeper changeover around 2007-08. What's different now, however, is a true sense of inexperience among goalkeeper options -- not only in terms of caps, but in big moments.
Solo was an alternate at the 2004 Olympics, which the USWNT won, and the starter at the 2007 World Cup before then-head coach Greg Ryan benched her for the semifinal in favor of Scurry. Solo reassumed the starting role for the 2008 Olympics and didn't let go of it for eight years, until U.S. Soccer terminated her contract for off-field reasons.
Naeher was part of the USWNT's 2015 World Cup-winning squad. She didn't play at that tournament, but she still got to experience that pressure-packed environment ahead of taking the starring role four years later.
Murphy was the backup goalkeeper for last year's Olympics and the 2023 World Cup. She looked like she might challenge Naeher for the No. 1 role at World Cup qualifying in 2022. Campbell was an alternate at last year's Olympics. And ... that's the extent of major-tournament experience among the goalkeepers who have been in senior camp in 2025.
Hayes is unabashed by inexperience, whether in goal or in the middle of the park, where she's increasingly given important assignments to 17-year-old midfielder phenom Lily Yohannes. Hayes said Tullis-Joyce looked "authoritative and commanding" in her debut, Saturday's 2-0 win over Brazil.
Tullis-Joyce played the ball long too often for Hayes' liking, but the USWNT coach added that she understood why: It was Tullis-Joyce's debut, and her club team frequently plays that way.
To be sure, there is a stylistic fit that needs to be made, but all of Hayes' options are strong shot-stoppers. Murphy ranks ahead of Campbell and McGlynn this NWSL season in post-shot expected goals minus goals against, per FBRef, which is a measurement of shot-stopping ability. McGlynn ranked second in the NWSL and first among Americans in that category by a significant margin last season. Tullis-Joyce is the runaway leader in that category in England's WSL, per FBRef.
Whoever is to assume the starting goalkeeper role, however, is expected to be comfortable on the ball to help the USWNT possess in deeper spaces, Hayes has said on multiple occasions.
"I would say for the goalkeepers that are not in here, they all know what they have to work on, and what is a key focus area," Hayes said in February.
Murphy, who plays for the North Carolina Courage, the NWSL's most possession-oriented team, is arguably the most suited for that style. The Houston Dash, where Campbell starts, is attempting to build a similar identity under a new head coach.
McGlynn registered a rare goalkeeper assist on opening weekend of the 2025 NWSL season, but she and the Utah Royals have also struggled with deep-lying turnovers on other occasions this season. She and an inexperienced USWNT back line made a series of errors early in Tuesday's 2-1 loss to Brazil while trying to keep possession around their own goal. McGlynn admitted after the match that she was "forcing it" in the first half as she played into the hands of Brazil's press.
Hayes made similar points about McGlynn and Tullis-Joyce needing to read the game in possession and figure out when to play short or go long.
So, who will be the next USWNT No. 1?
"I think it's been a competitive camp," Hayes said of her goalkeeper pool after Tuesday's loss. "I think both [McGlynn] and Phallon have had the opportunity to play against a top opponent, just like Jane had the opportunity to play against a top opponent with Japan, and I think it's fair to say I'm a lot clearer."
Whoever assumes the role will know well the scrutiny that awaits: World Cup titles and Golden Gloves are the program's standard. They will have two years to prepare for that inevitable pressure.
SAN JOSE, Calif. (April 8, 2025) -- The U.S. Women's National Team fell to Brazil 2-1 in the second of two matches between two of the world's top teams. The USWNT won the first meeting 2-0 in Inglewood, Calif., on April 5, but the South Americans took the second with a very late game-winner in stoppage time.
Forward Catarina Macario scored the lone goal for the U.S., that coming just 34 seconds into the match marking the seventh fastest goals from the opening whistle in USWNT history.
The goal came after forward Alyssa Thompson played a give-and-go to Macario near midfield and raced into the Brazil penalty box where her shot was blocked as she collided with Brazil goalkeeper Natascha, who couldn't corral the ball. Macario was able to latch onto the loose ball and rolled it home from close range for a dream start.
For Macario, a Stanford alumna, it was her 10th career USWNT goal and it was scored at the same stadium where played her final college career game, helping the Cardinal win the NCAA title in 2019. It was also her first career goal against Brazil, where she was born, before moving to the USA at the age of 12.
Brazilian forward Kerolin notched a well-taken equalizer in the 24th minute off an assist from Gio, but neither team could find the net until stoppage time when Brazil countered off a U.S. free kick. Luany raced down the right flank and played a pass across the goal mouth for a wide-open Amanda Gutierres to touch home. It was Brazil's fourth all-time win against the USA and first since 2014.
At 26-years-old, Macario was the second oldest player in the starting lineup, which averaged 17.9 caps at the start of the game, the lowest for any USWNT starting XI in the last 24 years. Center back Emily Sonnett, the oldest player in the starting lineup, had more caps (107) than the rest of the starters combined (81).
Sonnett and midfielder Korbin Albert were the only starters in this match who played against Brazil in the 2024 Paris Olympic gold medal match.
Since the gold medal run, U.S. head coach Emma Hayes has underscored the importance of developing young talent, and this match provided significant experience for several players.
Defender Avery Patterson and forward Michelle Cooper, both 22, made the first starts of their international careers while 19-year-old midfielder Claire Hutton played the entire match. Nineteen-year-old Gisele Thompson also played the full match at right back and 17-year-old Lily Yohannes played the first half, and did well.
The USWNT will be back in action against China in a pair of matches on May 31 in (St. Paul, Minn. at Allianz Field) and June 3 in (St. Louis, Mo. at Energizer Park).
USA -- Catarina Macario, 1st minute: Catarina Macario put the USA on the board early after she played a give-and go with Alyssa Thompson that sprung her free into the Brazil half. Her shot was blocked by a Brazilian defender, but goalkeeper Natascha couldn't secure the ball, and Macario capitalized to roll her shot into the open net from close range. USA 1, BRA 0
BRA -- Kerolin (Gio), 24th minute: Kerolin began her attack on the left side of the box off a short pass from Gio. Claire Hutton and Tara McKeown collided with each other, leaving Kerolin free, and the former NWSL MVP found an open space to shoot a high shot into the upper right corner above diving U.S. keeper Mandy McGlynn. USA 1, BRA 1
BRA -- Amanda Gutierres (Luany), 90+5th minute: After several late attacks by Brazil, Amanda Gutierres found the back of the net on an assist by Luany. Brazil created a two-on-one situation in transition and McGylnn was left stranded for Brazil's easy tap-in. USA 1, BRA 2
Match: United States Women's National Team vs. BrazilDate: April 8, 2025Competition: International FriendlyVenue: PayPal Park; San Jose, Calif.Attendance: 18,000 (Sell Out)Kickoff: 7:37 p.m. local (10:37 p.m. ET)Weather: 61 degrees, mostly cloudy
Lineups:USA: 18-Mandy McGlynn; 12-Gisele Thompson, 4-Tara McKeown (5-Alana Cook, 46), 14-Emily Sonnett (Capt.), 13-Avery Patterson (19-Crystal Dunn, 67 – Concussion Sub); 16-Claire Hutton, 3-Korbin Albert (17-Sam Coffey, 58), 24-Lily Yohannes (8-Jaedyn Shaw, 46); 15-Michelle Cooper (22-Yazmeen Ryan, 58), 20-Catarina Macario (10-Lindsey Heaps, 58), 11-Alyssa Thompson (9-Ally Sentnor, 74)Substitutes not used: 1-Jane Campbell, 6-Emily Sams, 7-Ashley Hatch, 21-Phallon Tullis-Joyce, 23-Emily FoxHead coach: Emma Hayes
BRA: 12-Natascha; 13-Bruninha (19-Luany, 36), 23-Isa Haas, 4-Lauren (20-Mariza, 36), 15-Fê Palermo (16-Kaká, 78), 5-Duda Sampaio (17-Lais Estevam, 78), 8-Angelina (Capt.), 6-Yasmim, 18-Gabi Portilho (7-Jheniffer, 90+3), 21-Gio (11-Amanda Gutierres, 90+3), 10-KerolinSubstitutes not used: 1-Lorena, 22-Camila, 2-Antônia, 3-Tarciane,9-Adriana,14-LudmilaHead coach: Arthur Elias
Stats Summary: USA / BRAShots: 18 / 19Shots on Goal: 5 / 7Saves: 5 / 3Corner Kicks: 8 / 7Fouls: 9 / 13Offside: 0 / 1
Misconduct Summary:USA – Alana Cook (Caution) 59th minute
Officials:Referee: Marianela Araya (CRC)AR 1: Shirley Perello (HON)AR2: Sandra Ramirez (MEX)4th Official: Katia Garcia (MEX)VAR: Tatiana Guzman (NCA)AVAR: Diana Perez (MEX)
Michelob Ultra Woman of the Match: Cat Macario
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April 9 – SoFi Stadium, in Inglewood, has seen two different faces to America's relationship with their respective men's and women's national teams over the last two weeks, and the differences could not be starker.
Two weeks ago the men played Canada in the third-place match at the Concacaf Nations League. This game had plenty riding on it, both competitively and politically, as the 2026 World Cup approaches. As the match kicked off, there were perhaps 3,000 fans in attendance, in a match the US went on to lose 2-1.
On Saturday, the women's team played the first of two friendly matches against Brazil, and were greeted by more than 32,000 loud, appreciative supporters in a comprehensive 2-0 win in front of a crowd that clearly loves these women.
Of course, America is a country where they love winners, and the USWNT is clearly that with four World Cups and five Olympic Gold medals to their names, but it isn't as though the USMNT has come up empty-handed.
Since the women won their first World Cup in 1991, the men have secured seven Concacaf Gold Cups and the first three Nations League titles in the same period, however there appears to be a growing disconnect between the men's team and US football fans.
No doubt the women's game is going through a remarkable surge in the US and in Southern California with the formation of Angel City FC and the San Diego Wave of the National Women's Soccer league. However the men in the form of LAFC and the LA Galaxy have competed in the last three MLS Cup finals, winning one apiece.
So, why does the LA public show up for a friendly match for women, and are a no-show for the men in a competitive fixture?
While there are no definitive arguments, potential reasons could be…
Cultural Impact:
The USWNT, with the likes of Alex Morgan, Brandi Chastain, Megan Rapinoe, and Abby Wambach, have used their status to advocate for gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, and equal pay meaning they have transcended the sport. They have also been a lightning rod in attracting young girls to the sport.
The USMNT is still trying to figure out exactly who they are and what they stand for. Back in the 90's the team was hard-nosed and felt as though it was up to them to prove the team belonged on the world stage. In the 2000's that led to improved World Cup performances, but as we move into the 2020s, the team has seemingly lost its identity with the football public.
Fan Engagement:
There is more connection to the women, as I believe that they're more approachable. At NWSL matches, you'll find players signing autographs and posing for selfies. The men, who are now scattered across the globe, don't enjoy the same intimacy, but could certainly make more of an effort.
U.S. Soccer also needs to look at the pricing of its men's games. Youth soccer in America feels as close to tennis and golf in terms of cost, and that has morphed into the national team. If you want to pack out SoFi make it affordable for a family of four. Make deals so that an entire youth team can come and support their country and create those fans for life.
What we do know is that SoFi will host two of the USMNT's group stage matches next summer. Americans love an event, and I'm sure the stadium will be at full capacity (World Cup ticket prices haven't been released), but the question remains…what will the support be like? Football tourists? Or fans living every second and straining every sinew in an effort to will their country to victory.
Contact the writer of this story, Nick Webster, at moc.l1744212884labto1744212884ofdlr1744212884owedi1744212884sni@o1744212884fni1744212884
News from North and Central America and the Caribbean
Tennis - ATP Masters 1000 - Monte Carlo Masters - Monte Carlo Country Club, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France - April 9, 2025 Serbia's Novak Djokovic in action during his round of 32 match against Chile's Alejandro Tabilo REUTERS/Manon Cruz
Novak Djokovic Faces Clay Court Crisis After Stunning Monte Carlo Upset
The tennis world was left in shock as Novak Djokovic, the former World No. 1, suffered a surprising defeat at the Monte Carlo Masters. Alejandro Tabilo, from Chile, outplayed Djokovic with a straight-set victory of 6-3, 6-4 in the second round, marking Djokovic's second loss to Tabilo in their head-to-head encounters.
Djokovic, a three-time champion at Roland Garros, is now facing a clay court crisis as he struggles to find his form leading up to the French Open. Despite his past success on clay, Djokovic's recent performances have left fans and experts questioning his ability to compete at the highest level on this surface.
The Serbian star, who had a strong showing at the Miami Open reaching the final, failed to replicate that form in Monte Carlo. Djokovic's game was plagued by unforced errors and an inability to break Tabilo's solid play, ultimately costing him the match and valuable ATP ranking points.
With just two more Masters 1000 tournaments before Roland Garros, Djokovic is under immense pressure to refine his game and regain his winning momentum. The loss at Monte Carlo not only dented his confidence but also widened the gap between him and the top-ranked players on the tour.
As Djokovic navigates through this challenging period, his fans are left wondering if the tennis legend can overcome this setback and once again dominate on the clay courts. Stay tuned for more updates on Djokovic's journey as he strives to reclaim his spot at the pinnacle of men's tennis.
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'I'm telling you bro ... write this down.'ByBaseline StaffPublished Apr 09, 2025 copy_link
Published Apr 09, 2025
Ben Shelton's got jokes! The 22-year-old is the latest to dunk on the unrealistic "morning routine" of Florida-based finess influencer Ashton Hall, which has racked up more than 1 billion views on social media and spawned copy-cat clips by everyone from politicians and Saturday Night Live, to singer Ed Sheeran and the Miami Heat's mascot, Burnie.Competing this week in Monte Carlo, Shelton centers his spoof on the centerpiece of Hall's bonkers five-minute long clip, which proclaims he starts his day at 3:52 a.m., sprints on the treadmill at sunrise, and sees him repeatedly dunk his head into a bowl full of Saratoga Spring Water.Pounding the pavement and huffing and puffing through the scenic views of Monte Carlo at "4:15 a.m.," Shelton later dispatches words of wisdom to a "fan," who can be seen taking copious notes. (Or is he?)"I'm telling you bro ... write this down: go to sleep 8 p.m., wake up 3 a.m., ice water on the face. That's it. Success," Shelton says.Watch the full video below, as the ATP Tour proclaims that Shelton has the path to greatness "down to a science."
Competing this week in Monte Carlo, Shelton centers his spoof on the centerpiece of Hall's bonkers five-minute long clip, which proclaims he starts his day at 3:52 a.m., sprints on the treadmill at sunrise, and sees him repeatedly dunk his head into a bowl full of Saratoga Spring Water.Pounding the pavement and huffing and puffing through the scenic views of Monte Carlo at "4:15 a.m.," Shelton later dispatches words of wisdom to a "fan," who can be seen taking copious notes. (Or is he?)"I'm telling you bro ... write this down: go to sleep 8 p.m., wake up 3 a.m., ice water on the face. That's it. Success," Shelton says.Watch the full video below, as the ATP Tour proclaims that Shelton has the path to greatness "down to a science."
Pounding the pavement and huffing and puffing through the scenic views of Monte Carlo at "4:15 a.m.," Shelton later dispatches words of wisdom to a "fan," who can be seen taking copious notes. (Or is he?)"I'm telling you bro ... write this down: go to sleep 8 p.m., wake up 3 a.m., ice water on the face. That's it. Success," Shelton says.Watch the full video below, as the ATP Tour proclaims that Shelton has the path to greatness "down to a science."
"I'm telling you bro ... write this down: go to sleep 8 p.m., wake up 3 a.m., ice water on the face. That's it. Success," Shelton says.Watch the full video below, as the ATP Tour proclaims that Shelton has the path to greatness "down to a science."
Watch the full video below, as the ATP Tour proclaims that Shelton has the path to greatness "down to a science."
A post shared by Overtime Tennis (@overtimetennis)
Shelton's video was produced in part by Overtime Tennis, a sports digital media company that caters specifically to the Gen Z fan—but taking a funny shot at influencers isn't all that the American is doing on the 'gram these days.Last month, he launched his relationship with soccer player Trinity Rodman on the platform, in a moment that Coco Gauff and Frances Tiafoe said we should've all seen coming.Read more: Ben Shelton hard launches new girlfriend Trinity Rodman on InstagramDespite losing his first singles match at the ATP Masters 1000 to Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, Shelton is finding success of a different sort on the doubles court with Rohan Bopanna. The first-time pair is through to the quarterfinals.
Last month, he launched his relationship with soccer player Trinity Rodman on the platform, in a moment that Coco Gauff and Frances Tiafoe said we should've all seen coming.Read more: Ben Shelton hard launches new girlfriend Trinity Rodman on InstagramDespite losing his first singles match at the ATP Masters 1000 to Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, Shelton is finding success of a different sort on the doubles court with Rohan Bopanna. The first-time pair is through to the quarterfinals.
Read more: Ben Shelton hard launches new girlfriend Trinity Rodman on InstagramDespite losing his first singles match at the ATP Masters 1000 to Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, Shelton is finding success of a different sort on the doubles court with Rohan Bopanna. The first-time pair is through to the quarterfinals.
Despite losing his first singles match at the ATP Masters 1000 to Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, Shelton is finding success of a different sort on the doubles court with Rohan Bopanna. The first-time pair is through to the quarterfinals.
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Stream the match live on TennisChannel.com at 6:10am ET.BySteve TignorPublished Apr 09, 2025 copy_link
Published Apr 09, 2025
🖥️📱 Click here for live coverage on TennisChannel.com (United States only; estimated start time 7:20 a.m. ET)The winner of this match will face either No. 6 seed Stefanos Tsitsipas or world No. 43 Nuno Borges in the quarterfinals.👉 Click here for the complete Monte Carlo bracket.
The winner of this match will face either No. 6 seed Stefanos Tsitsipas or world No. 43 Nuno Borges in the quarterfinals.👉 Click here for the complete Monte Carlo bracket.
👉 Click here for the complete Monte Carlo bracket.
There were two very different Alcarazes on court in his opening-round win over Francisco Cerundolo on Wednesday. In the first set, he looked lost and dazed as his shots flew haphazardly around the arena. In the next two sets, he looked fully confident in his entire arsenal, and played with a forceful efficiency that we haven't seen a ton of from him in 2025. He went from C- to A+ over the course of an hour and a half.Which of those Alcarazes we see on Thursday will determine how this match progresses, how close it is, and maybe even who wins it. He and Altmaier have never faced each other, but the German's ranking of 84 makes him the definite underdog. That said, he should be in a groove on these courts by now; he has won four matches since starting the qualifying on Saturday, one of which was over 16th seed Felix Auger Aliassime.We know Alcaraz can always come crashing to earth, but I'll guess that he'll stay locked in for another couple of sets. Winner: Alcaraz
Which of those Alcarazes we see on Thursday will determine how this match progresses, how close it is, and maybe even who wins it. He and Altmaier have never faced each other, but the German's ranking of 84 makes him the definite underdog. That said, he should be in a groove on these courts by now; he has won four matches since starting the qualifying on Saturday, one of which was over 16th seed Felix Auger Aliassime.We know Alcaraz can always come crashing to earth, but I'll guess that he'll stay locked in for another couple of sets. Winner: Alcaraz
We know Alcaraz can always come crashing to earth, but I'll guess that he'll stay locked in for another couple of sets. Winner: Alcaraz
"Tennis is not just about hitting the ball. It is about more than that."Could Carlos Alcaraz's unique approach to tennis be the key to his success? #RolexMonteCarloMastershttps://t.co/CeUdWWpmNI
Alcaraz is a -1600 moneyline favorite; Altmaier is a +725 underdog.To win the first set, Alcaraz is -700 and Altmaier +400.(Odds from BetMGM as of 3:10 pm ET on Wednesday, April 9.)👉 Click here for more betting coverage on TENNIS.com.
To win the first set, Alcaraz is -700 and Altmaier +400.(Odds from BetMGM as of 3:10 pm ET on Wednesday, April 9.)👉 Click here for more betting coverage on TENNIS.com.
(Odds from BetMGM as of 3:10 pm ET on Wednesday, April 9.)👉 Click here for more betting coverage on TENNIS.com.
👉 Click here for more betting coverage on TENNIS.com.
Eight fantastic third-round matches will be played on Day 5 of the ATP Monte Carlo Rolex Masters. Two of the top three seeds have already been eliminated in the second round, and #2 seed Carlos Alcaraz is now the heavy favorite to win the title. As always, we at LWOT will offer predictions for every match on the slate. But which players will advance to the quarterfinals?
Head-to-Head: Berrettini 1-1 Musetti
Matteo Berrettini got the biggest win of his career in terms of rankings, as he defeated the top seed, Alexander Zverev, in a three-set thriller. Berrettini was not finding his range for a set and a half, but his game became much more potent once he started getting more on his forehand. Lorenzo Musetti fought back from a set down to defeat the dangerous Jiri Lehecka. This will be an emotional match for both these players, and neither of them can afford to make a slow start. Berrettini has the better serve, but Musetti plays with a lot of variety, which helps him on clay. Berrettini will struggle to break through Musetti's defense, so I'm going with the younger Italian.
Prediction: Musetti in 3
Head-to-Head: Dimitrov 2-0 Tabilo
Grigor Dimitrov has started to turn around his season and is looking in good touch. He came back from a set down to defeat the local wild card, Valentin Vacherot, in the second round. The Bulgarian player will be looking to make his fifth quarterfinal appearance at the Monte Carlo Masters, but he has to go through an inspired Alejandro Tabilo first. Tabilo played the best match of his season to upset Novak Djokovic in two sets. Tabilo was in horrible form before this week, but two quality wins so far might have put his season back on track. I expect a competitive match between these two, but I believe Dimitrov will prevail.
Prediction: Dimitrov in 3
Embed from Getty Images
Head-to-Head: first meeting
Alexei Popyrin had to dig incredibly deep to get another top-quality win against an in-form player. However, the draw only gets tougher for the Australian as he faces Casper Ruud in the third round. Ugo Humbert and Frances Tiafoe are brilliant players, but they can't match up to the pedigree of Ruud on clay. The Norwegian dismissed Roberto Bautista Agut in straight sets and looked at his absolute best. Popyrin has made a valiant effort to reach this far, but Ruud should stop his run and reach the quarterfinals.
Prediction: Ruud in 2
Head-to-Head: first meeting
Carlos Alcaraz had to bring his best level to put away Francisco Cerundolo in the second round. Alcaraz made a lot of errors in the first set, and Cerundolo played at a very high level. The tables started to turn when the Spaniard saved a crucial break point at the beginning of the second set, and since then, he never looked back and lost just one game. Daniel Altmaier is a solid clay player and is having a decent season so far, but Alcaraz should handle him if he plays close to his best.
Prediction: Alcaraz in 2
Main Photo Credit: Mike Frey-Imagn Images
All eight Round of 16 contests will be played on Day 5 of the ATP Monte Carlo Masters. 2021 US Open champion Daniil Medvedev's match
Clay-court tennis on the WTA Tour returns to Europe for one of the most stacked events of the year. The Porsche Tennis Grand Prix in
After years of battling injuries, suspensions, and personal adversity, American tennis star Jenson Brooksby has scripted one of the most remarkable comeback stories of 2025.
The ATP Monte Carlo Masters second round features some top competitors, and with it come some really interesting betting opportunities. My featured match is none
This week's Monte Carlo Masters marks the traditional start of the European clay-court swing, which promises to be a fascinating two-month stretch of a long tennis season. Building towards the French Open in late May, the sport's most gruelling surface will throw up several storylines of interest.
Novak Djokovic is a Monaco resident but he did not look at home on the principality's courts on Wednesday. Sluggish and error-strewn, the Serbian veteran lost his opening match 6-3, 6-4 to Alejandro Tabilo, the world No32 from Chile who had also won their previous encounter at last year's Italian Open.
This was a tough turnaround for Djokovic, who had finished runner-up at the Miami Open ten days beforehand. Physically the transition from hard to clay is more challenging for a 37-year-old, while it appears he has not shaken off an infection in his right eye.
The short period of time was also probably not enough for a full mental reset from the disappointment of missing out on a 100th tour title in Florida.
This latest loss is not a huge setback, though. There are still at least two tournaments to come before Djokovic's next shot at claiming a record 25th grand-slam singles title in Paris next month, and plenty of time for work on the practice court. His gold-medal victory at last year's Olympics reminded us of his ability to peak for the biggest moments.
Do not expect Jannik Sinner to make a low-key return from a three-month drugs ban. His next scheduled tournament is on home soil from May 7 at the Italian Open, where he will be given a hero's welcome from the Rome crowd. Perhaps not a great look for the sport considering the circumstances of his absence but he will have served his time by then.
Remarkably, Sinner is already guaranteed to come back as the world No1. Alexander Zverev botched the best opportunity he has had to reach the top of the rankings with an underwhelming win-loss record of 6-6 since the Australian Open, while Carlos Alcaraz has fallen short of the run of unbeaten matches he needed to climb back up to the summit of men's tennis. Sinner has little to fear when he returns well rested ahead of a busy summer.
The very early signs are that Jack Draper is going to have a more enjoyable clay-court swing in 2025. Last year he struggled for consistency on the red stuff and looked demoralised after a French Open first-round exit at the hands of the Dutch qualifier Jesper de Jong. Ranked No39 in the world at the time, it prompted Draper to make various changes both technically and physically.
This week, Draper is in Monte Carlo at a career-high ranking of No6 and well primed to make further gains with few points to defend over the next two months. The confidence from his Indian Wells Open triumph last month showed in a 6-1, 6-1 win over Marcos Giron on Tuesday and he now faces a useful test of his clay skills against Spain's Alejandro Davidovich Fokina on Thursday. Getting the balance right between attack and defence on this slower surface is the main challenge for Draper.
Great Britain's chances of progressing to the Billie Jean King Cup finals have not been helped by the use of clay for this week's qualifying event in The Hague, but at least it gives team members the chance for an extended period of training with each other on the surface with the full swing ahead in mind.
Anne Keothavong's side face a tough task in a three-team section with Germany and the Netherlands as only the group winners go through to November's showpiece event in Shenzhen. The withdrawal of Emma Raducanu was also a blow, although hope should not be lost for the two British singles players who will be fielded. Katie Boulter is capable of rising to the occasion despite her general struggles on clay, while Sonay Kartal can make up for her inexperience with spin-heavy groundstrokes.
Raducanu decided last week that the Billie Jean King Cup qualifiers came along a little too soon for her after a busy first three months of the year and reneged on her initial commitment to play in the event. Instead she extended her period of rest after a quarter-final exit at the Miami Open before commencing her clay-court training in London. A planned appearance at next week's Rouen Open was also removed from her schedule.
Raducanu is on the rise again, inside the world's top 50 at a ranking of No47, but this surface change is not great timing for her as she would have wanted to continue the momentum she had built in Miami on hard courts. But while clay is her weakest of the three surfaces, she still has the necessary skills and intelligence to play at a high level. Consistency is key, as is the need for her finally to bring her long search for a coach to a conclusion.
Iga Swiatek was on top of the world when she won her fourth French Open title last June and was the clear favourite to return to Roland Garros later in the summer for Olympic gold. The contrast in scenes was quite striking seven weeks afterwards when she broke down in tears on live television after a semi-final exit at Paris 2024. She is still waiting for another tournament victory.
Surely clay will bring about a turn in fortunes for Swiatek, who has been noticeably low on confidence this season. It would also be nice for the tour to see a renewal of the rivalry between Swiatek and Aryna Sabalenka, who have not played each other in eight months. Their battle in the final of last year's Madrid Open — Swiatek won a deciding tiebreak after three hours — was one of the matches of the season.
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Mackenzie McDonald is on his way to Munich for the ATP 500 event next week in the German city. It is unlike any trip he has ever taken, though.
McDonald on Monday announced his engagement to WTA player Maria Mateas. They shared their special moment at a botanical garden in Orlando, where they both spend time training.
“I wanted to do this for a while, and had the ring on me, but didn't really want to do it over the offseason when everyone else does it,” McDonald told ATPTour.com. “I wanted to have our special moment. Did it in Orlando, and probably the biggest thing was [that I caught her] off guard, for sure.
“It's really hard to get any surprise past her and pretty proud of myself for pulling it off without her knowing.”
A post shared by Mackenzie McDonald 🍟 (@mackiemacster)
Some people know exactly when they will propose to their partner and when. That was not the case for McDonald, the No. 100 player in the PIF ATP Rankings.
“I've actually been traveling with the ring for months, and it's been going all over the world, because I just didn't know when I was going to see her,” McDonald said. “But I knew I wanted to do it around this time. We just happened to both be here and I did it at a botanical garden. We couldn't be happier.”
As happy as the newly engaged couple is, life as professional tennis players does not stop. Mateas is competing in Boca Raton, Florida and McDonald is on his way to Munich for the BMW Open.
“We couldn't be happier,” McDonald said. “Our families are so happy, and we're looking forward to forever.”
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The 24-time major winner dropped to 0-2 against Alejandro Tabilo on Wednesday.ByTENNIS.comPublished Apr 09, 2025 copy_link
Published Apr 09, 2025
MONTE CARLO, Monaco—For the second time in 11 months at an ATP Masters 1000 clay-court event, Novak Djokovic was eliminated by left-hander Alejandro Tabilo.Following his 6-3, 6-4 defeat to the Chilean Wednesday in the second round of the Monte Carlo Masters, the 24-time major champion revealed he wasn't surprised about the outcome of “the worst day.”Speaking with press, Djokovic stated, “Look, I was hoping it was not going to happen, but it was quite a high probability I'm going to play this way. Horrible feeling to play this way, and just sorry for all the people that have to witness this.”
Following his 6-3, 6-4 defeat to the Chilean Wednesday in the second round of the Monte Carlo Masters, the 24-time major champion revealed he wasn't surprised about the outcome of “the worst day.”Speaking with press, Djokovic stated, “Look, I was hoping it was not going to happen, but it was quite a high probability I'm going to play this way. Horrible feeling to play this way, and just sorry for all the people that have to witness this.”
Speaking with press, Djokovic stated, “Look, I was hoping it was not going to happen, but it was quite a high probability I'm going to play this way. Horrible feeling to play this way, and just sorry for all the people that have to witness this.”
It's too early for alarm bells, given Djokovic has exited before the quarterfinals in four of his past five Monte Carlo appearances.© Getty Images
© Getty Images
When asked if he could point to a reason for how it all played out, Djokovic responded, “I don't know. I don't have it. I have it and I don't have it. I don't really care.”The 37-year-old experienced a 6-2, 6-3 third-round loss to Tabilo at last year's Internazionali BNL d'Italia in Rome. He came into their latest contest on the back of an encouraging performance at the Miami Open, where he finished runner-up to Jakub Mensik, but downplayed any hope of carrying that momentum through when switching surfaces.“I knew I'm gonna have a tough opponent and I knew I'm gonna probably play pretty bad. But this bad, I didn't expect,” said the Serbian.
The 37-year-old experienced a 6-2, 6-3 third-round loss to Tabilo at last year's Internazionali BNL d'Italia in Rome. He came into their latest contest on the back of an encouraging performance at the Miami Open, where he finished runner-up to Jakub Mensik, but downplayed any hope of carrying that momentum through when switching surfaces.“I knew I'm gonna have a tough opponent and I knew I'm gonna probably play pretty bad. But this bad, I didn't expect,” said the Serbian.
“I knew I'm gonna have a tough opponent and I knew I'm gonna probably play pretty bad. But this bad, I didn't expect,” said the Serbian.
I was hoping it was not going to happen, but it was quite a high probability I'm going to play this way. Horrible feeling to play this way, and just sorry for all the people that have to witness this. Novak Djokovic
Djokovic, of course, is one title away from reaching the centennial mark. On what goals he might have for the European clay-court season, just one event was mentioned.“Roland Garros,” said the current world No. 5.Followed up a reporter, “Roland Garros? That's it?”Affirmed Djokovic with a smile, “That's it.”
“Roland Garros,” said the current world No. 5.Followed up a reporter, “Roland Garros? That's it?”Affirmed Djokovic with a smile, “That's it.”
Followed up a reporter, “Roland Garros? That's it?”Affirmed Djokovic with a smile, “That's it.”
Affirmed Djokovic with a smile, “That's it.”
The 24-time major winner dropped to 0-2 against Alejandro Tabilo on Wednesday.ByTENNIS.comPublished Apr 09, 2025 copy_link
Published Apr 09, 2025
MONTE CARLO, Monaco—For the second time in 11 months at an ATP Masters 1000 clay-court event, Novak Djokovic was eliminated by left-hander Alejandro Tabilo.Following his 6-3, 6-4 defeat to the Chilean Wednesday in the second round of the Monte Carlo Masters, the 24-time major champion revealed he wasn't surprised about the outcome of “the worst day.”Speaking with press, Djokovic stated, “Look, I was hoping it was not going to happen, but it was quite a high probability I'm going to play this way. Horrible feeling to play this way, and just sorry for all the people that have to witness this.”
Following his 6-3, 6-4 defeat to the Chilean Wednesday in the second round of the Monte Carlo Masters, the 24-time major champion revealed he wasn't surprised about the outcome of “the worst day.”Speaking with press, Djokovic stated, “Look, I was hoping it was not going to happen, but it was quite a high probability I'm going to play this way. Horrible feeling to play this way, and just sorry for all the people that have to witness this.”
Speaking with press, Djokovic stated, “Look, I was hoping it was not going to happen, but it was quite a high probability I'm going to play this way. Horrible feeling to play this way, and just sorry for all the people that have to witness this.”
It's too early for alarm bells, given Djokovic has exited before the quarterfinals in four of his past five Monte Carlo appearances.© Getty Images
© Getty Images
When asked if he could point to a reason for how it all played out, Djokovic responded, “I don't know. I don't have it. I have it and I don't have it. I don't really care.”The 37-year-old experienced a 6-2, 6-3 third-round loss to Tabilo at last year's Internazionali BNL d'Italia in Rome. He came into their latest contest on the back of an encouraging performance at the Miami Open, where he finished runner-up to Jakub Mensik, but downplayed any hope of carrying that momentum through when switching surfaces.“I knew I'm gonna have a tough opponent and I knew I'm gonna probably play pretty bad. But this bad, I didn't expect,” said the Serbian.
The 37-year-old experienced a 6-2, 6-3 third-round loss to Tabilo at last year's Internazionali BNL d'Italia in Rome. He came into their latest contest on the back of an encouraging performance at the Miami Open, where he finished runner-up to Jakub Mensik, but downplayed any hope of carrying that momentum through when switching surfaces.“I knew I'm gonna have a tough opponent and I knew I'm gonna probably play pretty bad. But this bad, I didn't expect,” said the Serbian.
“I knew I'm gonna have a tough opponent and I knew I'm gonna probably play pretty bad. But this bad, I didn't expect,” said the Serbian.
I was hoping it was not going to happen, but it was quite a high probability I'm going to play this way. Horrible feeling to play this way, and just sorry for all the people that have to witness this. Novak Djokovic
Djokovic, of course, is one title away from reaching the centennial mark. On what goals he might have for the European clay-court season, just one event was mentioned.“Roland Garros,” said the current world No. 5.Followed up a reporter, “Roland Garros? That's it?”Affirmed Djokovic with a smile, “That's it.”
“Roland Garros,” said the current world No. 5.Followed up a reporter, “Roland Garros? That's it?”Affirmed Djokovic with a smile, “That's it.”
Followed up a reporter, “Roland Garros? That's it?”Affirmed Djokovic with a smile, “That's it.”
Affirmed Djokovic with a smile, “That's it.”
Tennis - ATP Masters 1000 - Monte Carlo Masters - Monte Carlo Country Club, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France - April 9, 2025 Serbia's Novak Djokovic reacts during his round of 32 match against Chile's Alejandro Tabilo REUTERS/Manon Cruz
Novak Djokovic, the tennis sensation, faced a catastrophic defeat in his debut match at the prestigious Monte-Carlo Masters, sending shockwaves through the sports world. This unexpected loss has dealt a severe blow to Djokovic's preparations for the upcoming French Open, raising questions about his form and readiness for the grand slam event.
Known for his remarkable skills and dominance on the court, Djokovic's early exit from the Monte-Carlo Masters has left fans and experts stunned. Despite his extensive experience at the tournament, having participated 18 times, Djokovic has only managed to clinch the title twice, a surprising statistic for a player of his caliber.
The defeat has ignited speculation and debate within the tennis community, with many wondering about the possible reasons behind Djokovic's uncharacteristic performance. As one of the leading contenders in every tournament he enters, Djokovic's loss has certainly created an air of uncertainty around his future matches and overall season.
With the French Open fast approaching, Djokovic will need to regroup and refocus in order to maintain his status as one of the top players in the world. The road ahead will undoubtedly be challenging, but Djokovic's talent and determination may very well pave the way for a remarkable comeback in the days to come.
As fans eagerly await Djokovic's next move, one thing is certain – the world of tennis has been shaken by the Serbian star's unexpected defeat at the Monte-Carlo Masters, setting the stage for a thrilling and unpredictable season ahead.
Novak Djokovic Shockingly Defeated by Alejandro Tabilo in Monte Carlo Masters In a stunning turn of events at the Monte Carlo Masters, Novak Djokovic, the 24-time Major winner,...
Novak Djokovic, the tennis superstar, left fans shocked and disappointed with a dismal performance at the Monte-Carlo Masters, where he suffered a surprising defeat in his opening match...
Novak Djokovic's Dominance Shattered: Meet the Men Who Defeated the Tennis Legend Twice In a shocking turn of events, Novak Djokovic's quest for his 100th ATP Tour title...
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Djokovic, who suffered a shock defeat in the Miami Open final last month, had received a bye into the last-32 but came up short against the Chilean, who had also beaten him in Rome last year.
"It has been a tough year, so a little bit of the nerves were there," Tabilo said in an on-court interview.
"I remembered last time what I did well and thankfully, I served well today and it helped me a lot. It was an unreal match."
Tabilo has yet to drop a set against Djokovic as the 27-year-old registered back-to-back wins over the Serbian on clay.
Marat Safin and Jiri Vesely are the only other players to have faced Djokovic more than once and not lost, with both having 2-0 records.
Djokovic was chasing his 100th Tour level title, while winning the Monte Carlo title would have made the 37-year-old the only player to win each Masters event at least three times.
"I expected myself at least to have put in a decent performance. Not like this, it was horrible," said Djokovic, who made 29 unforced errors.
"I did not have high expectations. I knew I'm going to have a tough opponent and I knew I'm going to probably play pretty bad. But this bad, I didn't expect.
"I was hoping it was not going to happen, but it was quite a high probability I'm going to play this way... A horrible feeling to play this way, just sorry for all the people that have to witness this."
A second victory for Tabilo looked unlikely as the Chilean came into the tournament with a 2-9 win-loss record, having lost his first six matches of the year before he turned things around.
"It's just been some tough times... personal. But we've been trying to take care of it," he said.
"Match by match, we've been getting a bit looser. Just so happy now that I'm feeling better."
Updated April 9th 2025, 21:42 IST
Many expected Novak Djokovic to be one of the favourites to win the French Open 2025 as the tennis calendar enters the clay court season. However, Djokovic could not have made a worse start to life on the clay courts if he tried.
Taking to the court in the Round of 32 in the Monte Carlo Masters, Djokovic lost in straight sets to Chile's Alejandro Tabilo. The 6-3, 6-4 loss is his second loss in as many matches against Tabilo.
The Chilean southpaw had also defeated Djokovic in the final of last year's Italian Open, meaning he is 2-0 up in head-to-head records against the former world number 1.
ALSO READ | Rohan Bopanna Scripts History at Monte Carlo Masters, Becomes Oldest Player to Win Match at ATP 1000 Level
It is worth noting, however, that Djokovic was plagued by a series of issues in the build-up to what is one of the most prestigious tournaments on the calendar outside of the Grand Slams.
The Serbian was dealing with an eye infection just prior to the match and, to make things worse, seemingly picked up an arm injury as physios had to tend to his right forearm in a practice session before the match.
His form had also not been up to his usual high standards - he was coming into this tournament on the back of a straight sets final defeat at the Miami Open and the turnaround from hard courts to clay was always going to take time.
Yet fans would have expected more than a loss in straight sets during the opening round, and does raise plenty of questions over his French Open expectations.
Djokovic has won 24 Grand Slams in his illustrious career - the most by a male tennis player and the joint-most single titles alongside Margaret Court. However, that 25th Slam has proven elusive so far.
His last Grand Slam came in the 2023 US Open and he has since been unable to add to his tally.
Notably, Serena Williams is someone who suffered a similar fate. She won 23 Grand Slams, the last of which came in the 2017 Australian Open - but she could never equal Court's record before her retirement.
Published April 9th 2025, 21:42 IST
© 2025 Republic. All rights reserved.
Djokovic, who suffered a shock defeat in the Miami Open final last month, had received a bye into the last-32 but came up short against the Chilean, who had also beaten him in Rome last year.
"It has been a tough year, so a little bit of the nerves were there," Tabilo said in an on-court interview.
"I remembered last time what I did well and thankfully, I served well today and it helped me a lot. It was an unreal match."
Tabilo has yet to drop a set against Djokovic as the 27-year-old registered back-to-back wins over the Serbian on clay.
Marat Safin and Jiri Vesely are the only other players to have faced Djokovic more than once and not lost, with both having 2-0 records.
Djokovic was chasing his 100th Tour level title, while winning the Monte Carlo title would have made the 37-year-old the only player to win each Masters event at least three times.
"I expected myself at least to have put in a decent performance. Not like this, it was horrible," said Djokovic, who made 29 unforced errors.
"I did not have high expectations. I knew I'm going to have a tough opponent and I knew I'm going to probably play pretty bad. But this bad, I didn't expect.
"I was hoping it was not going to happen, but it was quite a high probability I'm going to play this way... A horrible feeling to play this way, just sorry for all the people that have to witness this."
A second victory for Tabilo looked unlikely as the Chilean came into the tournament with a 2-9 win-loss record, having lost his first six matches of the year before he turned things around.
"It's just been some tough times... personal. But we've been trying to take care of it," he said.
"Match by match, we've been getting a bit looser. Just so happy now that I'm feeling better."
Will we be saying “Monte Carlitos" after Alcaraz's effort in the principality this week?BySteve TignorPublished Apr 09, 2025 copy_link
Published Apr 09, 2025
“Monte…Carlitos?”That was the question scrawled on a sign that a fan held up during Carlos “Call me Carlitos” Alcaraz's opening-round match in Monte Carlo on Wednesday.The question mark was very much appropriate, because the idea seemed like a bit of a long shot at the start of the Spaniard's opening-round encounter with Francisco Cerundolo. Alcaraz, despite his mastery of clay in other locales, had never won a match in Monte Carlo, and had only played the tournament once.
That was the question scrawled on a sign that a fan held up during Carlos “Call me Carlitos” Alcaraz's opening-round match in Monte Carlo on Wednesday.The question mark was very much appropriate, because the idea seemed like a bit of a long shot at the start of the Spaniard's opening-round encounter with Francisco Cerundolo. Alcaraz, despite his mastery of clay in other locales, had never won a match in Monte Carlo, and had only played the tournament once.
The question mark was very much appropriate, because the idea seemed like a bit of a long shot at the start of the Spaniard's opening-round encounter with Francisco Cerundolo. Alcaraz, despite his mastery of clay in other locales, had never won a match in Monte Carlo, and had only played the tournament once.
Alcaraz was 0-1 in Monte Carlo previously before Wednesday's match.© AFP or licensors
© AFP or licensors
Unfortunately for Cerundolo, that's exactly what happened. In this case, the entire match swung toward Alcaraz. From that point on, he was the one who controlled the court position, who dictated the patterns of the rallies, who broke serve at will, and who finished with a fully confident flurry of drop shots. He would lose just one more game in a 3-6, 6-0, 6-1 win in 98 minutes.“I didn't start well, I made a lot of mistakes, let him play inside the court and dominate the points,” Alcaraz said.“After the first set I had to do something else. I had to play more aggressively. I had to play my tennis.”The biggest difference, Alcaraz said, was his determination to move up and “return close to the line.” That set the tone for the way he played the rest of a point.
“I didn't start well, I made a lot of mistakes, let him play inside the court and dominate the points,” Alcaraz said.“After the first set I had to do something else. I had to play more aggressively. I had to play my tennis.”The biggest difference, Alcaraz said, was his determination to move up and “return close to the line.” That set the tone for the way he played the rest of a point.
“After the first set I had to do something else. I had to play more aggressively. I had to play my tennis.”The biggest difference, Alcaraz said, was his determination to move up and “return close to the line.” That set the tone for the way he played the rest of a point.
The biggest difference, Alcaraz said, was his determination to move up and “return close to the line.” That set the tone for the way he played the rest of a point.
A post shared by Tennis (@tennischannel)
By the third set, Alcaraz was anticipating everything, and was in position for any Cerundolo ground stroke. Even if the ball came to him deep and with pace, Alcaraz took it on the rise and didn't back up. This was the Spaniard at his most efficient, controlling play without having to do anything spectacular or risky.“I missed clay,” he wrote on the ATP's camera lens afterward.With this first win in Monte Carlo under his belt, Alcaraz will move on to face Daniel Altmaier on Thursday. We may not be ready to rename the town Monte Carlitos quite yet, but for one round, all of his recent doubts were cleared away. He started ice cold, and finished en fuego.
“I missed clay,” he wrote on the ATP's camera lens afterward.With this first win in Monte Carlo under his belt, Alcaraz will move on to face Daniel Altmaier on Thursday. We may not be ready to rename the town Monte Carlitos quite yet, but for one round, all of his recent doubts were cleared away. He started ice cold, and finished en fuego.
With this first win in Monte Carlo under his belt, Alcaraz will move on to face Daniel Altmaier on Thursday. We may not be ready to rename the town Monte Carlitos quite yet, but for one round, all of his recent doubts were cleared away. He started ice cold, and finished en fuego.
Jack Draper has made a positive start to his clay court season after beating Marcos Giron at the Monte Carlo Masters.
Draper is at a career-high ranking after some impressive results so far this season, and is looking to continue that throughout the clay season.
The Brit's biggest moment of the year and his career so far came last month, with Draper winning Indian Wells after beating Holger Rune in the final.
Although Draper is more familiar with hard and grass courts, there is now some discussion surrounding his potential on clay.
Draper dismissed world number 45 Giron in just over an hour, winning 6-1 6-1, to obtain his second ever Monte Carlo Masters match win.
Dominant Display 😤Jack Draper takes out Giron 6-1 6-1 to advance at the #RolexMonteCarloMasters pic.twitter.com/6RTueOBLuc
This got plenty of people talking on social media, including Draper's compatriot and two-time Grand Slam junior doubles champion Liam Broady.
In a post on X (formerly known as Twitter), Broady appeared to be in disbelief at how well Draper was playing.
Broady wrote, “The set of tennis I have just seen Jack Draper play. Wow.”
The set of tennis I have just seen Jack Draper play. Wow 😂
This was followed up by a series of replies, including one fan already looking ahead to Draper's grass court season and potential Wimbledon chances.
However, Broady did not want to overlook Draper at Roland Garros, predicting the world number six to have a good tournament.
“I'm excited for him at RG [Roland Garros],” said Broady. “I think he could have a really good run.”
I'm excited for him at RG. I think he could have a really good run
Despite Broady's faith in Draper, if he is to do well at Roland Garros this year he will have to do something that he has never before.
Draper has made two main draw appearances at Roland Garros in his young career so far, losing in the first round on both occasions.
In 2023, he was struggling with a shoulder injury, while last year Draper was beaten by qualifier Jesper de Jong.
Following his latest victory over Giron, Draper has now won 10 matches on the main ATP Tour on clay.
However, Draper still has a negative win-loss record on clay, having lost 11 of his 21 matches on the surface.
Draper will look to continue to improve his record on clay when he plays his next match at the Monte Carlo Masters against either Tomas Martin Etcheverry or Alejandro Davidovich Fokina.
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April 08, 2025 09:05PM EDT
By Natalia Lobo
Argentina has one of the richest tennis tradition, especially thanks to great champions like Guillermo Vilas, David Nalbandian, Gaston Gaudio, and of course, Gabriela Sabatini and Juan Martin Del Potro.
The latter two came together to speak with Roland Garros' social media, and together they created their perfect tennis player. Of course, none of the members of the ‘Big Three' were left out when it came to the men, and Serena Williams and Martina Navratilova were some of the picks on the women's side.
On the ATP side, they chose Roger Federer, winner of 20 Grand Slams, for his serve and his elegance. Meanwhile, they picked Nadal, a 22-time Grand Slam champion, as the one with the “highest tennis IQ,” while 24-time major winner Novak Djokovic was selected for his backhand.
They also picked Carlos Alcaraz for best dropshot, and Gael Monfils as the fastest player. When it came to the forehand, Sabatini was clear: Juan Martin Del Potro. “If she says so,” the 2009 US Open champion joked.
When it came to the women, they chose 23-time Grand Slam champion Serena Williams for the best serve, Aryna Sabalenka's forehand and Ons Jabeur's backhand. When asked for the best dropshot, Del Potro suggested Karolina Muchova, “who is very talented.”
see also
World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka chooses Coco Gauff, Iga Swiatek and more to build her perfect player
For best volley, they chose Martina Navratilova, who won 18 Grand Slams in singles. The fastest player, according to Sabatini, was her biggest rival and friend Steffi Graf, winner of 22 major singles titles. “She was very fast,” she said. And, finally, for tennis IG, they went with Polish star, Iga Swiatek.
Both Sabatini and Del Potro are among the greatest players of their respective generations, and have very similar achievements. Sabitini reached World No. 2, remaining in the world's Top 10 for 508 consecutive weeks, before retiring at only 26 years old. She is the first Argentine woman to win a Grand Slam, by winning the US Open in 1988.
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On the other hand, Del Potro reached a career-high ranking of World No. 3, and won the US Open by beating Federer in a memorable five-set final. Both players were Olympic medalists, with Delpo winning bronze and silver, and Sabatini winning silver.
Natalia is a sports journalist at Bolavip US, where she covers soccer, tennis, and the broader sports world. She also works as an entertainment journalist at Spoiler US, focusing on the film industry, series, reality TV, and celebrity news. With a diverse background that includes reporting on sports, fashion, and culture, she brings a rich and varied perspective to her current roles. Natalia holds a Bachelor's degree in Communication and Media from the Universidad Central of Venezuela (UCV) and has over eight years of experience in digital media. She has previously contributed her bilingual skills in English and Spanish to outlets such as Revista Exclusiva and Cambio16.
Bolavip, like Futbol Sites, is a company owned by Better Collective. All rights reserved.
The second Grand Slam of 2025 is fast approaching, as fans look forward to the stars of men's and women's tennis taking to the court in Paris.
World number one Jannik Sinner won the Australian Open men's singles title earlier this year, securing his third Major crown with a straight sets victory over Alexander Zverev.
On the women's side, America's Madison Keys won her first Grand Slam, taking down Aryna Sabalenka in a three-set thriller on Rod Laver Arena.
At Roland Garros, Iga Swiatek and Carlos Alcaraz will look to defend their titles despite struggling for form as of late.
Ahead of the French Open, one former Grand Slam champion has shared his thoughts on a rumor he heard recently.
Speaking on his Served with Andy Roddick podcast, 2003 US Open champion Andy Roddick gave his honest opinion on something he heard last week.
“Prize money, percentage of prize money, is insane, it's laughably low,” said Roddick.
“I hope the rumors of the top 20 [players] on the men's and women's side writing a letter directly representing themselves to the Slams is true.
“It's been reported, hopefully, we'll know more about it, and we'll talk more about it when it is confirmed. I hope that's the case.”
News broke earlier this month that the top 20 players in tennis sent a letter to the four Grand Slams, requesting an increase to prize money, relative to the revenue the events generate.
Roddick then named the two other improvements he thinks players should be demanding from the Grand Slams.
“I'm going to beat this drum as much as I can, healthcare contributions from Slams [and] pensions,” he said.
“Think about yourself not three weeks from now but 30 years from now.
“Think about the people that are trying to be coaches, think about the people who are carving out a living, think about what your body is going to feel like.
“I feel a lot different at 42, having gone through 15 years of professional tennis than probably most 42-year-olds.
“Ask those questions now so you can reap the benefits later.”
The Professional Tennis Players Association [PTPA] launched a lawsuit against the tennis tours earlier this year, demanding changes in several key areas.
Roddick expressed his concerns with the PTPA's case but has now shared the one point they made he is definitely on board with.
“I would say actually make it, if you're an independent contractor then you have free markets to play whatever events,” he said.
“There is an incentive already to play in as many ATP [Tour events] and Slams as possible because of points.
“Every rank, every endorsement is structured off of rankings that you get from those tournaments. You're incentivized to participate in them as much as possible.
“As Chris Eubanks mentioned a couple of weeks ago, if he gets some outlier offer to go play in something crazy or a corporate event or a Pro-am before the US Open or something where he can make a third round Slam money in a day.
“I think he should be able to do that.
“The PTPA mentioned that, for as many issues as I have that they get wrong, they pointed that out very clearly and I think that was something that I would co-sign for sure.”
It remains to be seen what the outcome of the letter sent by top tennis stars or the PTPA case will be, but it will certainly be something to watch out for in 2025.
Perhaps some of the changes proposed will be brought in ahead of the French Open, which begins on Sunday, May 25.
The second Grand Slam of 2025 is fast approaching, as fans look forward to the stars of men's and women's tennis taking to the court in Paris.
World number one Jannik Sinner won the Australian Open men's singles title earlier this year, securing his third Major crown with a straight sets victory over Alexander Zverev.
On the women's side, America's Madison Keys won her first Grand Slam, taking down Aryna Sabalenka in a three-set thriller on Rod Laver Arena.
At Roland Garros, Iga Swiatek and Carlos Alcaraz will look to defend their titles despite struggling for form as of late.
Ahead of the French Open, one former Grand Slam champion has shared his thoughts on a rumor he heard recently.
Speaking on his Served with Andy Roddick podcast, 2003 US Open champion Andy Roddick gave his honest opinion on something he heard last week.
“Prize money, percentage of prize money, is insane, it's laughably low,” said Roddick.
“I hope the rumors of the top 20 [players] on the men's and women's side writing a letter directly representing themselves to the Slams is true.
“It's been reported, hopefully, we'll know more about it, and we'll talk more about it when it is confirmed. I hope that's the case.”
News broke earlier this month that the top 20 players in tennis sent a letter to the four Grand Slams, requesting an increase to prize money, relative to the revenue the events generate.
Roddick then named the two other improvements he thinks players should be demanding from the Grand Slams.
“I'm going to beat this drum as much as I can, healthcare contributions from Slams [and] pensions,” he said.
“Think about yourself not three weeks from now but 30 years from now.
“Think about the people that are trying to be coaches, think about the people who are carving out a living, think about what your body is going to feel like.
“I feel a lot different at 42, having gone through 15 years of professional tennis than probably most 42-year-olds.
“Ask those questions now so you can reap the benefits later.”
The Professional Tennis Players Association [PTPA] launched a lawsuit against the tennis tours earlier this year, demanding changes in several key areas.
Roddick expressed his concerns with the PTPA's case but has now shared the one point they made he is definitely on board with.
“I would say actually make it, if you're an independent contractor then you have free markets to play whatever events,” he said.
“There is an incentive already to play in as many ATP [Tour events] and Slams as possible because of points.
“Every rank, every endorsement is structured off of rankings that you get from those tournaments. You're incentivized to participate in them as much as possible.
“As Chris Eubanks mentioned a couple of weeks ago, if he gets some outlier offer to go play in something crazy or a corporate event or a Pro-am before the US Open or something where he can make a third round Slam money in a day.
“I think he should be able to do that.
“The PTPA mentioned that, for as many issues as I have that they get wrong, they pointed that out very clearly and I think that was something that I would co-sign for sure.”
It remains to be seen what the outcome of the letter sent by top tennis stars or the PTPA case will be, but it will certainly be something to watch out for in 2025.
Perhaps some of the changes proposed will be brought in ahead of the French Open, which begins on Sunday, May 25.
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Longtime Hallmark star Brennan Elliott has been understandably quiet since losing his wife Camilla Row to gastric cancer on March 22, 2025. But on April 8, the “His & Hers” star posted an emotional thank you note on Instagram, expressing his gratitude for the countless friends, including many Hallmark stars, and fans who have supported him and his kids during such a difficult time.
Sharing a throwback photo of himself and Row on their first date, Elliott wrote, “I know I have a lot of people to thank for the prayers and kind words since my beautiful wife camilla passed on march 22nd! The love and prayers as well messages have been overwhelming and my kids and I are so appreciative to every one of you!”
A post shared by Professional experiencer (@brennanelliott2)
Elliott and Row, a clinical psychologist, were married in September 2011 and shared two children — Liam, 12, and Luna, 10.
In his caption of the old photo he posted, Elliott wrote, “To think this was our first big date going to a hockey game together 20 years or so ago.! To say I miss #cami is an understatement but everyone's prayers are the wind beneath the kids and my wings and THANKYOU from the bottom of our hearts!!”
Within hours of his post, hundreds of fans and friends had filled the comment section with continued support, including his “All Summer Long” co-star Autumn Reeser, who wrote, “Loving you, sweet Brennan. ❤️🩹”
Cindy Busby left a string of emoji — “💖✨🙏✨💖” — and many fans left words of encouragement and comfort, including one who wrote, “Great photo. I have been widowed 10+ years. Hardest thing I have ever gone through. Give yourself grace. One day at a time.”
Someone else commented, “Peace & Comfort to you and your family. It sounds like she was an amazing woman and you have amazing memories that will keep your heart warm. Prayers for peace as you journey through grief. Know you aren't alone. There are many people that are grieving alongside you and your loved ones.”
A post shared by Professional experiencer (@brennanelliott2)
Elliott shared his wife's passing on March 22 via a heartbreaking Instagram post, announcing that she had died early that morning.
“I know my wife @camilla_row would have wanted me to thank every person from all over the world who prayed for her over the last 8 years she suffered immeasurably trying to survive and live with #stage4gastriccancer,” he wrote.
“Our babies and I lost our rock,” he continued, “a person who not only was the love of my life,my soulmate,my best friend and lover but the toughest strongest fearless person I have ever met in my life and the greatest mother to her babies.”
Row underwent treatment for early-stage gastric cancer in 2018, but it returned and spread in 2022, leading to a stage 4 diagnosis. Determined to beat the odds, she researched vigilantly, tried a variety of treatment options and surgeries, and told followers of her private Instagram account on January 30 that she was starting a new cancer treatment trial she called her “Hail Mary miracle treatment.”
“There were a few scary moments,” she wrote of the previous two months as she was in and out of the hospital, “but I am ready to get back to my normal, my new normal.”
Row added, “I feel so blessed to have this opportunity to even participate in a trial, thankful to God as he paves the way for me, grateful for all of your support and prayers. ❤️ you all!”
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A judge says the rapper's estate is the "sole owner of all intellectual property rights" he once held, rejecting claims filed by Tashera Simmons over their 2016 divorce agreement.
By
Bill Donahue
Four years after DMX's tragic 2021 death, a New York judge has ruled that his ex-wife can't claim a 50 percent stake in the rapper's music catalog and other intellectual property (IP) rights.
Tashera Simmons, who was married to the legendary rapper (Earl Simmons) for 16 years, sued his estate last year, claiming she was the rightful owner of half of his copyrights, trademarks and likeness rights. But in a ruling Monday (April 7), a New York judge said otherwise.
“The estate is the sole owner of all intellectual property rights [that] Earl Simmons acquired during his marriage to plaintiff, as well as any and all other trademarks and intellectual property rights that belonged to Earl Simmons at the time of his death,” Judge David F. Everett wrote.
Trending on Billboard
The dispute centers on the couple's 2016 divorce agreement, which mentioned “intellectual property” but didn't expressly state that Tashera was a co-owner of the copyrights and trademarks. Before his death, DMX insisted the deal only granted her royalty payments — an argument his estate has maintained in the years since his death.
In Monday's decision, Judge Everett not only ruled that the divorce settlement “does not confer ownership,” but that Tashera had essentially waived the right to make that claim. The judge cited the fact that she had raised the issue in previous litigation and had then signed a settlement that made no mention of sharing ownership.
“Under the circumstances of this case, the court will not, in effect, reopen those proceedings to reinterpret the parties' 2016 settlement agreement, particularly where the party best positioned to contest a contrary interpretation is now deceased,” the judge wrote.
DMX, one of the most influential stars in hip-hop history, was married to Tashera through his turn-of-the-century heyday, as he released Billboard Hot 100 hits like “Ruff Ryders' Anthem,” “Party Up (Up In Here)” and “What These Bitches Want.” The pair, who share four children, filed for divorce in 2013 and finalized the split in 2016. After years of health issues and struggles with drugs, DMX died in April 2021 from a heart attack.
Tashera sued last year, claiming that the estate's administrators (DMX's ex-fiancée Desiree Lindstrom and his daughter by another woman, Sasha Simmons) were improperly disputing her ownership stake. She cited a handwritten excerpt from the divorce settlement, which said she would get half of IP rights, followed by: “which shall include, but not be limited to, royalties.”
But in Monday's decision, Judge Everett said that language “does not unequivocally assign ownership of decedent's copyrighted works or trademark and, indeed, makes no mention of ownership or title to such property.”
“Instead, plaintiff proffers an interpretation of the phrase ‘intellectual property rights' to include ownership, but had that phrase meant ownership, then there would be no need to define those rights further in the subsequent clause, all tellingly limited to various categories of royalty payments.”
The judge did side with Tashera on one smaller issue by refusing to dismiss her accusations that DMX had breached the divorce agreement by failing to pay $214,000 in child support. That issue is factually disputed by both sides, the judge said, meaning dismissing it would be “premature.”
In a statement to Billboard on Wednesday, Tashera's lead attorney Samuel J. Ferrara criticized a ruling that he said “ignores long standing legal principles and voids significant benefits to which Ms. Simmons and her children were and should be entitled.” Ferrara said they were “considering all options, including appellate review.”
“While we appreciate the court's time and attention in coming to this decision, to say that Ms. Simmons and her children are disappointed would be a gross understatement,” Ferrara said. “Obviously we disagree with the court's interpretation of the plain language of the document in question, and it seems that the judge's ruling does not consider the parties' intent as evidenced by their conduct.”
In her own statement to Billboard, lead attorney for DMX's estate Lisa M. Capone said the ruling “ensures the preservation of DMX's legacy.” Ashley Austin, the CEO of Artist Legacy Group, which partnered with DMX's estate last year, said it was “not just a legal win” but also “a pivotal step” in protecting the rapper's legacy: “We remain committed to working side by side with Desiree and Sasha to protect his rights, navigate the future of the estate, and provide for all of his children.”
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The situation occurred after an unrelated hit-and-run incident.
By
Rania Aniftos
Weezer bassist Scott Shriner's wife Jillian Shriner, a.k.a. Jillian Lauren, was involved in a police shoot-out after an unrelated Los Angeles car chase, the Los Angeles Police Department confirmed Wednesday (April 9).
A preliminary LAPD statement indicated that around 3:25 p.m. PT Tuesday, the California Highway Patrol requested backup for a hit-and-run incident, in which three suspects fled into a residential neighborhood off the 134 Freeway. After establishing a perimeter, officers were directed to a residence where one of the suspects was seen running to.
When officers got to the back of the residence, a woman who was later identified as Jillian was in the yard of a neighboring home with a gun, according to the statement. When officers ordered her to put the weapon down, the 51-year-old writer reportedly refused and then pointed the handgun at the police. A shoot-out then occurred, which led to Jillian sustaining a non-life-threatening gunshot wound. She was transported to a local hospital, where she was treated for her injuries. No officers were injured during the incident.
Trending on Billboard
The LAPD later determined that Jillian was not involved with the initial hit-and-run, though she was absentee booked for attempted murder. A nine-millimeter handgun was recovered from her residence.
Billboard has reached out to Weezer's reps for more information, though no response was received at press time. The statement notes that the Force Investigation Division is currently investigating the incident.
Over the weekend, Weezer was announced as a last-minute addition to this weekend's 2025 Coachella lineup, set to play Saturday at 3:10 p.m. PT.
See the LAPD's full statement below.
NRF012-25ma Officer-Involved Shooting in Northeast Division pic.twitter.com/jiXCJ5ezMA
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And, yes, he gave The Hollywood Reporter an exclusive clue.
By
Tony Maglio
The hunter has become the hunted.
At the very beginning of Netflix‘s Gold & Greed: The Hunt for Fenn's Treasure, in an aside to the production team, Justin Posey reveals he has hidden a treasure of his own and that he's sprinkled clues to its whereabouts by way of his elaborate interview setting.
At the very end of the docuseries, Posey — a technologist based in Texas, as well as amateur treasure hunter and the star of the three-episode run — shares more detail, direct-to-camera in a self-shot video sent at the 11th hour to Netflix (so the production and post-production staff did not get a “substantial leg up” on the search over viewers). It was all in the treasure hunter-turned-treasure hider's grand plan.
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Posey told The Hollywood Reporter that he made the decision to set up the hidden clues “pretty early” in the process of the Netflix docuseries; Posey is not a producer, he's just a subject. It was a great way to sell a book, his Beyond the Map's Edge, if we say so ourselves. Posey's book, which includes a poem containing the necessary clues to find his treasure — the Forrest Fenn method — was released on March 27, 2025, the same as Gold & Greed: The Hunt for Fenn's Treasure. The fair man is a smart man, and Posey says the book is “selling well” so far.
“There are some good hints in the series,” Posey said. “There are much better hints in the book.”
He gets paid for exactly one of those. The docuseries and the book do work in tandem to some degree. Posey says his hints in the series can “help you with the treasure itself,” and they can “certainly help you with the book.”
OK, before we head out into the American West, how much is this treasure — a combination of Fenn's stuff (Posey bought most of the original hidden treasure off of the actual finder) and Posey's own personal plunder — worth?
He won't — or can't — directly say.
“I'm trying to avoid some of the mistakes that Forrest had made as part of his treasure hunt. The big advice that I've gotten from attorneys is never, never say a value, because that actually gives a basis for a lot of legal issues down the road,” Posey said. “For instance, if I said it's valued at this amount, and someone took it to an appraiser and that appraiser [assigned] a different amount, then there's basis for lawsuits.”
No one wants that. Concern over a potential lawsuit (by other seekers) is what caused Jack Stuef, the 32-year-old medical student who found Fenn's treasure, to rush it to auction — and by proxy, to Posey.
“I think it's fair to say that it's substantial,” Posey said of his hidden haul. “Just one of those gold bars alone, based on the price of gold today, is pretty close to $100,000 a piece.”
(We're lacing up our THR-issued hiking boots now.)
There are also “a lot of older historical items” populating the chest (Fenn's) that Posey says a treasure hunter like himself would dig. “One of them I paid $50,000 for alone — years ago. I don't know what the value is today, but quite a few things like that.”
There's also a meteorite.
Where does a 42-year-old man who didn't find Fenn's treasure get meteorite money? Posey was an early investor (2003) in the very platform that ultimately brought him to the masses: Netflix.
Posey, a software engineer (his day job funded the NFLX buys, which he says “turned out pretty well in the end”), was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He says he comes from a “squarely middle-class family.” That gold bar you see him excitedly unwrap as a kid on Christmas morning like a kid on Christmas morning? A Fugazi.
Right now, “at least a couple hundred people” are out there searching for Posey's very real gold. Posey says he's “been getting over 1,000 messages an hour,” and has been forced to shut down his DMs on X and Instagram. (You can still try your luck on Facebook Messenger — sorry, Justin, we're journalists over here.)
Posey wasn't prepared for this.
“I realized it was going to be on Netflix, but I never expected to hit the Netflix top 10 — especially worldwide,” Posey said.
In its first four days, Gold & Greed: The Hunt for Fenn's Treasure racked up 2.1 million views, according to Netflix, ranking eighth globally among its English-language TV shows for the week of March 24. It did not chart the following week, so we do not have data beyond March 30.
Speaking the charts, keep charting your courses, dreamers. It is too soon to say if any treasure hunters are “genuinely close of not,” Posey said, but there are “definitely” hunters who “have had some good thoughts.”
So, to those hundreds we present our clue, exclusive to THR and straight from Posey: “You don't need a high-clearance vehicle to find the treasure.”
Happy hunting, including to those with lowriders.
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By Glenn Garner
Associate Editor
After six years, Anjelica Huston is opening up about her experience with privately overcoming cancer.
Noting that her “bout of cancer” came after the release of her 2019 movie John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum, the Oscar winner said she's now “in the clear” with her health.
“That was a very serious moment for me. I managed to survive it, and I'm proud of myself,” she told People. “It's not something that came lightly. It came as a big shock, but it made me conscious of what I shouldn't do, of places I shouldn't go. One of those places was taking life too seriously. So now when the opportunity arises, I laugh, and I try not to make a big deal out of things.”
Although Huston didn't clarify the kind of cancer with which she was diagnosed, she said she's reached the “four-year mark” of being cancer-free.
Watch on Deadline
“And that means so much to me,” she added. “It's a fantastic thing. I'm very proud of myself, and I've been very lucky. My doctors have been wonderful.”
The Witches star explained that she decided to speak up about her health journey because “there's a lot to be said for talking about it and getting it out there and celebrating the fact that one's come through.”
When asked if she plans on retiring anytime soon, Huston said “no,” adding: “I can't imagine such a thing. I think it would be too much, even for me.”
Huston most recently starred in the BBC One limited series Towards Zero, now available to stream on BritBox, and she's recently re-teamed with brother Danny Huston for the upcoming holiday film The Christmas Witch Trial of La Befana.
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By Dade Hayes
Business Editor
YouTube came out in support of the “No Fakes Act,” which was reintroduced by Republican and Democrat members of Congress earlier Wednesday.
In a blog post, the tech giant also said it was expanding a pilot program that is designed to identify and manage AI-generated content featuring the “likeness,” including the face, of creators, artists, and other famous or influential figures.
“For nearly two decades, YouTube has been at the forefront of handling rights management at scale, and we understand the importance of collaborating with partners to tackle these issues proactively,” said Leslie Miller, VP Public Policy at YouTube. “Now, we're applying that expertise and dedication to partnership to ensure the responsible deployment of innovative AI tools.”
The No Fakes Act would give individuals the right to control the use of their digital likeness, as part of an effort to limit the use of AI deepfakes and voice clones. Introduced last year, the bill failed to advance in Congress even with bipartisan support and changes that alleviated First Amendment worries.
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As AI has exploded, and Google and other tech giants commit hundreds of billions of dollars to enhancing their capabilities, ethical questions have emerged for creator-based communities like YouTube. The company said at its last “Made On YouTube” event, a major annual gathering for creators, that it was enhancing safeguards designed to prevent the misuse of AI.
The No Fakes Act legislation is sponsored in the Senate by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN). In the House, the sponsors are Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL), Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA), Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) and Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT).
YouTube's Miller thanked the Senators and Representatives and said their proposed legislation is “consistent with our ongoing efforts to protect creators and viewers, and reflects our commitment to shaping a future where AI is used responsibly.”
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The Apple TV+ comedy “The Studio” has been justly lauded for getting virtually every detail of how Hollywood's movers and shakers live and work exactly right, but the show's accuracy goes beyond behavior. One of the great pleasures of the series week after week is observing the sense of Hollywood history that seeps into every aspect of the visual design. Directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are avid movie enthusiasts, and it's clear that the show's props, locations, and decor are all carefully chosen to tell the story not only of the series' particular characters but of an industry that's now over 100 years old.
Nowhere is this attention to detail more felt than in the production design of the studio itself, which is intended to emulate great legacy companies like Paramount and Warner Bros., the latter of which stands in for the series' fictional Continental Studios in exterior scenes. For interiors, production designer Julie Berghoff was tasked with creating studio offices that felt like they originated in the 1920s but had evolved with the times — they also needed to express the psychological state of the characters who occupied them.
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“I had to go through certain steps to get to what the executive office looked like,” Berghoff told IndieWire. “I really wanted it to be an American architect, and I wanted it to be an architect that existed in the '20s and '30s because that's when the studio would have been born.” Berghoff settled on Frank Lloyd Wright, an idea that Rogen loved. “This crazy idea that Frank Lloyd Wright built the offices really anchors the whole thing in a tangible history,” Rogen told IndieWire on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “It makes it feel permanent, and like you'd constantly be trying to live up to the grandeur of this space.”
Berghoff modeled the offices on Wright's Mayan phase when he created buildings like the Ennis House in Los Feliz. That structure has been used on-screen in movies as varied as “Blade Runner,” “The Day of the Locust,” and “Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf,” so when the Continental Studios design echoes it there's an added sense of resonance for film buffs. For Berghoff, the Mayan Revival phase of Wright's career made both visual and emotional sense. “It felt like The Continental,” she said. “A little archaic, classic and beautiful and sturdy, but maybe crumbling at the base of the foundation.”
Rogen liked the idea that Wright's Mayan buildings gave a sense of entombment, something he thought was appropriate for his lavishly paid but emotionally constricted characters. “These Mayan Revival buildings were very monumental, but also very tomblike,” Rogen said. The Mayan Revival concept had the added benefit of designs where light came into the buildings in interesting ways, something Berghoff played with by creating cucoloris effects with light coming in through the bricks and windows.
In a world where everyone is looking over their shoulder to see who might be coming for them and their job, Berghoff also decided to emphasize the space's voyeuristic potential. “I made the space open in the center, and I also added a lot of glass so that everyone could see each other in their offices,” she said. “They could see each other in their conference rooms. They could spy on people if they were waiting down below. And then, of course, Seth's office was the highest so he could see everybody — it was like a bird's nest for him. I thought about the space and how you would come in, how you would move, how you would wait, how you would go up the stairs.”
Speaking of the stairs, they're adorned with a mural that adds to the weight of history the characters are constantly inspired by and suffocating under. “The mural that I did on the stairs was like the history of the studios and how they started off in the golden age, the Hitchcock era, screwball comedy, then ended up slowly in decay,” Berghoff said. “By the late '60s it's robots and the Loch Ness monster.” Ultimately, the message of the show is encapsulated in the message of Berghoff's production design: “The architecture is coinciding with the story of the studio,” she concluded. “Will it be standing at the end?”
“The Studio” is streaming on Apple TV+. To make sure you don't miss Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's upcoming episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, make sure you subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
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President Donald Trump has backed down from his reciprocal tariffs on Wednesday after days of market fretting and concern at home and internationally (at least for now), but for Hollywood, some of the industry's biggest problems started well before Trump ever announced his so-called “Liberation Day.”
As IndieWire previously reported, Hollywood productions are moving overseas at an alarming rate, as the cost of doing business has made it cheaper to fly someone overseas than to film in your own backyard. Some executives have pointed to unions, while others say it's largely a need for tax reform, as countries like Ireland or Hungary offer large tax credits as a pure percentage of a film's budget, so the difference in recouped savings could be millions.
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The irony of Trump's tariffs is that they would have been more likely to drive Hollywood film production out of the U.S. rather than back into it, the exact opposite of what he hopes to influence on the American economy across other sectors. Various analyses from the trades have identified how media corporations could have been hurt by a myriad of related problems: taxes on streaming services, advertising uncertainty, lower attendance at theme parks, and more.
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But in the case of production, the general rising filming costs on both indies and studio projects will only see further exacerbation of a problem that is already there.
As it was initially announced, the Trump administration's tariffs would have targeted goods, not services, of which movies and shows are one of America's biggest exports. It's exactly why a recent report said that China was considering retaliating against the tariffs by banning American film releases. Trump kept his Chinese tariffs and boosted them to 125 percent, though a note from Wedbush on Wednesday cited the recent green light of Disney's “Thunderbolts” opening in China and called retaliation with films “unlikely.”
“China has been laser-focused on boosting its exhibition industry,” Wedbush wrote in a note obtained by IndieWire. “While China can rely on its local-language content and other content in Asia (Japan, South Korea, and Indian content are also popular), Hollywood content certainly helps and will continue to boost its industry.”
So, in the grand scheme of things, there wouldn't have been a direct impact to films, but think of the many line items that could incrementally increase production costs. The sourcing of textiles for costuming often comes from international markets. Cameras and other tech equipment may come from Japan, China, or elsewhere.
IMAX in particular has a major business in China and may need to, in the short term, adjust where it's sourcing its cameras from. Even catering costs for coffee from a local small business could rise. The general cost of living expenses all add up.
“I think the biggest issue with the tariffs is that there were too many uncertainties,” Alicia Reese of Wedbush told IndieWire. “Whether it's head of costuming for a movie or head of an entire corporation, you can't plan on when these tariffs are implemented.” Enterprising indie producers generally are nimble, and many will buy piecemeal rather than buying in bulk, while others will race to acquire goods in the window before Trump changes course again.
Eric B. Fleischman, an indie producer on the film “Sacramento” that opens from Vertical this weekend, said the reality is many of the projects he's been setting up have already pivoted to places like Ireland or Northern Spain, and the tariffs would have meant “whatever production was left in the States is gone.”
States had been working to curb this well before the new Trump administration, most notably with California Governor Gavin Newsom announcing a significant increase in the amount of dollars allocated for filming tax credits. While that proposal is gaining serious momentum, Fleischman argues it's a half-measure and complained that California's larger issues include a complicated application process, a lottery that only selects certain films for approval, and that only a small portion of a film's budget qualifies for the credit.
Reese added that the revising of the tax codes will be the bigger issue, more than anything that would have come from the tariffs.
“These tariffs are going to be the nail in the coffin for the majority of U.S.-based productions,” Fleischman said ahead of them being repealed. For now, many of those tariffs may be on hold, but the damage has already been done in Hollywood.
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As a filmmaker, Sarah Polley, an Oscar-winning writer/director and former actress herself, has avoided the very pitfalls of bean-counter interference the series “The Studio” satirizes.
Her indie features, from “Women Talking” to “Take This Waltz” and “Away from Her,” have evaded executive oversight. Studio heads like Michael de Luca and Pam Abdy, at MGM circa the days of Polley's fourth feature “Women Talking,” would check in, but they weren't interrupting the process on her period drama about Mennonite women abused and brainwashed by the men in their community.
In Episode 2 of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's Hollywood lampoon “The Studio,” Polley plays an exaggerated version of herself, a director on a sprawling set with cables everywhere and a video village like ants drawing to a magnifying glass, trying to pull off a oner at magic hour in the Hollywood Hills. Rogen's upstart Continental Studios chief Matt Remnick drops in to shadow the set one day but ends up mangling a tricky filmmaking feat. Polley's Polley ends up (understandably) screaming in frustration when Matt pratfalls his way into the shot, a tantrum the indie director could hardly relate to as someone known for facilitating calm, peaceful productions on intimate character studies.
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Polley, who in recent years was vocal about her traumatizing experience as a nine-year-old actor on the set of Terry Gilliam's 1988 “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” hasn't acted onscreen in six years. As a Canadian, she's also stayed put in Toronto, resisting the temptation to move to Los Angeles to be closer to an industry she's had just as much success collaborating with from across the North American border.
“When I first made the decision to stay here, in my early twenties or whenever, there would've been any kind of pressure to move to the States; it was a big decision,” she told IndieWire over Zoom. “You really did feel like you were separating yourself somehow. But the world has changed so much now that it just doesn't feel like a big deal to live elsewhere.”
Polley spoke with IndieWire not only about her “The Studio” cameo, but also where she fits in the economic and creative ecosystem of personal filmmakers who have flirted with commercial projects. Since she won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for her Miriam Towes adaptation “Women Talking” in 2023, Polley has been developing from her Toronto home a film about the experience of awards season, which she knows the ins and outs of after taking “Women Talking” from fall festivals to the Dolby stage. We also spoke about how the male-centered critical confusion over her sophomore directing effort “Take This Waltz” ended up fueling her creatively.
Polley got her start, though, as a director adapting an Alice Munro short story for her film “Away from Her,” where Julie Christie played a woman succumbing to Alzheimer's in a film that earned Christie a Best Actress Oscar nomination and Polley one for Best Adapted Screenplay. Last year, Munro's daughter, Andrea Skinner, revealed shortly after the revered Nobel laureate's death that Munro chose to ignore Skinner's claims of child sexual abuse against her stepfather, Munro's husband to the end. Below, we also discuss what that means for Munro's legacy.
The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and length.
IndieWire: How much direction did Seth Rogen give you about the version of yourself you're playing?
Sarah Polley: I just was told it would be “you, making a film.” He described it to me, and I remember having to compartmentalize my stress for him when he described shooting the episode — in a oner, about a oner, that all had to take place at magic hour — and going, “It's not my job to worry about the logistics of this.” But I just kept going, “How the hell are they going to pull this off?”
Your “Studio” character finally has a tantrum after Seth's character sabotages the shot one more time. That doesn't seem very you.
I definitely lose it in a way that I never have on set, but it felt extraordinarily therapeutic to get to do that as an actor. I wasn't exactly playing myself. I was playing a character of myself that I thought would be more entertaining. Never say never, but I've made it through four films [as a director] without a meltdown on set.
How much of your experience as a child actor who transitioned into acting as an adult informs how you manage a set?
If you've been an actor for any amount of time, you've run into some huge personalities. There was a day [on one of my films] where it felt like a few people were having nervous breakdowns at the same time. I was trying to kind of counsel them, and I remember a close collaborator of mine came up to me and said, “The problem is most directors are the hurricane, and everyone bends around them, but you've created a vacuum in not being a hurricane, so it means everyone else is becoming their own personal hurricane.”
There's something to be said for a strong personality, but I don't think the kind of narcissistic cult of personality that has existed around directors in the past really feels necessary anymore. It still gets respected in a way that I find mysterious because I've seen so many really decent people who are really grounded, who don't yell at people, make movies at this point. So it doesn't feel necessary. But still, we hold in our mind some kind of archetype of the mad unwieldy genius who has no regulation, as that somehow being a symptom of genius, someone completely out of control of themselves. But I do think that's changing.
Have you had moments in the room of not feeling like you were being taken seriously as a director?
I do notice when I work with people of an older generation, and this goes for people of all genders, if you're not really forceful and bombastic and take up all the space, there can be a concern that you don't have a vision. I have encountered that. I have encountered a lack of trust because I am generally not going to be the person who talks the most in the meeting. It's important to be curious as a filmmaker, too, but I don't think curiosity is something people associate with a vision, which is a real drag. With artists, people think it's a symptom of genius if you're someone who takes over a space and dominates everybody. It's changing a bit, but we still get bamboozled by that a bit.
Do you recognize the Matt Remnick archetype at all, an executive who inserts themselves too much into the filmmaking process? You've probably been insulated from that as a director on independent films.
I was so lucky that I grew up as a child actor and, you know, on “Baron Munchausen.” There were some ways in which I was very unlucky, but I came into directing knowing all the things I didn't want or wouldn't tolerate. I was able to craft the environments I was in accordingly and have real boundaries. I think that's shifting, and I'm getting more confident that I'd be able to handle edgier dynamics. But you're right, I've had very positive experiences as a director. As an actor, I've seen insane behavior with studio executives and producers. Absolutely.
Some of your peers start as personal filmmakers and end up making these very impersonal blockbusters. Are you open to more commercial opportunities, where you could still maintain your personal edge?
There's a few things I'm developing right now. Some have much smaller canvases, and some have much bigger canvases. I really love [how] Gus Van Sant, it seems, from the outside really thinks about what he's trying to do with a film and structures the size of it accordingly. If you're making a political film like “Milk,” yes, you want that to reach the widest audience possible. Yes, it's going to feel more commercial. It's also a great movie. The other thing is, there have been some great commercial movies made in the past.
I read a great piece of film criticism once a very long time ago by a Canadian film critic named Rick Groen, and it always stuck with me. I saw it when I just made my first short film. I was like 20 or something, and he said [something like], “‘Apocalypse Now' ended up being a very commercial movie, but nobody ever started that process and went, let's make a big commercial movie. They just tried to make it really good, and then it became commercial.” So you can make a good movie and have it become commercial, but you're never going to have a movie where your first objective is, “I'm going to make a commercial movie,” and, by accident, have it become good. It doesn't work that way. It's not to say that I don't think anyone should ever make a commercial movie; I just think that the first objective should be that it be really good.
Your peers, like Brady Corbet, are calling attention to how filmmakers struggle to make a living despite the perception that awards and a high-profile movie mean that you do. Did that resonate with you?
Nobody really talks about that, and it's interesting. That's been the fact always. People think when you've won an award for a movie, that must mean you're doing really well financially, and that is rarely the case if you make independent films. It's interesting to me that that has never been discussed as sort of an economic issue, that creators and artists are often living on minimum wage, basically, if you spread out what they make over years.
Both Michelle Williams and Luke Kirby are on TV right now with “Dying for Sex” and “Étoile.” You directed them in “Take This Waltz,” probably my favorite movie of yours and also co-starring Seth Rogen. The reaction to that romantic drama was perhaps muted, but then you had “Stories We Tell,” a very personal documentary about your own family, which became a sensation in 2012.
I learned over and over in my work that whatever the big shiny thing everyone thinks is going to be successful probably isn't going to be: It's probably going to be the little project you worked on for five years where no one understood what the hell you were doing with your time. I was making “Take This Waltz” and “Stories We Tell” basically in chunks around each other. I felt really buoyed by the response to “Stories We Tell” at the time. It was really unexpected, what a life that film had, because it felt like a little project I had to make for myself. For “Take This Waltz,” it's a film that's really been rediscovered on streamers, so suddenly it has an audience with a very positive reaction to it.
At the time “Take This Waltz” came out, a lot of critics were older, older men, and older, older men did not necessarily connect with that movie. To be honest with you, I hate it when filmmakers do a thing of like, maybe you didn't do your best work, but you'll find a political frame to justify why people didn't see it as a masterpiece. I'm not doing that. I don't think it's a perfect film. It stumbles at the beginning and then becomes something I'm super proud of. I'm not super defensive about it. I remember, after a press screening of that film, running into one of the old-guard film critics, and him going, “Yeah, I usually know within 10 minutes if a film's not going to work, and this didn't work.” He said it to me on a street corner. There were so many things about that I was fascinated by, like just saying that to someone really casually who's worked on something for two years. I don't know if a movie's going to work in the first 10 minutes. That's a special skill!
I remember I ran into Wim Wenders right after I saw some reviews, and I said, “I feel like this movie's getting misinterpreted somehow.” He said, “You think people are ready for ‘Madame Bovary'? You're wrong.” Which I know is, like, the greatest validation ever.
You adapted Alice Munro's short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” for your directing debut, “Away from Her.” What was your reaction to the allegations last year from Munro's daughter, Andrea Skinner, who claimed her stepfather sexually abused her but that Munro chose to stay with him even with that knowledge?
I live in Toronto. That's all anyone talked about for months.
Some readers, including myself, went back to her stories to look for clues about this, as Munro put so much of her own life into her work.
I definitely did a lot of that. I think that piece that her daughter wrote [in the Toronto Star], and then subsequently her other daughter [Jenny Munro] wrote, was extraordinarily courageous and useful and interesting and a real contribution. A lot of the reporting that followed was really irresponsible and took things out of context and created a picture of someone who was not what the family was saying, nor anybody else. I thought the New Yorker article that Rachel Aviv wrote was by far the best thing written about it, and until that point, I found myself extremely frustrated by the coverage of it, which was at times sloppy and downright irresponsible.
Did Munro's daughter's testimony, which came just over a month after the author died, lead you to rethink the story that became “Away from Her” in any way?
I certainly went back over all of the stories, and specifically the story “Away from Her” was based on, and it's really interesting to read that story through this lens. It's a woman sliding into Alzheimer's or dementia, and she's left with a lot of memories she's repressed of her husband's misbehavior, and those things are suddenly so present and staring her in the face. I would say that my film adaptation made it a lot less sinister anyway, but now it's dramatic to me how I was crafting basically a love story out of something that I think truly was not. When you read a story that many times, when you're adapting, you start to see things and smell things that are between the lines and maybe haven't been written about, and there was some feeling that story left me with where I was profoundly unsettled, and I took most of that out to adapt it. But it stares me in the face when I read it now.
What do you think those claims mean for Munro's legacy?
I have a lot of feelings about how it was handled, and I really wish people had just stuck to the original text of what the kids were asking for and for this story to be heard and part of a legacy. I don't think anyone was ever asking for us to decide she was a terrible writer, or never worth reading again. It's actually a very weird response when you think of all of the things that writers have done over the years and continue to do. It seemed like the renaming of things, rewriting prizes and chairs, that seemed to me not actually what anyone had been asking for. I could be wrong about that. I don't want to stick to that, but I just felt what they wrote was so pure and so clear, and then everyone had responses that seemed more about them than responding to what that family was asking for. I actually only care about what that daughter thinks and feels. I don't care what anyone else feels.
“The Studio” Episode 2, which features Sarah Polley, is now streaming on Apple TV+.
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By
Larisha Paul
Is it a mirage, or is Frank Ocean actually teasing a comeback? On Tuesday, an image circulated online of a brown billboard that seemingly popped up on the route into the Coachella Valley in the Colorado Desert reading: “KIKI BOY 2025.” Fans were quick to point out the connection between the sighting and the elusive musician's supposed private Instagram account, @kikiboyyyyyyy.
According to Instagram, the account was launched in March 2025. It only has eight followers, one being Ocean's public profile, @Blonded. The others include SZA and their shared collaborator Michael Uzowuru, a credited producer on tracks from Lana and Blonde, among others. Sean Matsukawa, an audio engineer and producer who has worked with SZA, Kendrick Lamar, Ariana Grande, and more, also follows the account. The emerging musician girlsweetvoiced is a Kiki Boy follower, too, along with the more mysterious account @archivedsolemn.
The artist billboards that pop up in the lead up to Coachella often establish a sense of optimism for the performances in store for the weekend. Laufey, for example, has one this year that reads: “Still struggling with my name? Visit SayLaufey.com to learn.” Charli XCX is teasing her performance with a Brat billboard that has the title of her blockbuster album scratched out with black ink. Clairo's is a play on her album title, too, reading: “I got Charmed at Coachella.”
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When Ocean last appeared at Coachella, there were no winking billboards preceding his performance. He headlined the annual festival in 2023. His weekend one set marked his first live performance in six years after his 2020 Coachella performance was cancelled due to Covid-19. His weekend two set never happened.
Ocean took the stage about an hour after his scheduled performance time, settling in the middle of the stage with his back partially turned toward the crowd. He didn't interact with them much, but did tease: “I want to talk about why I'm here because it's not because of a new album… Not that there's not a new album.” The small detail about the awaited follow-up to Ocean's latest album Blonde, released almost nine years ago, was swallowed up in the criticism and confusion around his Coachella set as a whole.
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Ocean's performance was cut short to oblige with the festival's strict curfew, and his weekend two performance was cancelled a week later. “It was chaotic. There is some beauty in chaos,” he said at the time. “It isn't what I intended to show, but I enjoy being out there and I'll see you soon.”
It was said that the musician suffered a leg injury at the festival during weekend one and was advised not to perform the following week due to two fractures and a sprain in his left leg. It was also reported that Ocean had plans for an elaborate stage set involving 120 performers skating on ice, but that ultimately fell apart. “There were a lot of production [elements] that Frank planned that at the last minute didn't pan out,” a source told Rolling Stone at the time. “That threw everything off, so it was a scramble after that.”
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While fans who were present for the set, or had plans to see him the following weekend, were disappointed, many extended grace to Ocean. On stage that weekend, the musician spoke about his late brother, Ryan Breaux, who died in a car accident in 2020. “My brother and I came to this festival a lot,” he said. “I know [Ryan] would be so excited to be here with all of us. I want to say thank you for the support and the years and the love all this time. Now I'll get back to the songs.”
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By Rosy Cordero
Associate Editor, TV
NBC‘s Chicago Fire fans are a week away from seeing the return of the beloved actor Eamonn Walker reprise the role of Wallace Boden, and Deadline has your exclusive first look at the action-packed episode with teasers from the actor below.
In “Post Mortem,” airing Wednesday, April 16, at 9/8c, Boden has been tasked by Commissioner Grissom to run a post-incident analysis following a house fire that collapses with a firefighter inside.
This will be Walker's first time on the series back at 51 since he departed in the Season 12 finale following his promotion from Battalion Chief to First Deputy Commissioner of the Chicago Fire Department.
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“It's a really intense episode,” Walker told Deadline during a recent chat. “I will give you this much: somebody got left behind in a fire, and that somebody was a firefighter. That is a no-no and should never, ever happen. And because they were left behind, possibly by the end of this episode, we may lose them. It's one of your favorites.”
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More on this and what it was like for him to revisit the character he played since the series premiered in 2012 in our Q&A below.
DEADLINE: What? Why are you guys always playing with us and scaring us into thinking our favorites might die?
EAMONN WALKER: We're not playing with you. It's not called playing. We love the fact that you are so emotionally involved and that you don't want any more! [LAUGHS] Within the hour that a firefighter was left behind and that moment happens, an investigation starts. So, Deputy Commissioner Bowden has to turn up at Firehouse 51 and let all officers and the chief know they are being investigated, and we have to prep just in case we lose this person. Possibly, a head will roll.
DEADLINE: Who is the firefighter that was left behind?
EW: That's what you want to know? Yeah, I can't tell you. Nice try, though. [LAUGHS] It's somebody you know and love. You might even freak out.
DEADLINE: Will Boden be able to swoop in and save the day?
EW: That's not his job this time.
DEADLINE: What was it like for you getting back into character?
EW: Bowden lives inside of me. My problem is stopping Boden from popping out. [LAUGHS] It was amazing to go back. It was amazing to put the uniform on. I'd missed everybody terribly, and the welcome that I got was second to none. I feel very privileged as an actor to have a cast, a crew, and a production office step up and welcome you home. That's what it was like, and then we went to work. And we went to work in the way that we always work. We knew that there was a very special episode. The writing in this episode is fantastic, and the filming of it is unusual for a Chicago Fire episode. I think you've got more of a movie here than an episode.
DEADLINE: Boden has been gone for a hot minute, and so many things have happened. Boden's pick to succeed him was Hermann (David Eigenberg), who has now taken the chief exam. Will he be weighing in on any of that?
EW: With his situation as it stands, none of that stuff matters. You know, the immediacy of somebody possibly dying is what takes precedent, and so he's come to find out whose fault it is. Whatever relationships, politics, or promotions going on before, this situation right now could change all of that for everyone—none of that matters. And you know, Bowden's investigating his old favorite house, so he has got to tread very carefully. He's been a chief who's been on the line. We watched more than 15 to 20 episodes where somebody was turning around and giving Bowden a hard time for the way he was doing his job. It's Pascal's [Dermot Mulroney] time this time, and I'm the one coming in. In my case, it was always a deputy, a deputy chief, or somebody higher than the chief coming in. There's only one person above me, and that's the commissioner. I am the Deputy Commissioner coming in to find out why a firefighter is left behind in the fire. It doesn't get more intense than that.
DEADLINE: Would you say he's been aware of all that's been going on, though? What has Boden been up to off-camera?
EW: You don't think that as Commissioner of the Chicago Fire Department, I don't know what's going on in Firehouse 51? [LAUGHS] As far as what he's been up to off-screen, he's being deputy commissioner and learning what that job is and how different it is to being a chief. When you first met him, he had control of five fire houses, although you never saw them, or you might have seen one or two. Then, he went to Deputy District Chief, and then he had a whole district, and now he's got the whole Chicago Fire Department, so all of Chicago is under his wing. He knows the reputation he received for having a favorite with Firehouse 51, and he can't afford to have that as Deputy Commissioner. He's coming in to do his job and not get caught up on the fact that somebody's in hospital. If Bowden does his job properly and the right person is discovered to be at fault, you will lose them too because they'll be fired.
DEADLINE: We haven't even seen your episode yet, but we're ready for you to secure a date for another appearance. Was this a one and done?
EW: The truth of the matter is, if they write it, I will always come back and do it if I can be here. It's a wonderful thing to be part of the Chicago Fire family. We support each other in so many ways that people can't even possibly imagine, on and off the screen. So I'm very grateful.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Deadline selected the two exclusive photos in this story after speaking to Walker. The one below may reveal the firefighter left behind and why Walker was so emphatic about how stressed fans should be about what's ahead. Walker is right, we are shooketh.
Chicago Fire is produced by Universal Television, a division of Universal Studio Group, in association with Wolf Entertainment.
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For all of the praise Emmy-winning series “The White Lotus” garners, creator Mike White does believe that the bigger the series, the bigger the target it is on its back… at least when it comes to critics. White said during “The Howard Stern Show” (via THR) that Season 3 of “The White Lotus” has proven that the more popular the series is, the “meaner” audiences can be.
“They're criticizing the show in certain ways and they're meaner in certain ways [now],” White said. “I'm used to being this underdog indie writer that people are championing. Certain things will hurt my feelings, or I'll feel misunderstood. The mean ones have gotten meaner. It's like they don't like me. I guess I need to either avoid that stuff or get tougher, because it does bum me out.”
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White, however, did not let any of those criticisms impact his HBO deal, though. The director teased that he is already negotiating his contract for Season 4 now. “We are renegotiating right now, I'm definitely curious to find out what that [amount] is,” White said. “I feel like I have financial security for sure … at a certain point with money, [you wonder]: ‘Is this going to make me worse? Is having more money just going to make me more dysfunctional?'”
White said during the official “White Lotus” podcast that a fourth season would differ from its predecessors. “For the fourth season, I want to get a little bit out of the crashing waves of rocks vernacular but there's always more room for more murders at the White Lotus hotels,” White hinted.
And for those viewers who find the series to be too “slow,” well, White has a comment about that too. “The pacing and the vibe… it definitely gets under their skin,” White said. “There was complaining about how there's no plot. That part I find weird. Part of me is just like, ‘Bro, this is the vibe. I'm world-building. If you don't want to go to bed with me then get out of my bed. I'm edging you! Enjoy the edging. If you don't want to be edged, then get out of my bed.' Do you know what I mean? Don't be a bossy bottom. Get the fuck out of my bed. Don't come home with me. Don't get naked in my bed. Get the fuck out of my bed. Obviously something is going to happen.”
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The ever-busy King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard revealed last year that they recorded an entire album with an orchestra in the same time period that they made 2024's Flight B741. Now, the Australian prog-rock band has announced the LP, titled Phantom Island, is on its way. A release date has not yet been revealed, but the band has hinted that more information will be revealed on April 15. You can check out the title track and cover art below.
“A lot of love and time and energy and patience and growth went into this one,” lead singer-guitarist Stu Mackenzie wrote on Instagram. “Can't wait to grow wings and fly with all of you.”
“Phantom Island” is the first of 10 tracks on the new album. It's the whopping 27th album of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard's career, following last year's Flight B741 and two 2023 records: The Silver Cord and PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation. The band hasn't specified which orchestra actually plays on the album, but the credits for the lead single do note that it was conducted by Brett Kelly.
Read about King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard's upcoming shows in “The 72 Most Anticipated Tours of 2025.”
Phantom Island:
01 Phantom Island02 Deadstick03 Lonely Cosmos04 Eternal Return05 Panpsych06 Spacesick07 Aerodynamic08 Sea of Doubt09 Silent Spirit10 Grow Wings And Fly
Correction: This article previously claimed that Phantom Island would be released on April 15. It has been updated to reflect that a release date for the album has not yet been announced.
This article was originally published on Wednesday, April 9 at 1:14 p.m. Eastern. It was last updated on April 9 at 2:08 p.m. Eastern.
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By
CT Jones
Brittany Broski knows what you're thinking. We're in an influencer economy where it feels like at any moment your favorite beauty reviewer could flood your feeds with an unexpected (and unwanted) pivot to a pop career. So, to have a well-known comedy and entertainment creator — first introduced to the world through a now-viral 21-second video trying kombucha for the first time — give a serious attempt to enter the music industry, it's basically asking for a world of scrutiny and derision online. Broski is well aware of all of this — she just doesn't “give a fuck.”
“I'm not new to this,” she tells Rolling Stone over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. “I know how the internet disposes of people. But I'm blessed with a fan base, real Broski Nation believers, who have been asking for a project like this for a long time. And I'm finally at a place where it feels right.”
It's this self assuredness, mixed with Broski's signature blend of humor and Southern twang-dipped expletives, that have moved this creator from her one-off viral moment in 2019 into a major force in the influencer industry. The Texas native boasts more than 10 million followers on TikTok alone, hosts her fan-favorite podcast The Broski Report, and also stars in her medieval take on a celebrity interview show Royal Court — which has close to half a million subscribers on YouTube and regularly features guests like Charli XCX, Saoirse Ronan, Orville Peck, and Colman Domingo. Broski's fans, also lovingly referred to as Broski Nation, are often drawn to the host for her brusque remarks and full pride in fangirling out about artists, celebs, and even the latest BookTok hit. She's won an audience by delighting in the silliness of most of her pursuits, gleefully putting Oscar nominees in the hot seat, or throwing the camera back to a sideline correspondent who just happened to be Timothée Chalamet. So her new single, “The Sun,” paints her in a light many people might not recognize her in — drop dead serious.
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“Trying is cool again,” Broski says, pushing her curtain bangs back to get closer to the camera. “Cringe culture is dying. You've seen me a goofy goober fucking jester online for five years. I think I'm getting old enough where [I can say] here's this more serious side of me and [have my fans] know I'm not going to stop being myself.”
Just because Broski is self-assured doesn't mean releasing the project hasn't brought on some nerves for her. She says that music has such a special place in her heart and career that she decided to release an interpolated cover of Harry Styles' “Adore You” in March as a way to slowly dip her toes into the world. “You feel a bit naked,” she says. “It's scary releasing that part of you. With ‘Adore You,' I had a bit of cover, because it's a clear homage to how much I love Harry Styles but at the same time showing you what I'm working with. With ‘The Sun,' it feels like I've just ripped the towel open and I'm like ‘check it out.'”
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Broski's debut single, produced and co-written by Luke Niccoli (Carly Rae Jepsen, the Kid LAROI), is a pop rock song dripping with bluegrass guitar and nods to her influences, which include Mumford and Sons, Florence & the Machine, and Hozier. The live performance, released today, is an acoustic version of the song — stripping back the layers until the biggest things people will focus on is Broski and her mic. The majority of the project was written in Nashville, which Broski says allowed her to include more of her Southern heritage directly into the heart of the work. “Getting together with people who have similar life experiences feels like such a safe place, she says. “They understand that tug of, ‘I'm from the South, and I feel Southern' but at the same time, politically, I don't identify with the South's portrayal. So it's nice to write with like-minded people.”
While Broski's new single is the first of what she hopes will be a continued career in music, she notes that she's always a fan first. “The earliest concert that changed my life was One Direction's Midnight Memories [tour],” she says. “It was electric. The excitement in the room could have lit a fucking match, and I've been chasing that high ever since. I remember thinking in high school, I'm wasting my fucking life away doing Wattpad, doing Tumblr, but all of that has been so incredibly helpful for where I am now and being an informed artist. I know what fans want.” And what's the proof? Take the thumbs up she got from Styles' team over the “Adore You” cover. “That means the world,” Broski says, before beginning to fan herself. “What the fuck are we talking about? I blacked out. A little trickle of piss ran down my leg. But just a little bit!”
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By
Michael Embrich
As if firing tens of thousands of veterans from federal service, gutting Veterans Affairs benefits, and slashing Medicare and Social Security weren't enough, Donald Trump is now moving to deport veterans — many of whom have risked their lives for a country that's now kicking them to the curb like trash.
As I write this, Jose Barco, a U.S. Army veteran and Purple Heart recipient, sits in a Texas detention center awaiting deportation to a country that won't even take him. Barco was born in Venezuela, but the Venezuelan government is claiming his birth certificate is a fake, alleging it looks too new to be real.
Barco — a veteran of two combat deployments to Iraq, who put his life on the line for a country that now refuses to recognize him as one of its own — is caught in limbo as the Trump administration decides what to do with him. What they do know is that they don't want him in the United States.
Barco came to the U.S. at the age of four. He enlisted in the Army and served in Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment — the kind of unit that saw the worst of Iraq during the height of the insurgency. In 2004, he earned a Purple Heart after an explosion launched him through the air and into a wall, leaving him with a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and severe burns. He was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). TBI and PTSD are the very conditions that Trump, through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is neglecting by slashing critical mental health services and eliminating over 80,000 jobs at the VA.
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While serving, Barco tried to file for citizenship. His commanding officer helped him complete the application. Then it vanished. No chain of custody. No record. A lost folder with a soldier's future inside it. What should've been a straightforward path to naturalization became an invisible trap door leading to exile.
When he returned stateside, Barco's untreated brain trauma turned to instability. He committed a violent crime in 2008. He fired a random shot, which he says he doesn't recall, into a group of people and injured a pregnant teen. He paid for it with 15 years of his life behind bars for attempted murder. His sentence was reduced for good behavior, and he was granted his release after his first parole hearing.
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Barco was honorably discharged. He was diagnosed with serious physical and mental injuries. He was promised a path to citizenship. And yet, immediately after his release from prison in January, ICE scooped him up and put on a plane to Venezuela — a country he hasn't seen since he was a toddler and which refused to accept him.
Now he is stateless, a man with no nation. The United States of America — the same nation he fought and bled for — has denied him the basic dignity of belonging.
Barco's story is a cautionary tale of abandoning due process. It isn't just about him; his is the story we know of. There are about 40,000 foreign nationals currently serving in the U.S. military. This is about the hundreds of deported veterans now scattered across 40 countries. This is about the failure of a country that thanks you for your service one day and deports you the next. This disregard for service has never been more egregious than under Trump, whose indifference toward the dismantling of the VA — and the callous, senseless firing of thousands of veterans at the hands of Elon Musk and DOGE — is willfully doing more harm to our veterans than any other administration in the modern era. Some are trying to intervene on Barco's behalf, arguing that he should be transferred to a VA facility for medical care, yet nothing has materialized as of today.
Barco's story, however flawed he was as a citizen, sheds light on the wider problem with Trump's lawless second term. If Trump can do this to a war hero, he can do it to anyone. He can ignore the Constitution and run again. He can suspend habeas corpus, jail protesters, and detain American citizens. He can pivot hard toward a more fascist and authoritarian America. Republicans in Congress will cheer him on. The mass protests across the country are a powerful start, but they are not enough to ensure America doesn't backslide into the very despotism it was founded to resist.
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Even if Democrats take power in 2026 or 2028, the party seems unwilling to dismantle the system of unlimited money in politics ensuring another Elon Musk can buy influence. Nor, outside a few, are they offering voters something other than “Republicans lite.”
The only one who can save you is you. Are you ready for what comes next? You better be.
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By Matt Grobar
Senior Film Reporter
EXCLUSIVE: Australian actress Alycia Debnam-Carey (Apple Cider Vinegar) is the newest addition to the cast of the still-untitled new Monsterverse movie from Legendary.
Character description is under wraps. The project reunites Debnam-Carey with Kaitlyn Dever, with whom she just starred in the hit Netflix series Apple Cider Vinegar. As previously announced, others in the ensemble include Jack O'Connell, Matthew Modine, Delroy Lindo, and Dan Stevens, who reprises his role as veterinarian Trapper Beasley from last year's Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the highest-grossing installment in the franchise.
Grant Sputore (I Am Mother) is directing from a script by Shang-Chi‘s Dave Callaham. While plot specifics are fuzzy, we're told the film features several new human characters alongside Titans Godzilla and Kong, as they face off against a cataclysmic world-ending threat. Sputore took over the directorial reins from Adam Wingard following his work on The New Empire and Godzilla vs. Kong.
Watch on Deadline
Launched with Godzilla in 2014, Legendary's Monsterverse franchise also includes Kong: Skull Island and Godzilla: King of the Monsters, as well as Netflix's animated spin-off Skull Island and the Apple TV+ series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. The films, released by Warners, have collectively grossed over $2.5B worldwide.
In addition to Apple Cider Vinegar, Debnam-Carey has recently been seen starring in It's What's Inside, the high-concept horror comedy that Netflix acquired out of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, in the splashiest deal of that year. Prior to that starring in all eight seasons of AMC's Fear the Walking Dead, the actress has also been seen on shows like The 100 and The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, among others.
She is represented by UTA, Entertainment 360, Australia's United Management, and Hansen, Jacobson, Teller.
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In the end — or at least in its penultimate installment — “Daredevil: Born Again” kept things pretty simple. For weeks we've noted the contrasts and parallels between Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) and Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio) as they circled each other ahead of an inevitable showdown.
But it was also always about a man grieving his best friend and fighting the less savory emotions that come with that. Justice was served in the assassination of Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), but was that ever going to be enough for Matt? Will anything?
The twain converge in Episode 108, “Isle of Joy,” directed Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead and written by Jesse Wigutow & Dario Scardapane. After being held hostage and shooting her captor in Episode 7, Heather (Margarita Levieva) is invited to a black and white ball by Mayor Fisk himself — an invitation that Matt rightfully views as a threat. The mere mention of Fisk's name is enough to catapult Matt's relationship into rocky territory; despite the trust and comfort of his life with Heather, the past and the truth are closing in at the worst possible time. With Fisk in the periphery — or at her office, or in the same ballroom — every second is an opportunity to reveal Matt's true identity and push Heather out of his life for good.
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The second wrench comes in the form of Foggy's killer Benjamin Poindexter (Wilson Bethel), who requests a meeting with Matt that plants the idea of him working as a hired gun. Their short scene together illustrates just how close to the surface Matt aggression lives. He may have donned the mask and suit and beat up opponents over the last eight episodes, but Poindexter elicits a special kind of resentment. When Matt smashes his head into the table and blames the victim, it sure feels like the type of tactic more prevalent on say, Fisk's anti-vigilante Task Force.
Marvel shows and movies are known for combative set pieces, but “Isle of Joy” makes a case for mixing that up with extravagance (even James Bond is required to dress up and go to parties). The Mayor's ball is an absolute feast for the senses; the black-and-white costumes, the massive number of performers, the layout and possibility of the space. In this setting, the episode shifts between covert conversations, furtive looks, confrontations behind doors, and everything in between. It's both spectacularly theatrical and immensely realistic.
Benson and Moorhead find opportunities to play within that, especially with lighting and color. Most of the background players are in black, with only Heather and Fisk fully in white and Vanessa providing a potent pop of red (she just killed a man, recently tried to kill another, and is responsible for killing Foggy. It's not subtle and it's not supposed to be!) that pairs with Matt's glasses — and eventually, his blood. The lighting around Poindexter goes a chilling shade of blue both in the prison hospital and when he's preparing to shoot his gun into the party. When Fisk speaks privately with Jack (Tony Dalton), the cameras flirt with mirrors around the room and the idea of his many personas.
Vanessa's power hasn't exactly been concealed all season, so it's not a shock that she ordered the hit on Foggy — and ostensibly the one that misses Fisk at the end of this episode. Matt accidentally, but undeniably, takes a bullet for his enemy, entangling them even further.
Meanwhile, Matt makes increasingly less sense the longer he hides his past from Heather; by the time they're on the dance floor, he might as well be speaking a different language. At what point does he tell her so that it all clicks into place? Does he ever? Between the danger to her life and her own anti-vigilante values, it does seem like the truth of the mask is a hard line they can never cross.
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New episodes of “Daredevil: Born Again” start streaming Tuesday nights on Disney+. Season 1 concludes on Tuesday, April 15.
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MrBeast, Marques Brownlee and Mark Rober are among the YouTube stars who will test the tool, after CAA signed on last year.
By
Alex Weprin
Media & Business Writer
A number of major YouTube stars have signed on to a pilot program that will give high-profile figures more control over their likenesses on the platform.
The video platform says that creators like MrBeast (real name Jimmy Donaldson), MKBHD (Marques Brownlee) and Mark Rober have signed on to test the tool, which was announced last year. The tool's rollout comes as generative AI tech makes it almost trivially easy to replicate the appearance or voice or a celebrity.
When it first announced the tool last year, YouTube unveiled a partnership with CAA that will let its clients, including athletes, musicians and athletes, try it out as part of a pilot program. The news on Wednesday expands that pool to high-profile creators.
The tool surfaces AI-generated content featuring a famous person's likeness, and allows them to request removal.
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YouTube's pilot expansion was made in connection to the news that Senators Chris Coons (D-DE), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) had reintroduced the NO FAKES (Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe) Act on Wednesday.
YouTube is a supporter of the bill, alongside the Motion Picture Association, the RIAA, SAG-AFTRA and others.
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HGTV‘s “No Demo Reno” star Jenn Todryk revealed that a scary fan encounter forced her family to suddenly move to a new home. Todryk felt the need to relocate for her family's safety.
A post shared by Jenn Todryk (@theramblingredhead)
Todryk, her three children, and husband Mike moved to a new home for their safety after a fan showed up at their former house.
In an April 2025 interview with Realtor.com, the HGTV star explained the situation. She shared the reason why her family made such a rushed move to a “mostly sight unseen” new home.
“The true story [about our move] is that we had people show up on weekends and take pictures; that's what really did it,” Todryk explained. “One night, Mike waited until the kids went to bed, and he told me that two people came while [their son] Von was playing outside and asked for a picture, and I lost it.”
She continued, “In that moment, I literally heard God say, ‘It's time,' and so I got in the car and I looked up real quick — probably Realtor.com — and I saw this home that was super close to my home. I drove to it. I was crying. I was emotional because I did not want to move. I loved that house. I still love it, and now my best friend lives there, so we still get to go all the time. I still get emotional talking about it.”
Todryk added, “[But] I saw this house and I couldn't see anything because it's really heavily treed and it's on a hill, and I was like, ‘It's perfect!'”
According to the HGTV star, she “didn't even know what the inside looked like,” but they was beyond motivated to buy. “I called the real estate agent that night; it was like 9 p.m. We went and walked it the next day, and we put an offer on the house,” she shared.
“We didn't even look at anything else, and I love it here. It's great,” Todryk added.
A post shared by Jenn Todryk (@theramblingredhead)
Todryk shared that she was fine without an open-concept kitchen in their new home. “I've lived in it. It's very echoey and open, and I like having separation,” she explained. “I think it's very cozy and homey, so I did not take down any walls in this home.”
According to the HGTV star, the kitchen renovation included upgrading the space to provide a warm place for the family to gather.
The kitchen features a gold faucet and white cabinets with gold hardware. The room is tied together with a neutral backsplash and beautiful quartzite countertops.
Todryk noted that her family is making memories in the kitchen, with her and her husband making lunches and their kids “crafting nonstop” in the space. She noted, “We do everything there really.”
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"It can't be overemphasized how proud HBO is" of the second season, says HBO drama head Francesca Orsi.
By
James Hibberd
Writer-at-Large
Season two will not be the last of The Last of Us.
HBO has renewed the Emmy-winning drama series for a third season ahead of its highly anticipated return this weekend. The news comes on the heels of the show's new episodes receiving glowing reviews from critics, with season two currently sitting at a 92 percent positive average on Rotten Tomatoes, and The Hollywood Reporter calling it “thrilling” and “addictive.”
“We approached season two [trailer below] with the goal of creating something we could be proud of,” said co-creator and showrunner Craig Mazin. “The end results have exceeded even our most ambitious goals, thanks to our continued collaboration with HBO and the impeccable work of our unparalleled cast and crew. We look forward to continuing the story of The Last of Us with season three.”
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Added co-creator Neil Druckmann: “To see The Last of Us brought to life so beautifully and faithfully has been a career highlight for me, and I am grateful for the fans' enthusiastic and overwhelming support. Much of that success is thanks to my partner in crime, Craig Mazin, our partnership with HBO, and our team at PlayStation Productions. On behalf of everyone at Naughty Dog, our cast, and crew, thank you so much for allowing us this opportunity. We're thrilled to bring you more of The Last of Us.”
And Francesca Orsi, head of HBO Drama Series and Films, said: “It can't be overemphasized how proud HBO is for the outstanding achievement we believe the second season of The Last of Us is. Craig, Neil, Carolyn and the entire executive producer team, cast and crew have delivered a masterful follow-up and we're thrilled to carry the power of Craig and Neil's storytelling into what we know will be an equally moving and extraordinary third season.”
Talking to THR about the new season, Mazin agreed the second season feels akin to Star Wars‘ famed second chapter, The Empire Strikes Back. “I think about that a lot — because I love The Empire Strikes Back, and I think everybody should,” Mazin says. “We love that one because the second act is the tough act. That's when everything is challenged and characters go through these moments where they can't be who they used to be, but they're also not ready to be who they're supposed to be. There's a sense of feeling lost. And I love that.”
The official description of season two: “Five years after the events of the first season, Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) are drawn into conflict with each other and a world even more dangerous and unpredictable than the one they left behind.”
The season two returning cast also includes Gabriel Luna as Tommy, and Rutina Wesley as Maria. Previously announced new cast includes Kaitlyn Dever as Abby, Isabela Merced as Dina, Young Mazino as Jesse, Ariela Barer as Mel, Tati Gabrielle as Nora, Spencer Lord as Owen, Danny Ramirez as Manny, and Jeffrey Wright as Isaac. Catherine O'Hara also guest stars.
The Last of Us season two consists of seven episodes, the first will air Sunday, April 13, on HBO and Max.
For more on The Last of Us season 2, including the future of the series, see our Everything We Know rundown.
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By Katie Campione
TV Reporter
HBO has picked up The Last of Us for a third season.
The announcement Wednesday comes ahead of the anticipated Season 2 debut on Sunday. Deadline understands that a decision has not been made whether Season 3 will be the series' last.
Creators Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin previously told Deadline that they were contemplating up to four total seasons to tell the story laid out across two video games. The upcoming Season 2 is seven episodes, and the duo sought early on to quell any worry from fans that they would try to wrap up the behemoth that is The Last of Us Part II game in such little time.
“It can't be overemphasized how proud HBO is for the outstanding achievement we believe the second season of The Last of Us is,” Francesca Orsi, Executive Vice President, HBO Programming, Head of HBO Drama Series and Films, said in a statement. “Craig, Neil, Carolyn and the entire executive producer team, cast and crew have delivered a masterful follow-up and we're thrilled to carry the power of Craig and Neil's storytelling into what we know will be an equally moving and extraordinary third season.”
Watch on Deadline
The early renewal is a show of faith for the acclaimed series, though not entirely unexpected, given that the first season performed so well for the network. By the time the Season 1 finale aired, HBO said the season's average audience had surpassed 30 million viewers, with the premiere well on its way to 40M. That's after the premiere episode brought in a same-day audience of 4.7M, which at the time was the largest debut after House of the Dragon since Boardwalk Empire launched in 2010. HBO also recently renewed hit The White Lotus for Season 4 ahead of its Season 3 premiere.
RELATED: ‘The Last Of Us' Star Bella Ramsey On The “Shift In The Relationship” Between Ellie And Joel For Season 2 – Contenders TV
“To see The Last of Us brought to life so beautifully and faithfully has been a career highlight for me, and I am grateful for the fans' enthusiastic and overwhelming support,” Druckmann said in a statement today. “Much of that success is thanks to my partner in crime, Craig Mazin, our partnership with HBO, and our team at PlayStation Productions. On behalf of everyone at Naughty Dog, our cast, and crew, thank you so much for allowing us this opportunity. We're thrilled to bring you more of The Last of Us!”
Mazin added: “We approached season two with the goal of creating something we could be proud of. The end results have exceeded even our most ambitious goals, thanks to our continued collaboration with HBO and the impeccable work of our unparalleled cast and crew. We look forward to continuing the story of The Last of Us with Season 3.”
RELATED: ‘The Last Of Us' Season 2 New Cast: Who Is Joining The Next Installment?
Based on Naughty Dog's award-winning video game, The Last of Us takes place 20 years after modern civilization has been destroyed. Joel, played by Pedro Pascal, a hardened survivor, is hired to smuggle Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a 14-year-old girl, out of an oppressive quarantine zone. What starts as a small job soon becomes a brutal and heartbreaking journey as they both must traverse the U.S. and depend on each other for survival.
Season 2 picks up five years after the events of the first season, Joel and Ellie are drawn into conflict with each other and a world even more dangerous and unpredictable than the one they left behind.
In addition to Pascal and Ramsey, returning cast includes Gabriel Luna and Rutina Wesley. Joining Season 2 are Kaitlyn Dever, Isabela Merced, Young Mazino, Ariela Barer, Tati Gabrielle, Spencer Lord, Danny Ramirez and Jeffrey Wright. Catherine O'Hara also guest stars.
The Last of Us is written and executive produced by Mazin and Druckmann. The series is a co-production with Sony Pictures Television and is also executive produced by Carolyn Strauss, Jacqueline Lesko, Cecil O'Connor, Asad Qizilbash, Carter Swan and Evan Wells; with writer/co-executive producer Halley Gross. PlayStation Productions, Word Games, Mighty Mint and Naughty Dog produce.
RELATED: ‘The Last Of Us' Season 2: Everything We Know So Far
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The Oscar-winning actress joins Anthony Anderson, Ramón Rodríguez, Douglas Hodge, Marsai Martin and Antony Starr in Patricia Riggen's action film.
By
Lovia Gyarkye
Arts & Culture Critic
In G20, Viola Davis joins the pantheon of action heroes tasked with saving the world from a catastrophe. The Oscar-winning actress plays Danielle Sutton, a steely veteran, mother of two and president of the United States. When we meet the leader of the free world, she's tensely battling with her 17-year-old daughter Serena (Marsai Martin) after the angsty teenager snuck out to party at a Georgetown bar.
How Serena managed to outwit her Secret Service agents and end up on the late night news shows vexes Sutton, who's trying to maintain a flawless and relatively low-key reputation as the first Black woman president of the North American nation. In that way, G20, directed by Patricia Riggen and streaming April 10 on Prime Video, feels like a relic of a timeline in which Vice President Kamala Harris' future in the Oval Office seemed all but assured. The film weaves the social and political pressures faced by a Black woman ascending to the highest office into a bumpy story about how she's eventually thrust into an explosive global crisis.
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G20
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Slow to start, but Davis kicks it into gear.
Release date: April 10 (Prime Video)Cast: Viola Davis, Anthony Anderson, Marsai Martin, Ramón Rodríguez, Douglas Hodge,Elizabeth MarvelDirector: Patricia RiggenScreenwriters: Caitlin Parrish, Erica Weiss, Logan Miller, Noah Miller
1 hour 48 minutes
Riggen, working from a screenplay by Caitlin Parrish, Erica Weiss, Logan Miller and Noah Miller, struggles to balance the tonal requirements of each thread, which results in a film that's slow to get going. But once the principal heroes and villains have been established and the perfunctory narrative throat-clearing is out of the way, G20 finds its groove as a solid popcorn action flick.
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In interviews about G20, Davis has said she did the movie because she wanted to star in something popular. While this film doesn't shy away from heavy themes, the whole operation hinges on the actress' confident portrayal of the kind of action hero usually played by white male movie stars. It's essentially her Air Force One. (To be fair, Davis isn't unfamiliar with this genre: She did lead an army of women warriors in precolonial West Africa in Gina Prince-Bythewood's The Woman King.) And while one does wish that Davis had a less schmaltzy and more coherent story to work with here, G20 manages to deliver where it matters. The stunts (coordinated by Grant Powell) are relatively inventive and appropriately balletic, and the film features a gallery of supporting characters worth rooting for.
After a reporter questions Sutton's ability to protect the nation if she can't even manage her kid, the president decides to take the whole family — husband Derek (Anthony Anderson), daughter Serena and son Demetrius (Christopher Farrar) — with her to the G20 summit in Cape Town, South Africa. They are accompanied by the president's friend and longtime security detail Agent Manny Ruiz (Ramón Rodríguez) and U.S. Treasury Secretary Joanna Worth (Elizabeth Marvel).
This year's conference is a big deal for Sutton because she needs to recruit other nations to join her efforts to give micro-loans to farmers in Africa, a step she believes will play a significant role in ending world hunger. There are plenty of doubters, though, including British Prime Minister Oliver Everett (Douglas Hodge), and key players she needs to convince like Elena Romano (The White Lotus season two‘s Sabrina Impacciatore), the new head of the IMF.
The world's most powerful leaders arrive in Cape Town with relatively little fanfare, but that changes later when the heads of state are held hostage in the hotel's conference room by a rogue group, led by Rutledge (Antony Starr), a former U.S. army officer, determined to short the market. They are functionally crypto bros — with a bit of an anarchist spirit — who use artificial intelligence and deep fakes to convince workers around the world to back bitcoin currency. They want the people to rise up against ineffective leadership and recognize that they are being brainwashed into paying for endless wars. Rutledge makes some fair points, but too bad they're tainted by an insatiable greed.
During the early moments of mayhem — in which Rutledge and his global team of mercenaries breach the hotel's maximum security system and hack into its surveillance framework — Sutton and Manny manage to escape the conference room. They are followed by Oliver, Elena and Han Min-Seo (a scene-stealing Meewha Alana Lee), the first lady of South Korea. Elsewhere in the hotel, Serena, Demetrius and Derek dodge their armed captors and find a way to escape.
G20 takes place almost exclusively in this hotel and its events happen over the course of a single night. The tight framing is helpful for a film that can wobble under the demands of its various plot points, some of which end up competing for attention. At first, Sutton's goal is to find a way out of the hotel, but it soon becomes clear that she is the one the mercenaries are after. Her position as U.S. president makes her critical to the plan to crash the global market, and in order to lure her back to the conference room Rutledge starts killing her colleagues. That plan adds tension to the relatively flimsy stakes of the film, turning a straightforward escape plot into a more gripping game of cat and mouse. Sutton must reverse course and now try to find a way to save her fellow leaders, her family and the world.
It's no small task, but Davis navigates it with believable conviction. She's having fun with the role, roundhouse kicking villains and toting a gun while wearing her evening gown. The actress embraces even the silliest parts of the story and that commitment makes it easier to forgive the garish visual effects and obvious telegraphing. G20 is really a film for fans of the actress and an audience ready to see some smooth-brained chaos.
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Former “Dancing with the Stars” professional dancer Sharna Burgess has filled fans in on a “crazy” few days she and her fiancé, former DWTS contestant and “Beverly Hills, 90210” alum Brian Austin Green have had.
Green has been hospitalized due to what turned out to be appendicitis, and Burgess gave fans the lowdown on how everything played out.
A post shared by Ｓｈａｒｎａ Ｂｕｒｇｅｓｓ (@sharnaburgess)
On April 8, Burgess shared a string of Instagram Stories about Green's hospitalization. She began by sharing, “We have had a crazy few days,” and noted she was just about to head into the hospital.
Burgess explained, “Bry is in there. He was having really bad stomach pain on Sunday.” She said he lay low the whole day, which was a big sign that something was wrong.
That evening, Burgess suggested that perhaps Green's issue had to do with his appendix. They did some digging online and felt certain that was the issue, and took him to the emergency room. Unfortunately, they were not able to get seen and resolve the issue at the first emergency room they visited.
They went to a different hospital's emergency room on the morning of April 7, and this time, they got answers. “They did blood work and CT scans and all the things. It was like, ‘Yeah, it's perforated. It's open,'” Burgess revealed.
Luckily, she added, Green wasn't going into sepsis, though. She shared, “They got him in for surgery that night.” He stayed at the hospital overnight, and Burgess returned to the hospital the following morning with fresh clothes and Green's toothbrush.
She noted, “We came in here with nothing. And it's been really wild.” Burgess also shared it was all leaving her feeling “really dysregulated” as well as “super emotional” and “very sensitive.”
A post shared by Ｓｈａｒｎａ Ｂｕｒｇｅｓｓ (@sharnaburgess)
Burgess promised fans she would keep them updated as Green's recovery continued. She said that Green was “doing good” and was “an absolute champ.” She added that “Everything went really well” with the surgery.
A while later, Burgess returned to her Instagram Stories with an update. She said she was leaving the hospital after visiting Green and said, “Bry is doing good.”
She added, “I just wanted to say thank you for the amazing messages of support and love and healing energy and all of that. He's doing amazing. He's such a champ.” She added, however, “He's definitely in pain.”
Burgess also indicated that the plan was for Green to return home the afternoon of April 9. She explained that the doctors “Just want to keep him there to do a few more rounds of antibiotics to make sure he doesn't get an infection because that would just be the worst.”
“We're really lucky,” she said, after hearing others share their experiences of trying to get help when they were having appendix issues. Burgess said she planned to get home to play with the couple's son Zane and catch up on other things, and it seemed likely she would return with an additional update once Green returned home.
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By Jake Kanter
International Investigations Editor
EXCLUSIVE: Brad Pitt‘s production company Plan B Entertainment is in early talks to make what could become a second season of Adolescence after the series' success on Netflix.
In their first interview since Adolescence went off like a firework last month, Plan B co-presidents Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner told Deadline that they are speaking to director Philip Barantini about the “next iteration” of the show, which starred and was co-created by Stephen Graham.
Gardner said they are thinking about how they can “widen the aperture, stay true to its DNA [and] not be repetitive,” but she did not wish to reveal too much about their plans. Kleiner added that they hope Graham and Jack Thorne, the British writer behind Adolescence, can reteam on the project. Warp Films and Matriarch Productions were the co-producers.
Watch on Deadline
The conversations are likely to be welcomed by Netflix and the millions who have watched the series, which tells the story of a 13-year-old boy (played by breakout Owen Cooper) accused of stabbing a female classmate to death after being drawn into the online manosphere. Adolescence now sits in fourth place in Netflix's Most Popular English-Language TV list after amassing 114.5M views since its March 13 release.
Gardner and Kleiner said they were grateful for the success, arguing that it showed that a “seemingly small, localized, emotional story” can resonate around the world. Gardner said male violence has been a societal issue for many years, and they were “humbled” to have found a key to unlock the story in the minds of millions. She added that Barantini's one-take method was an essential ingredient.
RELATED: Netflix Posts ‘Adolescence' Star Owen Cooper's Audition Tape
“Phil's style of doing the episodes in one take is not a gimmick. It's very much in conversation with the subject matter,” Gardner said. “In early conversations with Stephen and Jack, they were talking about how it's too easy to look away. You can look away from the school, you can look away from the police station, you can look away from the counseling, you can look away from the family. In that kind of prismatic way of viewing, you can duck the issue. So our theory was, what would happen if you couldn't look away? And will that make the subject embed in you in a different way? That was a thrilling thing.”
Plan B got the ball rolling on Adolescence after watching Boiling Point, Barantini's one-take feature about a chef, played by Graham, in the throes of a personal and professional meltdown. Kleiner said he knew quickly that Plan B wanted to experiment with the form in a TV series. Pitt also brought into the idea and was only too happy to reunite with his friend Graham after they worked together on Guy Ritchie's 2000 feature Snatch. “Brad is a massive fan of Stephen's,” Kleiner said.
RELATED: UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer Says Netflix Hit ‘Adolescence' Was Powerful: “It Hit Home Hard”
As Thorne revealed in a Deadline interview last month, Plan B first pitched the series to Amazon Prime Video under a development deal with the streamer. Kleiner was diplomatic about the reasons why Amazon passed on a series that has blown up on one of its biggest rivals: “I want to be grateful to them for their good faith in helping us get underway.”
Pitt was an enthusiastic advocate, sitting in on pitch meetings with Amazon and providing input on Thorne's pilot script, which Kleiner said the Fight Club star was “blown away” by. “He was part of the energy, drive, and impetus to get the thing off the ground,” Kleiner added.
Netflix was the first stop after Amazon's rejection. Plan B was keen to work with Netflix UK chief Anne Mensah after they collaborated at Comcast-owned Sky on Jude Law-Naomie Harris series Third Day. Mensah is on something of a hot streak at Netflix, having delivered other hits including Baby Reindeer, The Gentlemen and Fool Me Once.
RELATED: ‘Adolescence' Writer Jack Thorne On The Missing Knife, The Scene He Agonized Over, Saving British Drama & His Zoom Encounter With Brad Pitt
Kleiner said Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos took an interest in Adolescence. He told Plan B in November that he had watched the series and was “personally moved by the show.” The Netflix chief also wrote an Instagram herogram when Adolescence premiered — a courtesy he does not extend to every new title.
Gardner said she sensed the show was a hit when her daughter showed her the TikTok trend of moms reacting to Adolescence. The series has stirred political conversation in the UK, where Prime Minister Keir Starmer said it “hit home hard” in his own household. Gardner said it was refreshing to hear a politician talking about watching TV.
RELATED: ‘Adolescence' Secrets: Netflix Reveals Number Of Takes For Each Episode & How Drone Shot Filmed
So where does the show fit in Plan B's canon of content? The company is no stranger to confronting societal issues, be it the #MeToo movement with She Said or institutional racism in Nickel Boys, but Gardner and Kleiner said this is not always the intention.
Gardner said “complicity” is one theme she would highlight in Plan B's output. Kleiner said the company embraces a “level of ambition” that presented itself through the one-take method on Adolescence. “Look at the incredible power of UK television. There's a way things are made [there] that you know, we want to do more of, for sure. Not just in the UK but across Europe,” he added.
RELATED: “The Camera Doesn't Blink In This Show”: Jack Thorne & Philip Barantini Lift Lid On Netflix's First One-Shot TV Series ‘Adolescence'
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The death toll of the roof collapse at a Dominican nightclub has risen to 113, and is expected to climb as emergency crews continue to search the rubble more than 24 hours after the disaster. Dominican public figures from the worlds of music, politics, and sport are among those who were killed when the ceiling caved in an hour into merengue singer Rubby Pérez's midnight headline show at the Jet Set club. Pérez himself and his saxophonist, Luis Solís, were confirmed dead early this morning (April 9), and Major League Baseball has paid tribute to former players Octavio Dotel and Tony Blanco. Dominican officials have not commented on potential causes of the collapse, which also injured more than 255 survivors.
Pérez has been a merengue luminary for decades, playing in bands including Los Juveniles del Sabor in the 1970s after studying music at the National Conservatory of Santo Domingo. He sang on hits with the Wilfrido Vargas Orchestra that helped make merengue an international phenomenon, before launching a solo career in 1987. Popular throughout his life, he released several platinum albums and, as his legacy grew, headlined U.S. venues including Radio City Music Hall and Madison Square Garden. In 2010, the Committee of Latin American Political Parties in the United States recognized Pérez for helping victims of that year's Haiti earthquake.
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Christopher Landon is revealing where he landed amid the “Scream VII” controversies in 2023. The director of the new thriller “Drop” told Vanity Fair that he and his family endured death threats and “abuse” after “Scream” franchise actress Melissa Barrera was fired by production company Spyglass for her pro-Palestine comments. According to Landon, fans conflated Spyglass' decision with his own personal politics; at the time, Landon wrote on Twitter in a since-deleted statement about Barrera's firing, “Everything sucks. Stop yelling. This was not my decision to make.”
After Barrera was let go, her “Scream” co-star Jenna Ortega decided to leave the franchise as well. It was originally reported that “Scream VII” conflicted with Ortega's “Wednesday” Season 2 shoot after the SAG-AFTRA strikes; Ortega recently clarified to The Cut that her exit had “nothing to do with pay or scheduling” and it was Barrera's firing that was the reason for her decision to leave. “The Melissa stuff was happening, and it was all kind of falling apart,” Ortega said. “If ‘Scream VII' wasn't going to be with that team of directors and those people I fell in love with, then it didn't seem like the right move for me in my career at the time.”
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If only Landon could merely say the same: The “Happy Death Day” and “Paranormal Activity” filmmaker agreed with Ortega that without Barrera, “Scream VII” was “tumbling down in an instant.” He added that it was “devastating to suddenly cancel everything” during the prep for the project. However, it wasn't just creative frustrations that Landon had to endure: The director said that “Scream” fans were digitally attacking his family (Landon and his husband Cody Morris have two sons, ages five and eight.) The reason? Barrera being fired.
“I did not fire her,” Landon restated. “A lot of people think I had something to do with it, and it was not my doing. I had no control of the situation at all. I think in the absence of people understanding how Hollywood works and what the hierarchy is, the fans were like, ‘That's the guy.' And so they came for me, knives out.”
Landon continued that Barrera's firing became a crux of how Hollywood was reacting to the Israel-Palestine conflict at the time in November 2023.
“People were threatening to kill me and my family, to the point where the FBI was getting involved,” Landon said. “I got messages saying, ‘I'm going to find your kids, and I'm going to kill them because you support child murder.' The head of security at various studios and the FBI had to examine the threats. It was highly aggressive and really scary.”
On December 23, 2023, Landon announced that he too was parting ways with “Scream VII.”
“They wanted me to continue on,” Landon said of Spyglass. “They basically said, ‘You can restart it. You can figure it out.' But the amount of abuse that I had to deal with — I decided I didn't want to give any part of myself to that. For me, it was not worth it. I would rather put my efforts into something else, where I could feel appreciated and respected. The hate and abuse really spoiled it for me, and I lost my love for the idea of going forward.”
Landon added, “In the midst of all the chaos, I was grieving the loss of one of my dream jobs. I went through all the stages — I was shocked, I was sad, and then I got angry. To be a part of this legacy, it was really hard to let it go. ‘Scream' was a very dark and tumultuous experience. I was gobsmacked and in shock for a while, but I'm at a place now where I can talk about it 'cause I was able to use that unpleasant experience and turn it into something positive. And that was ‘Drop.'”
Original “Scream” screenwriter Kevin Williamson will now be writing and directing “Scream VII.” Landon supports the film and the franchise as a whole, even after his experience with it.
“I want ‘Scream' to succeed. Kevin probably made a banger of a movie, because he knows it better than anybody. It's going to be awesome,” he said. “There's no resentment at all. What else are you going to do? Wallow? Then they win. My best revenge was making something cool, and I feel like I did with ‘Drop.' My revenge wasn't rooted in pain or anger; it was rooted in joy and moving forward.”
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By
Andy Greene
T
he What About Bob? production crew were deep in the woods of the tiny Virginia town of Moneta when they heard a frightening sound they couldn't quite identify. They were over three months into shooting the 1991 Bill Murray–Richard Dreyfuss comedy about a mentally ill man who becomes obsessed with his tightly-wound therapist — way past the scheduled completion date — and things had been extremely tense from the beginning. But nothing prepared them for this.
“It sounded like an animal was being slaughtered,” says set photographer Barry Wetcher. Eventually, Wetcher says, they realized the noise was coming from a man — specifically, the film's director, Frank Oz. A celebrated voice actor on Sesame Street and The Muppets, Oz also had a stellar career as a filmmaker by that point, having directed fan-favorite films such as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Little Shop of Horrors. (Following What About Bob?, he would also direct In and Out and Bowfinger, among other films.) But this production clearly was pushing him to his limits. “He wasn't screaming at anyone in particular,” Wetcher says. “He was just screaming.”
The plan for the night was to film the climactic scene where Dr. Leo Marvin (Dreyfuss) takes Bob Wiley (Murray) into the wilderness and straps 20 pounds of explosives to his chest in a last-ditch attempt to finally remove the patient from his life. “Death therapy, Bob,” says a crazed Marvin. “It's the only cure.”
Things were only slightly less charged when the cameras weren't rolling. Murray and Dreyfuss grew to despise each other as their time in Moneta dragged on, eventually reaching a point where they didn't even communicate when the cameras were off. If this wasn't enough of a headache for Oz, he was fighting his own war with producer Laura Ziskin about nearly every aspect of the movie, including how to end it. On that night in the woods, Oz finally hit his breaking point.
“Remember in the old Woody Woodpecker cartoons, where the old thermometer goes up and up and up and up and then explodes?” Oz asks as he munches on oatmeal at an Upper West Side diner late in 2024. “That's what I saw at that moment. And I remember kicking over a garbage can and shouting, ‘Children! Children!' I walked to my trailer, and I just couldn't believe what was going on. I was so upset. I remember Richard knocking on my door, and I said, ‘Richard, go away. I don't want to talk to you now. Go away!'”
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Of course, all of this was hidden from the public when the film hit theaters on May 17, 1991. It was the top movie at the box office that weekend, and ultimately grossed $64 million ($150 million in 2025 dollars). “In this splendidly cast film, Murray and Dreyfuss play off each other to their maximum advantage,” wrote Hollywood Reporter critic Duane Byrge. “Murray does what he does best, to shine on and ultimately destroy authority figures, while Dreyfuss‘ portrayal of the runty doctor is splendidly Napoleonic.”
What About Bob? had a long afterlife on cable and home video, and is generally seen as one of Murray's greatest onscreen achievements, just one notch below Groundhog Day and Rushmore. “Not everything holds up,” Murray told Variety's Rebecca Rubin in January, noting that he'd recently rewatched What About Bob?. “I hadn't seen it for 15 years. I saw it and said, ‘God damn, it was funny.'”
Murray may be able to look back at the movie and laugh today, but most Nineties cinephiles know the humor came at a considerable cost. Stories have emerged over the years about Murray chucking a glass at Dreyfuss' head, tossing Ziskin into the lake, and causing general mayhem on the set. But most of the participants have stayed silent, and the full story of the production has never come out — until now. Rolling Stone spent the past several months conducting extensive interviews with members of the cast and crew and, with the help of her former assistant Blair Richwood, combing through the archives of Ziskin, who died from breast cancer in 2011.
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While Murray did not respond to interview requests, this story includes detailed accounts from Richard Dreyfuss, Julie Hagerty (who played Leo Marvin's wife, Faye), Charlie Korsmo (the Marvins' son Siggy), Kathryn Erbe (daughter Anna Marvin), director Frank Oz, screenwriter Tom Schulman, casting director Glenn Daniels, and staff photographer Barry Wetcher. It's the story of a painfully funny movie that required a lot of pain to bring to life.
On Aug. 14, 1983, a new novel named August appeared on The New York Times bestseller list alongside Stephen King's Christine, Nora Ephron's Heartburn, and the illustrated novelization of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. Written by Judith Rossner, it chronicles a tumultuous, five-year relationship between a disturbed New York teenager named Dawn Henley and her psychoanalyst, Dr. Lulu Shinefield, who has significant psychological issues of her own. Its title refers to the Shinefields' yearly August vacation in the Hamptons, and how Henley deteriorates when her doctor is away. It spent 19 months on the Times bestseller list.
Two of its readers were screenwriter Alvin Sargent (Julia, Paper Moon, Ordinary People) and producer Laura Ziskin (Eyes of Laura Mars, No Way Out), who felt that August's central idea of a patient cracking up when their therapist goes on vacation would make a funny movie. They wrote a 14-page treatment in 1987 called What About Bob?, creating characters and a story that, other than its original seed, was completely different from August. It begins with a group of shrinks at a marina talking about the tragedy of Dr. Marvin, a once distinguished colleague who lost his mind when a patient became obsessed with him and his family. The story then unfolds in flashback.
Sargent and Ziskin wrote out a handful of scenes with bits of dialogue that wound up in the finished movie largely intact (“They can turn a perfectly peaceful household into an insane asylum!”), but it ends with a series of rough thoughts and questions, like, “How does Bob get to stay or does he go? I think he should stay in the house or move in somehow … How does he drive the Doctor crazy?”
To answer these questions and get their treatment turned into a complete screenplay, Sargent and Ziskin turned to Tom Schulman after falling in love with his spec scripts for the boarding school drama Dead Poets Society and the black comedy Second Sight. Neither movie had been made at that point, and they had no way of knowing Dead Poets Society would become a beloved Robin Williams classic that would earn Schulman a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award. (It hit theaters the same month as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, based on another Shulman script.) At the time Sargent and Ziskin came to him, he was a relative unknown who loved their idea and desperately wanted to find a way to make it work.
Tom Schulman (screenwriter): I felt right away that the therapist needed to be at the high point of his career. I figured he had a book coming, was going to be on a show like Good Morning America, and this guy Bob would come into his life and essentially destroy every bit of success he had just had. There needed to be some ego on his behalf to get destroyed.
He had equally vivid ideas about the patient, Bob Wiley, who was named after Wile E. Coyote due to his tenacity and relentless spirit.
Schulman: I felt that Bob needed to be multi-phobic, just have an array of phobias and problems, really unable to even get from his apartment to a shrink's office. I felt like the Marvin character would have another shrink refer Bob to him, a shrink who just wants to get rid of this patient. I thought Marvin ought to have a book with a reasonable idea that seemed like it could help Bob. So [that book], Baby Steps, came to me as that kernel of a thing that Bob would at least at first think, “Oh, my God, I'm cured.” But nothing lasts long.
Schulman stuck with Ziskin and Sargent's idea of telling the story via flashback.
Schulman: It started with a group of psychiatrists in a boat on Lake Winnipesaukee telling stories of the worst doctor-patient situation they'd ever heard of. One of them says, “You've heard nothing until you heard about what Leo Marvin had to deal with.” Another one says, “That was his house over there. There's just the chimney, the whole house is gone.” The story launches from there.
In his original draft, the first thing we learn about Bob Wiley is that he compulsively swallows toothbrushes. “In three excruciating swallows, like a mouse going down the throat of a snake, the toothbrush disappears down his throat,” he wrote. “Bob pounds his chest, swallowing as he does. Then, delicately, he belches. He takes a deep breath, relaxes somewhat, and opens the medicine cabinet. There sit ten packaged toothbrushes. Bob opens one.” This idea was ultimately discarded after much fiery debate on the set (more on that later), but Schulman also came up with a simple idea for Bob that wound up driving much of the story.
Schulman: I realized that the most important thing for him to do would be to constantly interpret all of Marvin's efforts to get rid of him as forms of therapy. There was no hope for Marvin in that sense.
He also realized he had to find a way to make the audience root for Bob and against Marvin, even though what Bob is doing — stalking his therapist and his family on vacation — is wildly inappropriate and could be the plot of a horror movie if presented differently.
Schulman: Marvin has to be an egomaniac, so that we are really rooting for him to be taken down a notch. And Bob has to be sympathetic, just needy in a way that makes us want someone to help him.
After selling the movie to Disney's Touchstone Pictures, the search started for a director. Notes from Laura Ziskin's archives reveal they considered Milos Forman, Steve Kloves, Arthur Hiller, Danny DeVito, and Carl Reiner before settling on Frank Oz. Despite being best known for voicing Yoda, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, and Cookie Monster and his pioneering puppetry work with Jim Henson, Oz was also a successful director. He was on a hot streak in the late Eighties after helming The Muppets Take Manhattan, Little Shop of Horrors, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
Frank Oz (director): I remember it starting with [Disney CEO] Jeffrey Katzenberg calling me to ask if I was interested. This was after Dirty Rotten Scoundrels came out, and around the time Jim [Henson] died. And I would get a lot of scripts, mostly comedies, from my agents. This was one of the scripts that I felt I could do something with, because, from my viewpoint, I feel like comedy is often pushed too hard. I felt the script needed grounding, and I like doing that.
Bill Murray was everyone's first thought to play Bob Wiley. But his last two movies were the blockbusters Scrooged and Ghostbusters II, and he was an extremely hot commodity.
Schulman: Alvin, Laura, and I pretty much insisted that they go out to Bill first. There was nobody else in my mind who would have worked. And Bill said yes. But then Bill and the studio got locked in a battle over his fees, which went on for maybe six or eight months. They went back and forth, getting closer and closer, but then reaching a place where they were just deadlocked. And then the studio started coming up with other options.
One name they tossed around was Robin Williams.
Glenn Daniels (casting director): Robin Williams could have worked in anything because he was brilliant.
Oz: I think that Bill was the best choice, but I could have worked with Robin Williams. I could imagine a version of the movie with Robin Williams in my brain.
Richard Dreyfuss (Leo Marvin): It doesn't seem like Robin would have done that. I don't know. It seems too easy for him.
It became a moot point once Murray and Disney struck a deal. Finding the right Dr. Marvin, however, took a bit more thought. Ziskin's notes show that both Jack Nicholson and Michael Caine were considered at one point.
Schulman: We talked about Alan Arkin at one time, who I thought would've been great. I also vaguely recall Woody Allen's name coming up for Dr. Marvin, but I thought it would be a bad idea. Woody was essentially a very likable guy. And yes, he's associated with psychiatry because of all his neuroses, but it still felt wrong.
Charlie Korsmo (Siggy Marvin): I think the tone would've been totally wrong if they cast Woody Allen. He could do miffs, not volcanic.
Oz: I remember being in the Four Seasons, and I auditioned several people for Dr. Marvin. I also remember speaking to Bob Newhart and Richard Benjamin for the part.
Daniels: I don't see Bob Newhart and Bill Murray as having enough friction between them. I don't see them as that far apart from each other.
Dreyfuss: I wouldn't have been surprised if they'd used Bob Newhart, but I'm better.
Daniels: Richard Dreyfuss was very well-respected at the time. He was an Oscar winner [for 1977's The Goodbye Girl], and it was interesting to cast him in a comedic role, because he usually did drama.
Oz: I'd never worked with Richard before. It was Jeffery [Katzenberg], I think, who wanted Richard. So I met Richard and we talked about it. I found him to be brilliant. He felt that in the original script, Marvin was made a fool too often, and he was right.
Finding the right actress to play Leo's wife, Faye, also took a bit of work.
Daniels: A lot of women who came in who were hot at the time. The first one that comes to my mind is Anne Archer, and she had just come off of Fatal Attraction. She came in and she was completely unfunny. So we realized that we needed somebody who was really good at comedy, but wasn't going to steal the screen from Bill or Richard and also be believable as the mother, et cetera, et cetera. And we settled on Julie Hagerty pretty soon. Frank and Laura and myself discussed it, and we were all big fans of hers. She is like Diane Keaton in that she comes with her own neuroses that usually works.
Julie Hagerty (Faye Marvin): I remember Frank Oz asking me to come audition in an empty theater where I read with Bill and Richard. I was really nervous at first, but then we started playing and it was fun.
Oz: I tend to work collaboratively. I wanted to figure out who Bill and Richard liked, since they'd have to work with them. I was trying to decide between Julie and somebody else, and Richard kept telling me that Julie was fantastic. That put me over the line.
Glenn Daniels read with many young actresses for the part of Anna Marvin, Faye and Marvin's teenage daughter.
Daniels: One of them was a young lady named Gwyneth Paltrow. She was brought into my office by Boaty Boatwright, who was a talent agent for many, many years. She came to prominence for casting [Mary Badham as] Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. And she showed up at my office with Gwyneth without even a phone call. She just said, “Read her.” Gwyneth hadn't done anything at that point. Nothing. And as Boaty and I were talking, she just looked like a deer in headlights. I had no idea what she was doing there. But anyway, I read her and she wasn't funny, and it was a comedy. I had to tell Boaty it wasn't going to work. I wound up talking to maybe a hundred girls, and nobody seemed to fit in. And then my assistant said to me, “What about Kathryn Erbe?” And I said, “Well, I don't know who she is. Have her come in.'”
Kathryn Erbe (Anna Marvin): I auditioned for it at two different points. The first came when I was still an undergrad drama major at NYU. And then I graduated, went to L.A. for a sitcom [Chicken Soup starring Jackie Mason and Lynn Redgrave], that only ran 12 episodes. When they called me back for a second audition, I was doing Grapes of Wrath on Broadway. I thought [the part] had gone away at this point, but I remember riding my bike over there and seeing them all. And I got it.
Child actor Charlie Korsmo was given a three-picture deal with Disney after his breakthrough role as the Kid in Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy. It meant he didn't have a choice when the studio told him he had the role of Siggy Marvin.
Korsmo: James Cameron had just offered me the role of John Connor in Terminator 2. But Disney exercised their option and I had to do What About Bob? instead. The first time I heard about the movie is when I was told I couldn't do Terminator 2, but possibly could if they finished the movie just on time. But we ran a month and a half over. I loved Terminator, so I was pissed from day one. I just wanted to get out of there so badly to do T2 instead.
The remote Virginia town of Moneta was home to a mere 236 people when the What About Bob? cast and crew arrived in the summer of 1990 after filming for a few days in New York City. The scenes take place in Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, which is 750 miles to the north, but few viewers would notice the difference.
Erbe: It was a tiny, tiny, tiny town. We spent most of our time on this beautiful property on Smith Mountain Lake that had lots of different sized and shaped condos. No one was there, because it was the end of summer into fall. And so we all had our own apartments. Mine was bigger than my one back home in New York City, and it had a balcony looking onto the water. Bill had a great big one, and he had a boat. He took us waterskiing. We went waterskiing to the full moon at night once.
Dreyfuss: We were right at the water's edge. We loved being there.
Barry Wetcher (set photographer): It wasn't like when you're shooting in Philadelphia and you can go out to dinner in a great restaurant. We were all pretty much prisoners, so to speak. If I recall correctly, it was the moonshine capital of the U.S., because it was a dry county, meaning they can't sell alcohol. And we all had houses around the lake. Bill would often throw a party on Friday or Saturday nights, and he would somehow get us alcohol. Those parties are my most pronounced memories of that movie. We also had great tennis tournaments.
Hagerty: There was one little place to eat if you left the community, then you were still in the middle of nowhere.
Erbe: I spent a lot of time with Julie and her dog, Raisin. We smoked and drank and shopped and ate, and we went horseback riding. We found this place that would take us on trail rides. We did that by the moonlight, too, and went and had a campfire dinner with a can of beans and the fire. It was awesome. We drank moonshine. It really was so fun, and we weren't working as much as all those guys were.
Korsmo: Julie and Katy Erbe weren't actually that far apart in age. Julie Hagerty always plays these sweet fragile women, but she's kind of a brassy lady in real life. So they were always hanging around and smoking together even though they were playing a very prim and proper mother and daughter. They seemed like biker girls.
Erbe: We'd be at the one bar/restaurant, and Charlie would be there doing his homework. That's probably where he was seeing me and Julie smoke. He just was a lovely kid, such a lovely kid. His humor was very dry and very funny. He was always studying. He had to continue his schoolwork when we'd be off at night. I remember wishing that he could come have more fun with us.
Hagerty: Charlie was going from movie to movie at the time, and he wanted a dog really bad. He would come into my camper when we were working and play with my dog, Raisin, and we would make frozen pizza rolls for lunch.
Everyone had memories of fun (or just plain weird) interactions with Bill Murray. One example: On Oct. 4, 1990, MC Hammer — then at the peak of his fame — played a show 40 minutes away from set in Roanoke, Virginia. According to Wetcher, Murray rented a bus and took the crew.
Wetcher: I remember Bill got up onstage and was rapping with Hammer. It was fun.
Daniels: Bill used to call me “Mr. White,” and to this day I have no idea why. During the shooting of the movie, he used to call me at my New York apartment at 3 a.m. He'd go, “But Mr. White, listen …” And he wanted me to meet some person, usually a young lady the next day in my office for some role that didn't exist. I guess he was flexing his muscles or trying to impress them. But I got at least a half a dozen of those calls during the time I was on the film.
Erbe: One day, we were shooting the scene at the general store in Moneta, and they had to stop traffic on this two-lane road. A camper pulled up, and the family inside saw Bill Murray. They went, “Hey, Bill!” And he walked over, opened the door, got in, and he left with them. It took a long time to get him back.
Korsmo: The two people that people ask me most about are him and Robin Williams, who I worked with on Hook. And they're exactly the opposite. Robin Williams in real life, at least post-cocaine and everything, was nothing like the manic wild man he played onscreen. He was this quiet, reserved, introverted, very gentle guy. And Bill Murray acts like he's onscreen all the time. I don't know if he's putting on a show or not, but if he is, he's putting it on all the time.
Erbe: Julie and Bill and I went into Roanoke one weekend day — and I knew he was a big star, of course, and was a huge fan of his work, but didn't fully appreciate how beloved he is by the people. And they literally carried him away. We lost track of him and just went on with our day. He just got carried away by the crowd of people.
Korsmo: I remember sitting in my trailer when we came back to do reshoots. I see him walking across the field. He sees me from a hundred yards away, and he doesn't say anything. He just starts walking towards me. And when he gets to my trailer, he punches the screen out. He sticks in his hand and goes, “Korsmo, good to see you.” And then he walks away. That's the kind of thing he would do in Stripes or something, but that's what he does in real life, too.
Dreyfuss, meanwhile, had his own eccentricities, particularly when it came to his love of the Civil War.
Korsmo: He's a real history buff, and I was also very interested in the Civil War at the time. But he's like a Civil War reenactor, and I think he was skeptical of me. One of the first times we talked about it, he just asked me to name three generals. He was testing whether I knew anyone other than Lee and Grant, I guess. I think I went with [William] Rosecrans just to let him know I'm on his wavelength. I think he took me more seriously after that.
Oz: On [Richard's] birthday, Laura arranged for maybe a dozen Civil War reenactors to come galloping onto the set.
Hagerty: It was a total surprise to him.
Dreyfuss: The day before that, I marched with the Southern contingent at the re-creation of the Battle of Cedar Creek. It was a great honor.
They arrived on the set without a script anyone loved.
Oz: Everybody had their own idea about what the script should be. It felt like there was my version, there was Laura's version, there was Richard's version, there was the Disney rep version. I felt I was cobbling together different versions to shoot every day.
Schulman: I liked the whimsy of opening the movie with Bob swallowing a toothbrush.
Oz: Is that grounded? No. That is dishonest, unless you create a world in which people can eat things like glass or toothbrushes. But that's not the world of this movie. The world created was a believable world. I like my movies to be grounded, and trust that it'll be funny because of the actors.
Oz also dumped the entire framing device where the story was told in flashback, along with early scenes that would introduce Bob's inattentive mother and flaky, Neil Diamond-obsessed ex-wife, who Schulman had included to convey how desperately Bob needed a family that cared about him. A tiny wink to the toothbrush bit remains, where Bob borrows Leo's toothbrush and never returns it.
Schulman: It turns out, that old adage “less is more” is true. Just by the way Bob reacts to seeing the pictures of Marvin's family on his wall gives you that sense of what he needs. And then he's constantly like, “Aw, the fam.”
Oz: Every decision I make has to grow from how I see the whole movie. It is almost like sculpting an elephant, where you remove all those things that don't look like an elephant. At one point, I remember saying to Bil and Richard, “If we weren't all such big fuckin' stars and big-time people supposedly, we would do what students do and just go page by page and order room service and work on it all day.” And that's what we did. We went page by page all together.
They still left a lot of room for improv, most notably during the family dinner scene where Bob orgasmically moans over the food before performing the Heimlich maneuver on Dr. Marvin.
Oz: The dinner scene is one of my favorites. That's because you don't hire Bill Murray to read lines. You hire Bill Murray because of Bill Murray. He's brilliant. So you just let him fly. So all that moaning was from Billy. It wasn't written.
Korsmo: They just rolled film for two hours, as I recall. And that was entirely improvised. There was a lot of material they could have used, and it was funny throughout. I'm not sure how they picked “pile it high and deep” and “Is this corn hand-shucked?”
Erbe: Because our characters love Bob, Charlie and I were able to laugh. Richard wasn't allowed to. It created a nice tension.
Korsmo: The dialogue in that scene is almost entirely Julie and Bill. The two kids are just sitting there reacting to it, and Richard Dreyfuss is just sitting there seething. But they literally went on for two hours doing that scene, and every time they'd swap out film, everyone would break out laughing.
After the meal, Bob, Faye, Anna, and Siggy joyfully wash dishes while singing “Singin' in the Rain.” Leo watches, simmering with rage.
Hagerty: We just started throwing the dishes around, and I can't believe that none of us dropped one. It was so fun. We were throwing them and catching them, and Frank let us do that. He knew what he could get, and the fact that he got it from all of the performances, he's a wonderful director of letting you play.
Oz: The process was not tightly directed. It was all of us playing around. With Bill, everything was improv. We established this when we worked together on Little Shop of Horrors. Billy just improv'd that whole scene, and that was the agreement we had, that he didn't have to stick to lines. I didn't want him to.
The scene where Bob is tied to the mast while sailing with Anna and her friends was also largely improvised.
Oz: It was Bill's idea to just keep saying, “I'm sailing. Sailing!” I'm not sure if the “ahoy” was scripted or not.
Erbe: That was a really long day. At one point, Bill started singing “Brandy (You're a Fine Girl).” It was hilarious.
For the scenes where Bob spends the night with the Marvins before the Good Morning America shoot, Murray and Korsmo were given permission to lob whatever insults they felt like while jumping up and down on their beds.
Korsmo: I remember Bill getting very sweaty when we did that. They gave us some things they wanted to make sure we said. And then we just spent 45 minutes yelling the dumbest things we could come up with at each other.
As Dr. Marvin correctly surmised after their one and only proper therapy session, Bob has an “extreme need for family connections.” He gradually heals as the Marvin family embraces him. Dr. Marvin, meanwhile, grows increasingly unhinged by Bob's constant presence.
Oz: The idea was as Billy gets healthier, Dr. Marvin gets crazier. But we shot the movie out of order. And so I had to chart Dr. Marvin's craziness. So, for instance, if he starts at zero in the beginning and he ends up 100 percent crazy at the end, then I had to go through each scene. I'd say, “In this scene, he's five percent more crazy,” and then 10 percent more crazy and 15 percent more crazy and 20 percent, 30 percent.
Dreyfuss: I don't think Bob is ever sane, though. He is insane from the beginning to the end.
Oz: It's weird that Richard thinks that. Because if that's the case, there'd be no satisfaction from the audience. I find that odd.
After the disastrous Good Morning America interview, Leo finally throws Bob out of the house. The kids are confused and ask him why he did it. “You think he's gone?” Leo roars. “You think he's gone?! That's the whole point. He's never gone!”
Oz: Richard was fucking brilliant that scene. He was insanely brilliant.
Erbe: There was just a lot of room for Bill to improvise when Richard would open the door and see him, and he would say a different thing every single time, and none of it was scripted.
When Leo realizes that Bob won't leave unless he's somehow restrained, he commits him to an insane asylum. But Bob is released within hours after he charms the staff. During their drive back to the house, Leo slams on the brakes. His line in the script simply reads, “Get out of the car.”
Dreyfuss: I didn't say, “Get out the car.” I said, “GETOUTOFTHECAR!!” [as one long, slurred syllable of uncontrolled rage]. I didn't have to think. I just did it.
The hilarity of that moment embodies the great work Dreyfuss did throughout the entire shoot.
Korsmo: I think he's the funniest part of the movie. Dr. Marvin is this petty little man who is sitting on a volcano of anxiety and anger, which is naturally funny to me. Maybe I relate to it more later in life.
Hagerty: I don't think anybody else could have done that besides Richard Dreyfuss. He was so genius in that part.
Oz: Richard was fabulous. He was essentially the straight man to Bill in the movie, and the straight man doesn't get the credit. It's not fair.
Dreyfuss: I don't have the slightest idea how I created that character. Any time anyone has ever asked me why I did such and such in building a character, I always say, “I don't know.” And I don't know. I just do what I do, and you either get it or you don't. I thought What About Bob? was, as written, very funny. And so I just did it.
But Oz's warm feelings toward his cast were apparently not entirely mutual.
Dreyfuss: I went out to dinner once with one of the crew, and I said, “What do you think of Frank Oz as a director?” And he said, “Hmmmmm.” I didn't think that he thought very much of Frank. And the other person said, “Master close-up/master close-up over the shoulder … Master close-up/Master close-up over the shoulder … A monkey could direct that way.” So, they didn't think very much of him. I thought that he actually could direct if he bothered to direct, but he didn't really do that. He refused to give me any direction.
Hearing this read back to him, Oz breaks out in uncontrollable laughter.
Oz: That's great, hysterical! That's how he saw it. That's all there is to it. Look, every set has a culture and a dynamic of its own, and there I have had difficulties. Those bad situations are cracking me up because they show our frailty as human beings and our imperfections … the egos and the fears, the insecurities when you get in a crucible that's so pressurized. Making a movie like this, we're talking about millions and millions and millions of dollars. We're talking about stars believing that it better work, because the next paycheck won't be good if it doesn't. Richard Dreyfuss was not trying to be bad. Everybody believes they're doing the best thing for the movie and they're trying their very best. That doesn't mean that what they're doing is the best for the movie, but they honestly believe it.
Laura Ziskin and Alvin Sargent's original story treatment from 1987 had Dr. Marvin suffering a complete breakdown at the end, and Bob, 100 percent healed, becoming Leo's therapist. “Remember, one day at a time,” Bob tells him. “One step at a time. Baby steps. Little baby steps.” The final scene is the group of shrinks from the beginning marveling at the crazy saga while riding in a boat together.
Tom Schulman's 1990 script changed the plot so that Dr. Marvin loses his medical license after trying to murder Bob, and is institutionalized. Upon his release, he learns that Bob and the Marvin family have rented a lakeside cottage together. Bob is now a forever part of Leo's life. Leo silently watches Bob and his family play volleyball together. “A zombie would seem more alive [than Leo],” Schulman wrote. It also ends with the doctors on the boat. “Wait a minute,” one of them says. “You're not telling me that Bob Wiley is Dr. Robert S. Wiley, the psychologist?!”
These endings left nobody completely satisfied, creating conflict that lasted throughout the entire shoot. A tense meeting between Schulman and Murray before cameras started rolling portended many difficult days to come.
Schulman: The day before we were supposed to leave for the set, I met up with Richard and Bill in Bill's hotel room. Bill turned to me and said, “Where's that ending you're supposed to be working on?” And I said, “It's up in my room.” And he said, “Well, why isn't it in here?” And I said, “Because it's up in my room.” He said, “Well, go get it.” And I said, “OK.” When I got there, I got a call from the studio saying, “Bill doesn't want you on the set.” I was like, ‘What?” I tried to talk to him about it, but never heard back. And so I never stepped foot on the set.
Hagerty: I remember at one time having five different scripts in my house. There were different writers and different endings. There were a lot of different opinions.
Schulman: They called in Elaine May at one point. She had this idea that when Bob comes out of that burning house, Marvin looks at him and goes, “Oh, my God, you're alive. Thank God you're alive,” and hugs him. And then you would cut to the next summer, and Bob and Marvin and their family would be in a little boat on the lake, talking about last summer and what a disaster it could have been, but things all worked out … This is what Disney wanted, a happy ending.
Oz: That ending would have made me vomit. Happy endings make me vomit anyway. I don't think it's about happy endings. I think it's about satisfying endings. The protagonist can die, not so happy. But if he dies for a greater cause, that can be satisfying. I think “happy” is a misnomer.
Schulman: Disney said to me, “Will you write that happy ending [where Leo forgives Bob and they become friends]?” And I said, “No. Absolutely not, because it doesn't work. You haven't laid the [groundwork] for this. You haven't set up anything earlier in the movie that's going to make this work. It's going to be a disaster.” So they said, “Well, that's what we're going to do.”
Dreyfuss: That ending would have been crap. Anyone who would have said that in front of me would have received a, “Crap.”
Korsmo: [That ending] just negates everything that came before, basically.
Oz: Nobody was ever happy with the ending, none of us. So it got to the point where we had one terrible night where everybody met for the ending, and it was an explosive night. From that moment on, I had to shoot two endings. We shot my version, which Bill agreed with, though I can't remember the details. And we shot Laura's version, which Richard agreed with. One of them was the ending on the boats.
Schulman: We showed both endings to a test audience. I snuck down to the front of the theater at the end of the movie and looked back. Couples were looking at each other going, “What the hell happened?” It was like looking at people watching Springtime for Hitler. They just didn't work.
Oz: Both endings were scrapped, and we finally just punted and reshot the ending in California.
They settled on an ending where Leo was indeed committed to an insane asylum, but leaves in a near-catatonic state to attend a wedding between Bob and Leo's sister, Lily. At the end, Leo awakes from his stupor to voice his objections. “Dad's back!” Siggy exclaims. Title cards reveal that Bob went back to school to become a therapist. He wrote a bestseller called Death Therapy. Leo sued him over the rights.
Korsmo: They toyed with the idea of having Richard Dreyfuss in a Hannibal Lecter-like bite mask, with the bars over his mouth. But they decided that was too dark, I guess. And they kept pushing people to give more broad performances. At the end, I jump up and yell, “Dad's back!” And [Oz] kept wanting that to be bigger and bigger. It's the last thing anybody says in the movie, but I eventually sarcastically did a take, “Dad's back!” And that's the one they used.
Oz: This was another version of Laura's ending. I felt, and I still do, that the ending's too cartoonish. It's not true to the world which the characters inhabit. All of the sudden, Marvin wakes up and it just seems … It just didn't feel honest to me. It didn't feel honest to the world which the characters inhabited.
Korsmo: The final ending's not a dark or sad ending, but it's consistent with everything that came before. It's not, “Suddenly we've all accepted this. Ha, ha, ha. Wasn't I a fool?” It's still Bob intruding on Leo's life and ruining it, basically.
The most well-known aspect of the What About Bob? production is the notorious feud between Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss. But in reality, it wasn't just a battle between the two stars. It was actually a multifront war that placed Frank Oz and Bill Murray on one side, and Richard Dreyfuss and Laura Ziskin on another. The roots of the Murray-Dreyfuss feud, unbelievably, go all the way back to the May 13, 1978, episode of Saturday Night Live, which Dreyfuss hosted just weeks after winning a Best Actor Oscar for The Goodbye Girl. Murray was in the SNL cast at the time.
Replying to @kq0717 s3e19 5/13/78 Host Richard Dreyfuss #snlclassic #snl #saturdaynightlive
Dreyfuss: I recognized back then that he didn't seem to like me, but he didn't seem to like anybody. I saw him interact with the other Saturday Night Live cast members … but that was none of my business. Bill had this really sarcastic attitude. He was sarcastic to everybody.
Erbe: Bill and Richard have two distinct personalities with two different styles of work and two different styles of comedy.
Hagerty: Whatever the underbelly of [the feud] was, it all worked. Whatever happened worked on the screen. It's just life. I mean, not everybody gets along, but when you come to work, you come to work and do your job.
Korsmo: I heard there was a lot of tension going with producers and the rest of the creative team, particularly Laura with the director. And I guess there was also a lot of tension between Richard and Bill. That I did not know at the time. Everyone was fairly protective of me.
Wetcher: Bill was fun. He could be difficult — not for me, not for the crew per se. He's really kind of a crew person.
Erbe: Bill brought a boombox to the house set. And he'd play music in between setups, which was really good for morale, just keeping everybody up.
Daniels: Apparently Laura made the decision that they were going to work on Columbus Day, and Bill didn't want to work on Columbus Day.
Wetcher: Bill said [the request] was for the crew. And I remember the AD [assistant director], Jimmy Skotchdopole, came back onto set and said, “Disney said no.”
Dreyfuss: I walked in and said to Laura, “What's going on?” And she looked up at me and she said, “Hold me.” So I put my arms around her. Bill had gone to her about the day off, she had said no, he had said, “Please.” And then she said, “I don't want to ask them for something I know that we won't get.” And so she said, “I'll ask. I won't get it, but I'll ask.” And she came up to him a few minutes later and said, “You're not going to get it.” Bill said, “We don't know that.” And he reached up and he took her glasses, the ones that she was wearing on her nose. And he said, “You don't know that.” And he tore her glasses off her face and crushed them into separate parts and threw them into her face, which I thought was pretty wacky.
Korsmo: I remember hearing he broke her glasses.
Oz: I thought at the time he crushed her glasses for personal reasons, but it makes sense to hear it was for the crew. He really cared about the crew.
At another point, cast and crew confirm, Murray threw Laura into the lake.
Erbe: I just remember Laura ending up in the water.
Wetcher: He picked her up and took her along the dock, which was by the house we were shooting. And I just remember he threw her in the lake. I don't really remember why he did that. I didn't think it was mean-spirited.
Korsmo: That was, I guess, supposed to be funny, but I don't think she thought it was funny.
Oz: It was couched in the celebration of her birthday, but she didn't appreciate it.
Schulman: Laura was a wonderful person. In the world of Hollywood, she was a force of nature. She willed every movie that she did into existence.
Erbe: I just loved her. She was so alive and vibrant and enthusiastic and such a supporter of me.
Dreyfuss: She was powerful. That's what I remember.
Hagerty: She was a powerhouse. She was on the set every day, and a woman producer of a big movie. I'm sad she's not here on the earth anymore.
Korsmo: She was pretty inclusive and respectful even though I was only 11 years old. But at the same time, I knew she was not beloved on the set. Tension followed her everywhere she went.
Oz: I wanted to make the best movie possible. But I think she saw things maybe that I didn't see, [and] vice versa.
Korsmo: I think she had in mind a sort of darker, more neurotic, New York therapy comedy kind of thing. And she was pretty insistent on it, even though I don't think that was anyone else's view of the movie at that point, besides maybe mine.
Wetcher: There seemed to be two camps, so to speak, where it was Bill and Frank versus Laura and Richard. It seemed like Laura and Richard were on the same page about the script, and Bill and Frank were on another page, and that accounted for a lot of tension.
Oz: The tensions were so crazy, and there were different camps. But I don't deal with camps. I don't like that on my set.
Everything came to a boil after they made the decision to film the two completely separate endings, tacking weeks onto the shoot. By this point, summer was turning into fall and temperatures were plunging.
Erbe: The leaves were turning, and they had to paint them green. We had layers and layers of long underwear underneath our clothes, and we were putting ice cubes in our mouths so we didn't have fog coming out of our mouths when we talked.
Oz: It was supposed to be summertime and here was Thanksgiving coming.
Wetcher: We all heard about a script meeting where Bill threw a glass at Richard.
Oz: What happened that night is etched into my memory. I got in a room with Bill and Richard to try and solve a script problem. We had several drafts that various people liked. Bill left the room and came back about 20 minutes later. Bill said something, I'm not sure what it was, but he was obviously in a dark mood. And Richard said, “Is that Bill talking or is that Bob Wiley talking?” And I remember Bill grabbing a glass and saying, “This is Bill talking.” And he heaved the glass about 10 feet up in the air against a huge high fireplace and glass scattered all over the room. And I remember Richard going, “Whoa,” and standing up and leaving.
Murray confirmed the incident in a recent interview with The New York Times, stating: “I did fire a glass, but I threw it at the ceiling. We were in a townhouse on the set of What About Bob?, and I did not fire it at anyone. I threw it up in a far corner of the townhouse, assuming it might break upon contact with the ceiling and the walls, but I didn't throw it at anyone. If I'd thrown it at Dreyfuss, I'd have hit him.”
Dreyfuss: Talking about [the glass incident] is childish. And I'm an adult, so I stopped talking about it. You're the first person I've talked to about it for years. And I don't like me talking about it. The fact was, we made a very funny movie, and that was more important than not liking one another.
Oz: One night, maybe a week later after he threw the glass, Bill was concerned that Richard was screwing with him. It got really bad.
They were filming the “death therapy” sequence in the woods, where Leo straps explosives to Bob and tries to murder him.
Oz: Laura came to me and said that Richard thinks I'm spending more time on Bill's ending. I'm not sure if that was the words, but that was the intent. She was attacking my integrity, and I don't allow that, because I was doing my very best. Even though I disagreed with the ending, I was doing my very best. And I totally fuckin' lost it.
After screaming like a wild animal in the woods, Oz called his lawyer at 2 a.m. and said he could no longer work with Ziskin.
Oz: I said, “This is ridiculous. I can't do it.” And Laura was … Rest in peace. Laura was wonderful. When she was on your side, she was ferociously on your side. But when she's not on your side, she was ferocious in another way. It was not good. It got to the point where it was her or me. I said, “I'm not going back to the set if she's there.” And so, she had to leave. I'm sure she'd have her own version of all this, and it's really not fair since she's not here to defend herself. She might have a whole different view of me and that might be justified. I don't know. But we had a dinner break around 2 a.m. that night. Laura came to me with her teeth gritted and said, “Well, good luck to you.”
There have been rumors that Dreyfuss was “barely” willing to speak to Oz after he forced Ziskin off the set. He slightly disputes that notion.
Dreyfuss: You should take out the word “barely.” We weren't talking. That's it.
Wetcher: They only communicated to each other through AD Jimmy Skotchdopole. It got really ugly.
Oz: We still had to finish the scene that night. We were outside in the forest. I was in my director's chair. I said to Jimmy, “Give me a flag over here and a flag over there and flag over here. And I boxed myself in so I wouldn't be seen. And I said, “Jimmy, I'm going to give you instructions to tell Richard. OK? And I'm not going to talk to Richard.”
Schulman: From what I heard, Bill and Richard never spoke again after the glass incident besides as their characters. But it really worked well onscreen since there was so much hostility.
Oz: Unfortunately, I agree. Not unlike Dr. Marvin and Bob, the personalities of Richard and Bill also need each other in that Richard is more structured and Billy is more lax. That conflict which is the essence of drama also was there for comedy. So that enhanced it.
Dreyfuss: I don't think it helped the end result. Nope. It was childish.
Wetcher: Bill and Richard, aside from whatever personal shit was going on between them, they pulled it off. They pulled it off.
Oz: Two days or so before we wrapped, we were shooting Dr. Marvin's office since we filmed the movie out of order. And I remember sitting there between takes, and after all this hell we gone through, Billy says, “Frank, wouldn't it be amazing if this movie turned out to be good?” It just cracked me up so much.
Dreyfuss: I think it's like that Cary Grant and Frank Capra movie, Arsenic and Old Lace. They really didn't get along during the shoot. I don't know why. I don't know anything about it, but I know that they didn't get along. And it's hysterical.
Ziskin became a Hollywood powerhouse in the years that followed, producing giant hits like As Good As It Gets and the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man trilogy. She married her What About Bob? writing partner Alvin Sargent in 2010, one year before she died from breast cancer. When digging through her archives recently, Ziskin's former assistant, Blair Richwood, found a letter Ziskin wrote to Frank Oz shortly after he kicked her off the set. The letter cc'd Jeffrey Katzenberg, and film executives Donald DeLine and David Hoberman, but Oz has no memory of ever receiving it. Rolling Stone has been given permission to run it in full so that Ziskin's voice can be a part of this story.
Frank:
I'm told you are in distress over what occurred Friday night. For the record, let me give you my point of view about what happened.
I supported you strongly and vocally in the meeting with Richard last Sunday — because I would do that in any event and because I agree with “your” version of the ending.
I agreed with [co-producer] Bernie [Williams] at 5 a.m. and after the incident with Bill, that we had no choice but to shoot two versions if we wanted to get on with things. I was disappointed that you subsequently re-wrote the version you had fought for so hard on Sunday, but that was your choice and I still feel structurally that it is probably better than the so-called A version. You called me to the set Friday night to tell me there was a lot of tension between Bill and Richard. I advised you to just have Richard do the speech both ways and to downplay characterizing things as Version A and Version B. After you decided not to to shoot the speech 2 ways, and even though you said you could just cut out of it, Richard came to me, upset, feeling that he had been “shined on” to some degree. In retrospect I think he just needed to blow off steam. But the actor came to the producer and expressed some feelings; you had already told me there was a lot of tension and I felt you should probably have the information you as the director would be aware of the actor's state of mind — since you all have to keep working together and hopefully successfully. I did not do anything to deserve your “response,” but I know how pressured you feel and everybody loses control on occasion.
It's unfortunate for everyone that you are unable to speak to me about what happened, about the movie, etc.
I am not “against” you — I am for you and for our film. We have certainly had our disagreements — and I'm sure you recognize that the resolution of all those disagreements has often resulted in better work for the picture.
I'm told that you feel I have been crawling all over you. I made a conscious effort to stay off the set as much as possible last week. I'm sure you are aware that other than suggesting the line about “He left. You mean he was leaving,” I did not try to comment on the ending unless you asked my opinion. On Friday, I came to the set because you called me there.
Be that as it may. For your sake and mine, I wish you only the best in completing the film. I look forward to seeing it cut together.
Regards,
Oz: Wow. I can understand her point of view. Although, in the letter, she is missing some of her behavior that was not kind to me and was detrimental to the movie. But we all have our own memories.
When shooting finally ended in the fall of 1990, the cast and crew all went their separate ways. Most of them haven't spoken to each other in decades.
Hagerty: You don't always keep up with everybody because everybody comes together and then everybody goes off and has their life. It's sort of a mystical, magical kind of work when you come and go out of people's [lives], like we're gypsies. God, I haven't seen Katie in forever and ever. Please tell her I said hello.
Erbe: That's really good to hear. I'll try to reach her.
Korsmo: I don't keep in touch with anybody. And it's partly my fault. Frankly, Robin [Williams] did more to stay in touch with me after Hook than I didn't stay in touch with him, which was foolish of me, because he was a very good man, and I wish I'd reached out to him more over the years.
Korsmo largely retired from acting after What About Bob?, though he did appear in the 1998 Jennifer Love Hewitt movie Can't Hardly Wait. By that point, he was a student at MIT. He attended Yale Law School afterward, joined the Federalist Society, and is currently a professor of corporate law and corporate finance at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland. He's still a little pissed about missing out on the chance to star in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
Korsmo: I joke that of course after working with me on T2, obviously James Cameron would've cast me in Titanic, too. Leonardo DiCaprio would be teaching law in Cleveland right now.
Oz: I last saw Bill when he auditioned for Indian in the Cupboard. He really wanted that role. I was very grateful he was willing to audition. It's not that he wasn't great. He just wasn't who I saw. There's so many talented, brilliant actors who I had to say, “No, it's not going to work,” just because it wasn't who I saw, the character as I saw it. We haven't spoken since. As a matter of fact, I got an award at Disney last summer and there was a video segment where Steve Martin, Robert De Niro, and Bill said nice things about me. I sent Bob a thank you note and was able to thank Steve since I know him so well, but I wasn't able to find Bill so that I could thank him. He's elusive.
Dreyfuss hasn't communicated with Murray since filming wrapped.Dreyfuss: Why would I do that? We left on bad terms. Oh, yeah, one day I decided to make up with Bill, about 15 years after the movie came out. I went to a restaurant that his family ran and told his brothers that I was looking to make up with him, but he was not there.
Does he hope to ever have the chance to sit down with Bill and make peace?
Dreyfuss: No.
Oz still hopes he'll have the chance to hash things out with Dreyfuss.
Oz: Years later, I wrote to him and said what a brilliant job he did. He didn't get the attention, I think, that he should have gotten because he was not the lovable character. I wanted to let him know how highly I thought of his work. I did never did hear back. I'm not sure why. Maybe he was appreciative of it. Maybe he still had a problem with me. I don't know. But he had a reason to have a problem with me. It was a tough shoot, and my job was to keep going forward.
Dreyfuss: I did get the letter. I thought it was great. But have we been in touch? No.
The passage of time has allowed them all to realize that they made something very special, even if the process was often maddening.
Hagerty: I don't know if it's a perfect storm or just a perfect situation. It was perfect writing, perfect chemistry. It was like one of those wonderful, wonderful explosions of everything working right.
Schulman: A lot of people tell me it's their favorite comedy, which is always wonderful to hear. People will immediately say, “Baby steps,” or things like that. It's great that it's remembered.
Erbe: People talk to me about it all the time. It's a movie that families watch over and over again together. I think it's about family and about misfits, and it has a good heart.
Hagerty: It's a really wonderful, odd family movie that does talk a lot about family dynamics and visitors to your home. I mean, have you ever had a visitor where you go, “Oh, my God, I wish they'd go away”?
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Dreyfuss: It's a very funny movie. And that's due to Bill first and everyone else second. Bill is a hysterically funny guy. Even if you're angry at him, he still makes you laugh. That's an amazing talent.
Oz: We all have imperfections. And they come out when we're in this heightened crucible of making a movie. But when you think of the world outside, we're so lucky that we get to do what we do. We're so lucky, so fortunate. And within this crucible, all this nonsense happens. Looking back, it's just so funny to me. [Laughs hysterically]
Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss enjoying a friendly moment in ‘What About Bob?'
© Buena Vista Pictures/Everett Collection
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This year's selections span 102 years, from 1913 to 2015.
By
Paul Grein
Recordings by Amy Winehouse, Celine Dion, Elton John, Mary J. Blige and Tracy Chapman are among this year's 25 additions to the National Recording Registry, which is administered by the Library of Congress. This year's selections span 102 years, from 1913 (a recording of “Aloha ‘Oe” by Hawaiian Quintette) to 2015 (the cast album to the Broadway sensation Hamilton: An American Musical).
The list includes three songs that reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Helen Reddy's “I Am Woman” (1972), which gave the women's liberation movement a theme song; Freddy Fender's country/pop smash “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” (1975) and Dion's “My Heart Will Go On,” the Oscar- and Grammy-winning smash from Titanic (1997).
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It also includes two albums that reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 – John's hit-laden double album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973) and Chapman's eponymous debut album (1988). John and his longtime songwriting partner Bernie Taupin were the 2024 recipients of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, which is also administered by the Library of Congress.
Tracy Chapman, which spawned the hit “Fast Car” (which was revived by Luke Combs in 2024), was one of three debut albums to be saluted this year. The others are Don Rickles' comedy album Hello Dummy! (1968) and Chicago's hit-filled double album Chicago Transit Authority (1969).
Winehouse's Back to Black, the singer's second (and, sadly, last) album, was inducted. The 2006 album spawned the smash “Rehab,” which won Grammys for both record and song of the year.
Two double-disk jazz albums – Miles Davis' Bitches Brew (1970) and Keith Jarrett's The Kӧln Concert (1975) – were honored. On the jazz fusion classic Bitches Brew, Davis and such musicians as Wayne Shorter and Chick Corea blended jazz with rock elements. It's Davis' second album in the Registry, following his 1959 classic Kind of Blue. Davis is the only artist this year to receive a second career induction.
Charley Pride, the first Black superstar in country music, was inducted for his 1971 classic “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin',” which topped Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart for five weeks. Fender's aforementioned “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” topped that chart for two weeks.
Blige's 1994 sophomore album My Life, which topped Billboard's Top R&B Albums chart for eight weeks, was inducted. The album was highly personal, with songs addressing clinical depression, struggles with drugs and alcohol and being in an abusive relationship.
The Steve Miller Band were honored for their 1976 album Fly Like an Eagle, which spawned three top 20 hits on the Hot 100, including the No. 1 smash “Rock'n Me.”
Roy Rogers and Dale Evans were honored for their 1952 single “Happy Trails,” which Evans wrote. Rogers is the only artist to have been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame twice – first in 1980 as a member of the Sons of the Pioneers and again in 1988 as a solo artist.
Hamilton (2015) is the first Broadway cast album that was released since Sweeney Todd in 1979 to be selected. Here's a full list of all 15 Broadway cast albums in the Registry.
Vicente Fernández's enduring ranchera classic “El Rey” (1973) joined the roster of Latin recordings in the Registry. See the full list here.
With the aforementioned Rickles album being inducted this year, this is the second year in a row that a comedy album has made the grade. Lily Tomlin's This Is a Recording was honored last year. Here's a complete list of the 14 comedy albums in the Registry.
Two left-field selections are Microsoft's Windows reboot chime (1995), composed by Brian Eno, and David Rosenfeld's Minecraft: Volume Alpha (2011). Microsoft wanted a brief start-up sound that would play when Windows 95 booted up. They approached Eno, who came up with a sound that Microsoft designers felt conveyed the sense of “welcome, hopefulness and progress” that they desired. Minecraft is the second video game soundtrack to join the Registry, following Koji Kondo's theme from Super Mario Bros., selected in 2023.
Thelma Houston & Pressure Cooker's 1975 album I've Got the Music in Me is one of this year's most surprising choices. The album was likely honored because of the unique way it was recorded: live to master disc. Pressure Cooker consisted of top session players of the era, including Michael Omartian, Larry Carlton, Tom Scott and Larry Knechtel. The title track had been a big hit in the fall of 1974 for The Kiki Dee Band. Houston went on to top the Hot 100 in 1977 with “Don't Leave Me This Way.”
The radio broadcast of the deciding Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, in which the Pittsburgh Pirates beat the New York Yankees, was inducted. Another sports-related entry is Brother Bones & His Shadows' 1948 recording of the 1925 standard “Sweet Georgia Brown.” The Brother Bones recording was surprise hit in 1949. Three years later, the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team made it their theme song.
Chanticleer's Our American Journey (2002) saw the acclaimed a cappella choral group taking its listeners on an eclectic musical trip across America, through its history and a variety of musical genres.
This year's other entries, not already mentioned, are Harry Urata Field Recordings (1960-1980) and Nimrod Workman Collection (1973-1994). Musician and educator Harry Urata, confined to an internment camp after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, encountered Japanese-American workers who had processed sugar cane leaves on Hawaiian plantations since the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Like many immigrant workers, they adapted and sang old folk songs to reflect their daily circumstances. Recognizing the cultural and historical significance of the songs, Urata traveled throughout Hawaii's islands recording elderly singers who had toiled on sugar plantations. His collection features 20 open-reel tapes recorded from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Born in Inez, Kentucky, in 1895, Nimrod Workman was a folk singer, coal miner and union activist. He began his work in the West Virginian mines at age 14, and he would continue for the next 42 years. After retiring from the mines, he began recording unaccompanied traditional ballads, songs of his own composition and oral history. In 1986, Workman was a recipient of a 1986 National Heritage Fellowship, the U.S. government's highest honor in the folk arts. Workman died in 1994.
More than 2,600 nominations were made by the public this year. Chicago Transit Authority finished first in the public nominations. Other selected recordings that ranked in the top 10 of public nominations include “Happy Trails,” Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and My Life.
Under the terms of the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000, the Librarian ofCongress, with advice from the National Recording Preservation Board, selects 25 titleseach year that are “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Recordings become eligible for the Registry 10 years after release, compared to 25 years for the Grammy Hall of Fame. (Which means the Hamilton cast album won't be eligible there for another 15 years.)
“These are the sounds of America – our wide-ranging history and culture,” Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden said in a statement. “The Library of Congress is proud and honored to select these audio treasures worthy of preservation.”
Industry veteran Robbin Ahrold serves as chair of the National Recording Preservation Board. “This year's National Recording Registry list is an honor roll of superb American popular music from the wide-ranging repertoire of our great nation,” he said in a statement.
These 25 recordings bring the number of titles on the Registry to 675. This represents just a tiny fraction of the Library's vast recorded sound collection of nearly four million items.
NPR's “1A” will feature selections from this year's induction class in its series “The Sounds of America,” including interviews with Hayden and several featured artists.
Here's the complete list of 2025 additions to the National Recording Registry. They are listed in chronological order by release date.
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"My idea was because the album is so broad, I didn't want to just be like, 'Here's the single. Here's the album,'" Sheeran told Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper.
By
Tyler Jenke
As Ed Sheeran readies the release of his forthcoming eighth album, he's revealed that fans won't be left waiting too long between singles for fresh material given the record's “broad” range of sounds.
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Sheeran's comments were made during his appearance on the latest episode of Call Her Daddy, where he spoke with host Alex Cooper about his lyrics, his favorite memory of Taylor Swift, and the embarrassing story of being caught naked in a hotel lobby.
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The conversation also switched to the discussion of Sheeran's new music, which includes the recently-released single “Azizam,” which will feature on his forthcoming album Play. While a release date for the record is yet to arrive, Sheeran used his appearance on Call Her Daddy to talk about the music that is still to come in the near future.
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“My idea was because the album is so broad, I didn't want to just be like, ‘Here's the single. Here's the album,' so there's music coming every sort of two, three weeks,” he explains. “So there's ‘Azizam' now, there's a song called ‘Old Phone' that comes out in a couple of weeks, and then after that there's another song coming.
“We shot all these videos and I'm less about single moments and more about, I want people to sort of feel the breadth of the record and I'm very confident that one of the songs will work, but it's more about just putting 'em out and letting people hear some of the record before it's out rather than what I've done before, which is just like, ‘Here's my first single. Here's the album,' and yeah.”
While Sheeran has already given fans a preview of “Old Phone” by playing it live on The Tonight Show, Cooper also queried the English musician as to how his new music differs compared to what he had released on previous albums.
“It's definitely different. I think I've been more explorative with this album,” Sheeran explained. “I kind of had an attitude of ‘Why the f–k not?' and not really felt like I have to be in a box of being a singer-songwriter, of like, ‘I have to do this or I have to do that,' and I lived in India for a little bit and worked with a load of Indian musicians and producers and blah, blah, blah.
“I made a song like ‘Azizam' with Ilya who's Persian and that's in that world and ‘Old Phone' I think is more in a Nashville country world and there's just lots of different moments on the record, and the record is called Play and therefore it has to be playful. It has to be celebratory.”
Sheeran's forthcoming eighth LP follows on from the release of his two 2023 albums, − and Autumn Variations, which peaked at No. 2 and No. 4 on the Billboard 200, respectively. They were his first records not to peak atop the chart since the release of his 2011 debut, +, and were followed in November 2024 with the standalone single “Under the Tree,” as featured in the Netflix film That Christmas.
As Sheeran explained during his chat with Cooper, the general vibe of Play is set to be far different to what what had arrived on his most recent albums.
“I released two albums that kind of, well, one was the sort of main album and one sort of came off the back of it, but they were both very depressing about quite hard hitting subjects, very muted,” he added.
“I still think they're beautiful records, but I feel like coming out of that, of you know, going through grief and all that sort of stuff coming out, I needed to have something that felt bright and colorful and playful and that's where doing St. Patrick's Day, playing at Tootsie's in Nashville, doing the New Orleans thing, the whole record just has to feel like fun and exciting.”
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Co-showrunners Eric Tuchman and Yahlin Chang speak to The Hollywood Reporter about everything that happens when June (Elisabeth Moss) and Serena (Yvonne Strahovski) get off that train.
By
Jackie Strause
Managing Editor, East Coast
[This story contains spoilers from the three-episode season six premiere of The Handmaid's Tale, “Train,” “Exile” and “Devotion.”]
The biggest question for The Handmaid's Tale viewers heading into the sixth and final season was what was going to happen to June and Serena after they got on that train.
The three-episode premiere of the Emmy-winning dystopian Hulu saga quickly answered that question by setting its starring women on diverging paths once again for the final chapter in this Gilead story. Serena (Yvonne Strahovski) ends up jumping from the train, with her baby son in her arms, to escape a mob of Gilead refugee women looking for revenge against the former Gilead wife. She eventually makes her way back to Gilead via New Bethlehem, the reformed community founded by Commander Lawrence (Bradley Whitford) where she is needed to recruit refugees.
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June (Elisabeth Moss), who helped Serena escape, ends up making it to Alaska, where she reunites with her mother Holly (played by returning star Cherry Jones), giving the hero of this tale a much-needed win after the harrowing journey she took to get there in the events of season five. The mother-daughter reunion reminds the audience what June is fighting for, as she updates her mother that her oldest daughter, Hannah (Jordana Blake), remains in Gilead.
June's Alaskan visit is short-lived, as she's quickly pulled back into the fight and joins the Mayday rebellion on a mission to save her husband Luke (O-T Fagbenle), who is out on bail after his finale arrest, and best friend Moira (Samira Wiley), who are trapped in No Man's Land, the disputed territory in the Gileadean-Canadian border region. She calls on Nick (Max Minghella), now a High Commander, for help and he obliges the mother of their daughter Nichole, who June is now calling by her birth name, Holly.
The third episode ends with a successful rescue mission, which brings about an awkward reunion with Luke and Nick, as Moira also meets Nick for the first time, and another poignant goodbye for June and her star-crossed lover. This time, June and Nick agree it's not goodbye. It's see you later.
Below, longtime writers and season six co-showrunners Eric Tuchman and Yahlin Chang unpack all of those reunions in the first three episodes — also including Janine (Madeline Brewer), who is now a Jezebel, with Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) — and explain how these early events of the season will set up what's to come as the 10-episode final chapter unspools the rest of June's tale: “This is a season where every character reveals who they really are.”
***
When I spoke with creator Bruce Miller and star/executive producer/director Elisabeth Moss at the end of season five, they didn't know yet what would happen after June and Serena got on that train. When you got back into the room and started to break the story, how did you figure out that you were going to set them on these different paths?
YAHLIN CHANG Bruce actually thought about it for a long time, what he wanted to happen on that train. I think the fun of that episode is that it starts out as a June and Serena working on their relationship story, and then it takes this dark, scary turn. The end of that episode I credit entirely to my co-showrunner Eric Tuchman, because he was the one who was really beating the drum of, “Wouldn't it be great if [June's mother] Holly were in Alaska? Holly needs to be in Alaska to receive June.” I just loved that, and it happened because of him.
ERIC TUCHMAN Everybody has good ideas in the writers room, but for that episode, because it became such a dark disturbing story, which is very much in line with a lot of what the Handmaid's Tale has been about, we wanted this [premiere] ending to feel uplifting and hopeful that there was still a light in this darkness. What better for June, after this harrowing experience on the train, then to reunite with her mother who she thought was dead? It's wish-fulfillment for a lot of people, including me. The fact that we got Cherry Jones [who played Holly in seasons two and three] back to play this role again and to act in those scenes with Lizzie [Moss] is one of my favorite things about the season.
Lizzie also directed the premiere, as well as episode two. With Lizzie herself becoming a mother before filming, and having her baby with her on set, how emotional was that mother-daughter reunion to film? We see three generations of women in June's family together, and a needed embrace for June after a harrowing journey.
TUCHMAN Well, I happened to be there for those Holly scenes with Cherry Jones, and Lizzie had her child with her for most of that shoot. It's just another facet of what makes her this extraordinary superwoman who is producing, acting, directing and being a full-time mother at the same time. She is juggling all these balls so beautifully and without ever really breaking a sweat. She has the most positive, upbeat attitude always, and that infuses the entire set with that enthusiasm and passion for the show.
CHANG Bradley Whitford jokes about how so many of our actresses had babies at the end of the show, which he's called dyslexic method acting. (Laughs)
On the flipside, one of the more disappointing moments for Serena came on that train. She had an opportunity to ask these Gilead refugee women for forgiveness, and instead, she doubles down on her Gilead intentions. Can you talk about that scene and what it tells us about Serena in the final season?
CHANG Serena's going to Serena. That's how I feel about her and how we craft her throughout the season. She has an ego. She always has to be in the right. She always has to feel like she's close to god or doing what god wants, and even when she asks for forgiveness from June or wants redemption, she really feels like she has this very special relationship with god and has a certain divine responsibility. So I think she really believes a lot of what she says on that train. She does believe that she saved the country and yes, it took a couple dark turns and didn't work out exactly as she wanted, but she really does think that America sucked in many ways and had to change. And so, god bless her. She doesn't lie about her true feelings. That's the one thing that she has going for her: she doesn't lie.
We see her returning to Gilead via New Bethlehem, the reformed societal vision from Commander Lawrence (Bradley Whitford). Serena, now wearing a new purple color, attracts the attention of Gilead Commander Wharton, played by Josh Charles, who is the father-in-law to Nick (Max Minghella), who is now a High Commander himself. How does this third episode set Serena up in New Bethlehem?
TUCHMAN She returns to New Bethlehem very determined to be an independent voice, a woman of real influence. She's not going to get sucked into the role that Gilead has had her play before, which is either as a wife or is just someone there for a photo op. She really wants to contribute and change Gilead into the Gilead she knows it can be. And then she comes across someone who is powerful and influential, who's courting her, who seems to embrace her desire for reform, and she gets sucked back in. He's not only a good romantic match, but he's a good figure with power and influence that can help her. She loves power.
CHANG Serena is ambitious and that's even in her decision to go back to New Bethlehem. On the one hand, she felt like god has called her to this purpose. But the first thing was that she was threatened. She had to get the hell out of Gilead, and make sure that the Wheelers didn't get her baby. [When Lawrence tells her that the Eyes know where she is], she then turns it over in her mind to, “God has called me back to set things right.”
We see Janine (Madeline Brewer) in episode three and she is now a Jezebel. She has this reunion scene with Aunt Lydia where she sends Lydia away. Aunt Lydia (who will star in the sequel series The Testaments) has been starting to see things differently since last season. How will seeing Janine at Jezebel's continue to turn the wheels for Aunt Lydia?
TUCHMAN Janine and Lydia have a really complicated, almost mother-daughter relationship. Lydia genuinely feels love and protectiveness toward her most precious girl, Janine. And when she sees Janine in this den of iniquity, we're again chipping away at Lydia's delusions about what Gilead really is. We're taking those rose-colored glasses off that she's been wearing for so long. To see Janine suffering in this place is yet another step in her journey to stop being so willfully blind about what the truth is behind Gilead. Stop hiding behind religion. It's really about power.
The third episode sees June leaving baby Holly (formerly Nichole) with her mother and going on the rescue mission to save Luke (O-T Fagbenle) and Moira (Samira Wiley). This leads to her reunion with Nick. Nick calls June out for choosing Luke, but June makes it clear she loves them both. I've spoken with O-T about June and Nick, and he thinks people are crazy for shipping them. Because their love came from trauma, is June blinded to the red flags she should see in Nick?
CHANG I think you're absolutely right that her relationship with Nick was forged in trauma. It kept her alive and it gave her a reason to survive those horrible, horrible years in Gilead, and they have this amazing bond. Also, Nick is always there for her and always doing whatever she needs at great risk to himself. So of course, she loves him. And Luke has been so reliable and has waited for her for so long, so she has a real love for him too, but it's a different kind of love. With Nick, I think it's more lusty and passionate, and with Luke, it's the love of a super strong attachment to a husband who has stood by her. But, as you said, there are certain things about Nick that she is blind to and that our viewers and we as writers are blind to because we're invested in this romance. And that is that he is a commander in Gilead. And that's the truth of it.
Bruce Miller has always said he knew the show's ending from the start. Did things evolve or change at all, or was there a North Star you were working towards this season?
TUCHMAN I think the ending is true to Bruce's vision that he's had for a long time. You know, it's called the Handmaid's Tale and it ties into the telling of this story. It didn't dictate the rest of the stories that we're telling across the season and we could still lead to that ending that Bruce has always wanted. So we did get to do a lot of juicy stories for June and for our entire ensemble.
CHANG Yeah, I think he knew what that last scene should be for a long time.
What are some of the biggest themes you are tackling this season?
TUCHMAN We really wanted this season to be, as Yahlin has called it, a season of triumph and uplift. It's been a lot of dark and disturbing stories in the past, but now it's the final season and it's a season about fighting back, about defiance and resilience and courage and guts and hopefulness. It's time. Our audience has stuck with us through the darkest times and it's time for them to be rewarded for that passion and commitment they have for the show, and we're going to deliver it for them this season.
When it comes to giving your sprawling ensemble all some closure, was that the biggest challenge that you had for this final season?
CHANG That was challenging for sure. One thing we really wanted to do this season was to give a fleshed-out story arc to every one of our characters and our amazing actors. There were past seasons when they maybe got less screen time or they didn't get to have a fully fleshed-out arc and we really felt like they deserved it, and wanted to do justice by those characters. They each deserved a really good fleshed-out arc, which I think they have this season. And yes, it's always a challenge because there are so many riches and they're all so great, and there's limited time on screen. But I think we get to see that they all become even more themselves and return to inner strengths that maybe we didn't know they had. So they evolve in beautiful ways, all of them.
TUCHMAN I think this is a season where every character reveals who they really are. The choices that they make, they're each at a crossroad reveal. Do they have the courage and the guts, or are they more selfish and self-serving? We'll see. Everybody exposes their true self.
The Handmaid's Tale has never stopped being prophetic, but there's a sense of dejà vu with the show again releasing under Trump 2.0. How does that feel to be here, eight years later, with this Gilead story again being so timely?
TUCHMAN Never would have expected it. Yahlin joined us in the second season. I was there from the beginning and in the first, we had an election in 2016. While we were in production. It was an election with a result that most of us on the show did not expect and the show became suddenly very timely and resonated with a lot of people. Many people have called the show a cautionary tale and it seems to me that not enough people were cautioned, and here we are again after a very consequential, shocking election. I never would have anticipated that that's where we would be. But here we are.
CHANG I was working on a show where we make stuff up, right? And I just cannot believe that as a woman, I have fewer rights now than when I started on the show in 2017. I never thought that Roe v. Wade would get overturned. It seems like the stuff you would make up, especially at that time with the #MeToo movement when it seemed like society was really moving forward.
Working on this show, you really have to get into the minds of authoritarians to write the characters on the Gilead side. Getting into those minds is about imagining what the worst people would do if given the reins of power. You have to imagine if you have no moral compass, if you are completely guided by avarice and selfishness and cowardice and covering your own ass, how would you act and what would you do? In that way, what's happening now feels very understandable and predictable to a certain extent.
***
The Handmaid's Tale is now streaming the first three episodes of season six, with new episodes releasing weekly on Tuesdays. Follow along with THR‘s final season coverage, including our three-episode premiere postmortem with Elisabeth Moss and story on how they crafted the end.
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Before becoming the filmmaker's confidant and doing PR for all his movies, he worked on classics including 'Ben-Hur,' 'Walking Tall' and 'Taxi Driver.'
By
Mike Barnes
Senior Editor
Marvin Levy, who spent five-plus decades handling public relations for Steven Spielberg and his films en route to becoming the only publicist to receive an Oscar, died Monday, an Amblin representative announced. He was 96.
Levy worked for MGM in New York and for Columbia Pictures in Hollywood, where he began his relationship with Spielberg on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). The soft-spoken executive became a “Spielberg Whisperer,” offering counsel to the filmmaker.
In introducing Levy at the Governors Awards in November 2018, Tom Hanks noted that the publicist also advised Spielberg on films including E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), best picture winner Schindler's List (1993), Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Lincoln (2012).
“Now, all those movies are pretty damn good, but I don't think any of us in this room would have bothered seeing them without the efforts of Marvin Levy,” a cheeky Hanks said before the publicist came to the stage to accept his Oscar.
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The work “has to be about showing up for something good; it has to have a purpose,” Levy said in his acceptance speech. “The person who most taught me that is Steven Spielberg. He's always treated me like a storyteller, and we are all storytellers in the public relations branch. “
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had presidents (Richard Kahn and Cheryl Boone Isaacs) come from that branch, but no one had been given an honorary Oscar until Levy got his.
“The Academy could not have chosen a more perfect ceiling-breaker than Levy, who has practiced virtually every aspect of his profession — and been a credit to it every step of the way,” THR Awards Analyst Scott Feinberg wrote.
He retired in July 2024. “To say that Marvin has been an integral part of my personal and professional life is an understatement,” Spielberg noted at the time.
On Tuesday, Spielberg said in a statement:
“Marvin's passing is a huge loss for me and our industry writ large. There are many talented PR executives, but Marvin was one of a kind. For over 50 years, he was a deeply loyal and exceptional collaborator who was respected and appreciated by all those who were lucky enough to learn from his counsel. When it came to handling the press, he had no peer. To the media and the world of exhibition, Marvin was the face of Amblin.
“We were opposite ends of the movie-making process. Every time I reached the end of production on a film, Marvin's work had only begun. Through countless films, TV series, Amblin events, awards campaigns and our public relations strategy — this is where Marvin came alive. He loved his work and was endlessly enthusiastic about our business. He was creative, innovative and respected for his knowledge and honesty. He was excited to figure how new and better ways to present films to audiences. As a result, he was the first and only publicist to receive an Academy Award.
“I am grateful for all our years together. Marvin never failed to make me laugh, he never stopped smiling. We will miss you, Marvin. You will always be in our hearts, and your memory will always make us smile.”
Levy was born on Nov. 16, 1928, in New York City and raised on the East Side of Manhattan. After graduating from NYU in 1949, he got a job as a researcher for a TV quiz show but got fired when a contestant answered a question that he had written too quickly.
He then was employed by Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenburg, a married couple who hosted two radio talk shows a day and had a column in the New York Herald Tribune. They had to let him go when business slowed, but McCrary gave him a glowing letter of recommendation that got him into the “advertising, publicity and exploitation” department at MGM.
Mentored by his boss, lyricist and publicist Howard Dietz, Levy helped MGM clients get exposure when they came to New York and contributed to awards campaigns for the eventual best picture winners Gigi (1958) and Ben-Hur (1959).
Marvin Levy (left) with actor Glenn Ford in the 1950s.
In 1962, he exited MGM and was hired by the Blowitz, Thomas & Canton PR firm. There, he did publicity for movies including Charly (1968), They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), Lovers and Other Strangers (1970) and Walking Tall (1973), all distributed by Cinerama Releasing Corp.
(Levy was on the team that famously came up with a new marketing campaign for Walking Tall after the film struggled in theaters. With less emphasis on the violence surrounding Sheriff Buford Pusser and more on his relationship with his wife, it became an indie success story, grossing an estimated $40 million — $287 million today — on a budget of about $500,000.)
In July 1974, Levy came to Los Angeles to work full time for Cinerama. His stay with the distributor was cut short after it merged with American International Pictures, but he quickly landed at Columbia and worked on films including Taxi Driver (1976), The Deep (1977) and the best picture winner Kramer vs. Kramer (1979).
Spielberg was coming off his mega-hit Jaws (1975) when he first met Levy on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the two got along quite well. In 1982, he began to work exclusively for the filmmaker and his companies. (In September 2019, he transitioned to a role of “senior advisor” at Amblin Partners.)
“Most of Levy's time,” Feinberg noted, “is spent doing the grunt work — in tandem with studio PR and marketing partners — of crafting production notes, press kits, one-sheets and positioning statements, devising strategies for advertising and marketing and remembering, while plotting Spielberg's media appearances, that a little of his client can go a long way, whereas too much can actually backfire.”
In 1963, Levy helped celebrity activists, including Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier and Burt Lancaster, take part in the historic March on Washington. He received the publicists guild's highest honor, the Les Mason Award, in 1994.
Levy was on the Academy's board of governors for 23 years and a member of its PR branch since 1969. He also served on the board of the Starlight Children's Foundation.
Survivors include his wife of 73 years, Carol; their sons, Don (also a publicist) and Doug; and his grandsons, Brian and Daniel. He was preceded in death by his sister, Jane.
A funeral will be held at 10 a.m. on Friday at Mount Sinai in Los Angeles. Donations is his memory may be made to Feeding America or Canine Companions.
During his Governors Awards speech, Levy pointed out that he often struggled to describe to some just what he did for a living.
“Most friends and relations outside the industry really had no clue, so I could never explain the full range of what the job really entails,” he said. “But at least now they know I got an Oscar for it.”
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The death toll continues to rise after the Jet Set nightclub roof in Santo Domingo tragically collapsed on Tuesday (April 8).
By
Rania Aniftos
Cardi B is sending her love to the Dominican Republic after the tragic collapse of the Jet Set nightclub roof in Santo Domingo left at least 66 people dead and more than 160 injured, at the time of publication.
The rapper, whose father is Dominican, wrote a message of mourning to her BG Secret Society community on Instagram Tuesday (April 8), according to a screenshot shared by Complex. “I'm in literal tears scrolling down my timeline seeing my Dominican people being rescued some wit lives and some gone,” she wrote. “l'm sad seeing families crying desperately in pain looking for love ones ..I feel like every Dominican around the world is in a big hora Santa praying for survivors and praying for the ones that are gone to be in Gods Glory. For the people who lost a family or a friend don't have bad memories they left this earth singing and dancing and most likely happy and enjoying themselves and that's how the lord will receive them.”
Cardi also honored merengue singer Rubby Pérez, who reportedly died when the roof collapsed roughly an hour into his midnight performance at the club. “Its so heartbreaking to see one of our iconic artist [Rubby] Perez leave in such a tragic way,” she wrote. “I'm glad tho our final memory of him was him sharing his beautiful voice to us ..Sang one last time .I want my fans to pray for those who was in that building last night ❤️💙”
Trending on Billboard
Officials urge anyone seeking updates on missing loved ones to contact the Center of Emergency Operations in Santo Domingo.
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Christopher Landon says being a fan of horror made his mother nervous when he was a child.MICHAEL TRAN/AFP/Getty Images
If director Christopher Landon had to elevator-pitch his childhood as a movie, he might call it “Little Haunted House on the Prairie.” While his father Michael Landon was known to millions as the star of such family-friendly television hits as Little House on the Prairie and Highway to Heaven, Christopher's dad was also something of a secret horror-movie super-fan.
Nifty high-concept thriller Drop doubles as the perfect anti-texting PSA for inconsiderate moviegoers
“I grew up in a divorced home, so my dad was a big horror fan and I watched a lot of the stuff with him, but it drove my mom crazy,” the younger Landon recalls today of his youth. “She hated it, and because she had no control over what I was doing when I was with him on the weekends, she'd later search my room for horror magazines and confiscate them. She thought my dad was raising a serial killer.”
What Landon's mother didn't realize, though, was that horror was a cathartic outlet for the young boy – a safe way for him to deal with the anxiety of his parents' split, and later Michael's death from cancer when Christopher was just 16. But those early father-son horror-movie bonding sessions also helped fuel Christopher's creative spirit, leading him to become one of today's most sought-after genre filmmakers thanks to his work on the Paranormal Activity and Happy Death Day franchises.
And now, Landon is preparing to scale new, terrifying heights with his thriller Drop. Following a first date gone horribly wrong atop a 38th-floor Chicago restaurant, the high-concept flick is emblematic of Landon's approach to filmmaking: it is fast, funny and positively dripping with dread. Ahead of Drop's release this weekend, Landon spoke with The Globe and Mail about how blood is thicker than water.
Violet (Meghann Fahy) and Henry (Brandon Sklenar) in Drop, directed by Christopher Landon.Bernard Walsh/Universal/Supplied
You've had a long history with the horror genre, which seems to be the one resilient kind of movie when it comes to theatrical releases lately. How have you seen the game change over the years?
You know it's funny, I think horror has always had a certain popularity because it's always been a great space to discover new talent. Most horror movies are relatively inexpensive to make, so a lot of people cut their teeth in the space. But the biggest evolution has been a certain level of respect for the genre that didn't really exist. People in Hollywood for a long time were dismissive of the genre in terms of it being an art form. But we're finally seeing a certain kind of recognition, between Ari Aster's stuff or The Substance. And, of course, they recognize that there's a lot of money to be made in horror.
Growing up, were you the kid with the Fangoria subscription?
A thousand percent, yes, which I had to hide from my mom. I grew up on a very steady diet of horror, maybe five to six movies every weekend for my whole childhood. My mom didn't understand my obsession. But she finally came around when I was an adult and realized, “Oh, he's not chopping up bodies and burying them in the backyard.”
You cut your own teeth on the micro-budget Paranormal Activity movies. Is it more fun when you get the budget scale for a movie like Drop?
I've directed movies where they've been under $5-million and I directed We Have a Ghost, which was $65-million. But what's interesting is that they're not wildly different from each other. When you have a low-budget movie, it forces you to be more nimble and creative in a lot of different ways because you have to, to figure it out. And even Drop is a modestly budgeted movie by Hollywood standards. But we still figured out how to build a 12,000-square-foot restaurant and make it look beautiful. For Drop, I was also jonesing to make something that felt a bit more tonally contained, and more specific. It was a movie that met the moment for me – I was in a darker mood when I stepped into this project.
That darker moment, is that alluding to your time developing Scream 7, and then having to step away from that project after its casting fell apart?
I would definitely say that was a big part of it. I was excited about the project, and we had a great script and an exciting movie planned, but there's not much more I can say about it. I'm very excited about the new movie and see what Kevin Williamson does with it. It's one of those things where I do believe in fate and the way that things play out, and I do believe that I was meant to make Drop, and he was meant to make Scream 7. I'll be first in line on opening night.
Just talking about your own exposure to horror, you have two young children. When will you introduce them to horror movies, specifically your own?
Oh it's happened already. Not mine, but I'm talking gateway horror. We've all watched Beetlejuice, both of them. Gremlins, too, which they are obsessed with. It's funny – they ask a lot about when they can see something of mine. I'll start with We Have a Ghost, which I feel they can see pretty soon. And then I'll go straight to Happy Death Day, and hopefully they'll get to watch three of those. And then we'll get into the other stuff. Even though Freaky is really gory, it has a lighter touch and tone. I'm more afraid of the Paranormal movies, because those are the kind of movies that give you nightmares.
Okay, you opened the door to discuss the Happy Death Day trilogy just now, so I'll ask: Is there anything you can say about a potential third movie?
I can't say too much because it's in such early stages. But we are actually having real conversations again with producer Jason Blum about a third movie and how we could approach it. But it's a relief and a joy for us to feel like the door is back open again.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
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CHILLING new UFO footage shows a US warship facing off with two "Tic Tac" aircraft as four mysterious objects were spotted darting around the destroyer.
The objects are captured taking off in a "sychronized" flight off the coast of southern California - stunning sailors aboard the USS Jackson who claim they saw four in total.
New bombshell footage shows the unbelievable moment two of the UFOs burst from the ocean during the February 2023 incident.
Their shape resembles a 2004 sighting of a Tic Tac shaped UFO in the same waters, with the incident investigated by a top secret government program.
One of the stunned sailors told News 8 Now: "All we witnessed was all four of them.
"All in synchronous, jetting into the abyss.
"All four, all timed together and all left. And we were like holy s***.
"The second they left, maybe three, four seconds pass, I run to my station and I look at my radar, they're all off radar. That's it, they all zoomed off.
"But it's clear that they're in communication with one another and synchronized like three, two, one countdown. Let's all go. I think unless there's some level of like one entity controlling all four and then they all leave at the same time."
And former defense department analyst Marik Von Rennenkampff added fuel to the UFO fire after analyzing flight data from the exact time and location of the sighting - concluding there were no US aircraft in the area.
He said: "I don't think it's ours. I suspect there are better places for us to showcase that kind of equipment to unwitting sailors.
"That just doesn't make sense."
The latest incident with the chilling footage bares similarities to the infamous Nimitz incident a whopping two decades prior.
Several pilots encountered the unknown, flying object as it sped over the pacific near Mexico on November 14, 2004.
Pilot David Fravor was one of four people in two fighter jets sent to monitor the object after it was spotted by his bosses on board the USS Nimitz.
He told CNN at the time that they came across a disturbance above the water that was causing the sea to foam and "a white object, oblong, pointing north".
He added: "It had no wings. So you think, 'okay, it's a helicopter', but there's no rotor wash in the water, there's no rotors and when helicopters move from side-to-side they're kind of slow then pick up speed going the other way.
"This was extremely abrupt - like a ping pong ball bouncing off a wall. It would hit and go the other way and change directions at will.
"Then the ability to hover over the water then start a vertical climb from zero up to about 12,000ft and then accelerate in less than two seconds and disappear is something that I've never seen in my life."
When asked about those who may be sceptical of the claim, he replied: "It's easy to doubt what we can't explain and this isn't the first account of people seeing a UFO.
THE Tic Tac UFO is a mysterious flying object that U.S. pilots and experts have claimed to have witnessed over the last few decades.
The first famous sighting with footage took place off the San Diego coast in 2004, after pilots on the USS Nimitz carrier strike group detected the object.
Commander David Fravor believed it to be something beyond human technology - as it possessed extreme acceleration and no visible propulsion.
Then in 2015, pilots on the USS Roosevelt off the East Coast captured footage of unidentified moving objects.
They also showed no means of propulsion and moved at high speeds.
Speculation online has caused alien fanatics to look for more Tic Tac-shaped space paraphernalia, including a Russian military base which appeared to be a Tic Tac UFO "charging hub".
The Pentagon has also acknowledged other declassified videos of encounters, but have been unable to explain them.
"In this situation you're talking about four people, all eyeballs on, ranging in experience from relatively new in a fleet squadron... to myself who had over 16 years of flying."
And fellow F-18 pilot Lietenant Chad Underwood flew out and caught the object on video which was published by the New York Times in 2017.
This sparked a mixture of uproar and intrigue on how much the government knows of UFOs.
At the time, the sighting didn't get looked into on a large scale - until the Defense Intelligence Agency looked into it in 2008.
Both Fravor and Underwood expressed how they couldn't believe the similarities between the infamous Nimitz incident and the latest sighting - therefore questioning whether the UFOs were returning or never left at all.
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Scientists recently revealed that they have "brought back" extinct dire wolves thanks to genetic engineering — but experts say the newly created animals are only like dire wolves in appearance.
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In an announcement on Monday (April 7), scientists revealed to the world that they have "brought back" long-extinct dire wolves with genetic engineering.
Researchers with the biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences shared images of three adorable, snow-white pups, which they said mark the "world's first de-extinction."
Dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus), which were made famous by the HBO television series "Game of Thrones," went extinct at the end of the last ice age. By creating lookalike pups, Colossal's CEO Ben Lamm said the company has "made healthy dire wolf puppies" and resurrected these predators after more than 10,000 years of extinction.
But many experts say the language used by Colossal to describe their creation is misleading. "What Colossal have produced is a gray wolf with dire wolf-like characteristics," Nic Rawlence, an associate professor and co-director of the Otago Palaeogenetics Laboratory at the University of Otago, told the New Zealand Science Media Center (NZ SMC). "This is not a de-extincted dire wolf, rather it's a 'hybrid.'"
To make the pups, scientists extracted DNA from two prehistoric dire wolf fossils: a 13,000-year-old tooth discovered in Sheridan Pit, Ohio, and a 72,000-year-old inner ear bone from American Falls in Idaho. Using this DNA, the researchers pieced together a partial dire wolf genome, which they then compared with the genomes of the dire wolf's closest living relatives, including wolves, jackals and foxes.
Related: 'Closer than people think': Woolly mammoth 'de-extinction' is nearing reality — and we have no idea what happens next
Based on their results, the scientists selected the gray wolf (Canis lupus) as an egg donor to "bring back" dire wolves — despite the two species not actually being that closely related, experts said.
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"New information shows that the original dire wolf itself was not really a wolf," David Mech, an adjunct professor specializing in wolf ecology and behavior at the University of Minnesota and senior research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, told Live Science in an email.
Evolutionarily speaking, dire wolves split from wolves roughly 6 million years ago, forming an entirely separate group from modern-day gray wolves. "Dire wolves are in their own genus, so a very different species," Philip Seddon, a professor of zoology at the University of Otago, told NZ SMC. "The African jackal might be more closely related to dire wolves."
De-extinction requires egg cells from a living animal to hold and "grow" the genetic material of the animal scientists want to create. Having selected gray wolves to perform this step, Colossal scientists then collected cells from gray wolf blood samples and modified them to resemble the cells they found in the dire wolf fossils. Using CRISPR gene-editing technology, the team made a total of 20 edits in 14 genes that they identified as important in giving dire wolves their distinctive traits.
Next, in a similar process as the one used to clone Dolly the sheep in 1996, the scientists inserted the modified cells' DNA into gray wolf egg cells, whose own genetic material had previously been removed. At this point, the gray wolf egg cells contained all the genetic information required to build wolves with some of the defining characteristics of dire wolves. The egg cells were then left to mature in the lab, and the resulting embryos were implanted into the wombs of domestic dogs, which are technically a subspecies of the gray wolf.
Colossal's first "dire wolf" puppies, Romulus and Remus, were born Oct. 1, 2024, meaning they are now 5-month-old adolescents. According to Colossal, they are being held and continually monitored in a nature preserve surrounded by 10-foot-tall (3 meters) fencing.
"They will live out their life in a luxurious preserve under human care," Bridgett vonHoldt, a professor of evolutionary genomics and epigenetics at Princeton University who collaborates with Colossal on this project, told Live Science in an email. "As many have seen with previously cloned animals, their health always remains unpredictable and of potential concern."
A third pup, Khaleesi, was born Jan. 30, 2025. It's unclear how dangerous these animals are, but their behavior is unlikely to differ dramatically from that of a captive gray wolf, especially as they have been constantly surrounded by humans, vonHoldt said. "Lots of captive wolves are handled by humans. Some remain submissive with their humans even as adults while others mature into a more aloof, standoffish animal. I expect the DW [dire wolves] will be no different."
Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi will not be released into the wild, but in the future, Colossal said it will consider options to introduce animals into "secure and expansive ecological preserves potentially on Indigenous land."
But some experts doubt very much that these introductions would be successful. "Any release to the wild would be fraught with negative PR and legal consequences, which would probably also be the case with any of the other types of newly created animals," Mech said.
Regarding the dire wolf specifically, Mech said there is a question mark over how they might fit into modern ecosystems. "They occupied an entirely different ecological niche than exists today," he said.
Many experts have criticized Colossal's announcement, but some have also praised the technological breakthroughs the company made along the way. "Certainly, this involves advances in genetic technology, and these might have applications for the conservation of existing species," Seddon said.
One species that is already benefiting from Colossal's breakthroughs is the red wolf (Canis rufus), the world's most endangered wolf. The company announced the birth of two litters of cloned red wolves on Monday, boosting the number of red wolves held in captivity in the U.S. and offering new hope for the species.
—'We didn't know they were going to be this cute': Scientists unveil genetically engineered 'woolly mice'
—130,000-year-old mammoth calf smells like 'fermented earth and flesh,' necropsy reveals
—Most complete Tasmanian tiger genome yet pieced together from 110-year-old pickled head
But at the end of the day Colossal's claim that it has resurrected the dire wolf is spurious, Seddon and others said. "Colossal compared the genomes of the dire wolf and the gray wolf, and from about 19,000 genes, they determined that 20 changes in 14 genes gave them a dire wolf," Rawlence said.
Moreover, Colossal's "dire wolves" aren't technically the world's first de-extinction. In 2003, scientists in Spain cloned an extinct wild goat species known as the bucardo, or the Pyrenean ibex (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica). A baby goat was born, but it died seven minutes later due to a lung defect.
The announcement on Monday means that "we have GMO wolves and might one day have GMO Asian elephants, but for now extinction really is for ever," Seddon said.
Sascha is a U.K.-based staff writer at Live Science. She holds a bachelor's degree in biology from the University of Southampton in England and a master's degree in science communication from Imperial College London. Her work has appeared in The Guardian and the health website Zoe. Besides writing, she enjoys playing tennis, bread-making and browsing second-hand shops for hidden gems.
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'If it weren't for that asteroid, they might still share this planet': Dinosaurs weren't doomed before the asteroid hit, new study suggests
Adorable dire wolf pups mark 'world's first de-extinction,' Colossal Biosciences says
'Fingerprints of cancer' found after scientists flash infrared light pulses at blood samples
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A new, AI-powered test can detect the molecular "fingerprints" of cancer in a patient's blood using flashes of infrared light.
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Flashes of infrared light can detect signs of cancer in a patient's blood, new research suggests.
In a new study, scientists demonstrated that a test using infrared light can detect the difference between blood samples from patients with lung cancer and samples from those without the disease with up to 81% accuracy. They presented their findings in a study published April 9 in the journal ACS Central Science.
The new test is powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and examines differences in molecules found in blood plasma, the watery portion of blood that carries various proteins and chemical compounds — such as hormones and vitamins — around the body.
When blood samples are exposed to flashes of infrared light from a laser, the molecules held within the plasma vibrate. In turn, different components of the molecules absorb or reflect the energy from the light pulses, and consequently, they emit their own distinctive pattern of light that can be recorded and read as an "infrared molecular fingerprint."
Related: Detecting cancer in minutes possible with just a drop of dried blood and new test, study hints
The fingerprint differs between patients with cancer and those without the disease, the researchers reported. This suggests that the blood-screening method could offer a new approach to detecting cancer.
New blood tests are currently being developed to help diagnose a plethora of cancers, including those of the pancreas, breast and stomach. While still in the early stages of development, such tests aim to detect cancer earlier than current methods available, and they can achieve this in a less invasive way than traditional tissue biopsies, for instance.
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"Laser-based infrared molecular fingerprinting detects cancer, demonstrating its potential for clinical diagnostics," study co-author Michaela Žigman, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, said in a statement. With further development and testing in larger clinical studies, this approach could help advance cancer screening and diagnosis, she added.
To create the new blood test, Žigman and colleagues first trained an AI model to detect differences in the fingerprint of plasma samples from more than 2,100 people. This cohort included patients with lung, prostate, breast or bladder cancer who had not yet been treated for their disease. For each patient with cancer, the researchers showed the AI a blood sample from a person of the same sex and of a similar age who didn't have cancer, for comparison.
After training their AI model using these data, the researchers tested how accurate it was at identifying cancer fingerprints in the plasma of about 430 people who weren't included in the initial data. The researchers found that the model was up to 81% accurate at discerning plasma samples from patients with lung cancer compared with those from individuals without the disease.
However, the model was much less successful at detecting the other three types of cancer included in the study. For example, the model only detected around 50% of breast cancer cases.
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Considering these limitations of the test, much more research will be needed before it could ever be used in clinical practice.
Nevertheless, the researchers behind the test are hopeful about its prospects. They now plan to train the model on a wider range of cancers, using data from more patients, to see if they can improve its accuracy in detecting cancer. They especially want to hone its ability to detect cancer at different stages of the disease, they said in the statement.
Emily is a health news writer based in London, United Kingdom. She holds a bachelor's degree in biology from Durham University and a master's degree in clinical and therapeutic neuroscience from Oxford University. She has worked in science communication, medical writing and as a local news reporter while undertaking NCTJ journalism training with News Associates. In 2018, she was named one of MHP Communications' 30 journalists to watch under 30. (emily.cooke@futurenet.com)
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Quantum computing breakthrough could make 'noise' — forces that disrupt calculations — a thing of the past
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Useful quantum networks are hobbled by the problem of decoherence from environmental "noise." But a new breakthrough could change that.
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Scientists have discovered a groundbreaking method to shield quantum information from "noise" — and it could finally let us build practical quantum computers.
Quantum computers rely on quantum entanglement, the connection between the quantum properties of two particles that are shared instantaneously across time and space. This enables quantum computers to perform faster calculations than their traditional counterparts because they can process information in parallel rather than in sequence.
But maintaining this "coherence" is difficult due to "noise" from the outside world, as interactions with loose particles, rays of light and even minute changes in temperature can break the entanglement and disperse the information within. That's why the error rate in qubits is much higher than in conventional bits in classical computing.
"Basically even though companies claim [they have] 1,000 qubits, very few of them are useful. Noise is the reason," study co-author Andrew Forbes, a professor of physics at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa told Live Science. "Everyone agrees that there is no point in pushing for more qubits unless we can make them less noisy."
Now, by encoding the information in the topology (or the properties that stem from the shape) of two entangled photons, a team of physicists has found a way to preserve quantum information, even amid a storm of noise. The researchers published their findings on March 26 in the journal Nature Communications.
Related: MIT invents new way for QPUs to communicate — paving the way for a scalable 'quantum supercomputer'
In much the same way that traditional computer bits are the basic units of digital information, qubits encode quantum information. Like bits, qubits can exist as a 1 or a 0, representing the two possible positions in a two-state system.
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Thanks to the bizarre rules of the quantum world, qubits can also exist in theoretically infinite superpositions of the two classical states. And when they're entangled inside quantum computers, their ability to crunch numbers grows exponentially.
But this quantum daisy chain is fragile: Even when housed inside extremely cold and highly insulated cryostats, current quantum computers are still infiltrated by tiny disturbances that rapidly disrupt the delicate processes within.
The typical strategy for preventing quantum decoherence is to preserve entanglement, but this has so far only enjoyed relative success. To look for a way around this, the researchers behind the new study sought to preserve information even in systems that had already been partially decohered.
"We decided to let the entanglement decay — it is always fragile so let it be so — and instead preserve information even with very little entanglement," Forbes said.
For their solution, Forbes and his colleagues turned to a type of qubit known as a "topological qubit" that encodes information in the shape made by two entangled particles. They settled on a quasiparticle known as an optical skyrmion, a wave-like field formed between two entangled photons.
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After exposing the skyrmions to varying levels of noise, the researchers found that the patterns and information coded within remained resilient far beyond the point where non-topological systems would decohere.
"It turns out that so long as some entanglement remains, no matter how little, the topology stays intact," Forbes said. "The topology only disappears when the entanglement vanishes."
The scientists believe their approach could play a key role in making quantum computers and networks that can overcome noise in any environment. Their next step will be to create a "topological toolkit" that can encode practical information into a skyrmion and get it out again.
"Once we have this, we can start to think about using topology in practical situations, like communication networks and in computing," Forbes said.
Ben Turner is a U.K. based staff writer at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, among other topics like tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist. When he's not writing, Ben enjoys reading literature, playing the guitar and embarrassing himself with chess.
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MIT invents new way for QPUs to communicate — paving the way for a scalable 'quantum supercomputer'
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Scientific research is the lifeblood of our economy. Now, a wrecking ball has come.
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Liam Coen was one of the top head coaching candidates on the market this year after an impressive year as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' offensive coordinator. The Jaguars showed strong interest in Coen during their search for a head coach, setting up an interview with him on Wednesday.
He turned down that opportunity and was set to sign a lucrative three-year deal with the Bucs to make him the highest-paid coordinator in the NFL, but he never put pen to paper.
That's when the Jaguars pulled the “break glass in case of emergency” card and fired GM Trent Baalke, making one last push to hire Coen as their head coach. Fast-forward to Thursday and they've landed their guy.
According to reports, Coen is expected to be hired as the Jaguars' next head coach. It was a bizarre turn of events, particularly considering the Buccaneers were unable to reach Coen on Thursday after he left to take the interview with the Jaguars.
Furthermore, his contract with the Buccaneers was reportedly contingent on him not taking a second interview with Jacksonville – but he never signed it, so he never breached the contract.
Coen had two different stints with the Rams. He was the assistant wide receivers coach from 2018-2019 before being promoted to assistant quarterbacks coach in 2020. He then left for Kentucky in 2021, returned to the Rams as Sean McVay's offensive coordinator in 2022, went back to Kentucky in 2023 and then landed with the Buccaneers in 2024.
So, yeah, he's made a few stops in the last five years.
This article originally appeared on Rams Wire: Former Rams OC Liam Coen lands head coaching job after bizarre turn of events
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Documentary filmmaker Jeremy Corbell spoke with NBC News' Gadi Schwartz about a new video of an unidentified tic tac object possibly recorded by a Navy ship near the California coast in 2023. April 9, 2025
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