--:-- Tracy Mumford: From the New York Times, it's the headlines. Today's Tuesday, April 15th.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Harvard has now become the first school to refuse to comply with the Trump administration's pressure campaign on American universities. Yesterday, Harvard's president rejected a list of demands that the administration had sent.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: It had called for significant changes to the day-to-day operations of the institution, like ordering Harvard to shut down all programming related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, requiring it to report international students who commit conduct violations to federal authorities, and mandating outside oversight of its academic departments to ensure they are, quote, viewpoint diverse, among other demands.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In a statement, Harvard's president said, No government, regardless of which party is in power, should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Within hours of Harvard's refusal, the Trump administration announced it would freeze more than $2 billion in federal funding for the school. That adds to the billions of dollars the administration has already paused for other elite universities.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: As Trump and his closest advisors and allies have been pushing to fundamentally reshape American higher education. They've claimed the schools have allowed anti-Semitism to go unchecked on their campuses.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Many conservatives have also argued more broadly that the institutions have been taken over by leftists and need to be overhauled. One of the Trump allies prominently pushing that view is the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who told The Daily in a recent interview that using federal funds as leverage over the institutions is central to their strategy.
--:-- Christopher Rufo: Nice words, pleasing sounds, promises to change. All of those you know very pleasant and non proposals regarding academia have not worked. And so look the raw material of politics is money power and status. And so I'm thinking about how can we take away their money? How can we take away their power? How can we take away their status so that they have to change?
--:-- Tracy Mumford: At the White House yesterday, President Trump said he wants to ramp up deportations to El Salvador and send as many people as possible to the country, which the U.S. is paying to jail migrants.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And I just asked the president, you know, it's this massive complex that he built, jail complex. I said, can you build some more of them, please?
--:-- President Trump: I'd like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country, but you'll have to be looking at the laws on that, Steve, OK?
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Today is tax day in the U and for most Americans the chance of being audited having their tax records checked and investigated has dropped to historically low levels.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: A Times analysis of IRS data shows that the audit rate for personal income tax returns dipped to just around a third of a percent in 2023. That's less than half of what it was a decade ago.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Fewer audits have led to less revenue for the government. With its audits of tax returns for the year 2010, for example, the IRS got an additional $11 billion. Its audits for 2019 returns, though, only brought in $4.5 billion.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Part of the reason for the drop has been a staffing shortage, something the Biden administration tried to reverse. But the Trump administration's now planning deep cuts, targeting at least 25 percent of the agency's staff, which would almost certainly make audits even more rare.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The president and other Republicans have likened audits to harassment. One IRS employee told The Times she was in the middle of working on an audit, what she called a slam-dunk case for the IRS, when she and four other staffers working on it were laid off this year.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Now, she says, it's unclear if it will ever be finished.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Surgeons in Massachusetts recently pulled off what had seemed impossible. They successfully transplanted a kidney that had previously been frozen. The patient was a pig, not a human.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: But researchers hope it might lead to a major breakthrough in organ transplants for people. Right now, kidneys must be transplanted within 24 to 36 hours, a tight window that makes lining up the right match very difficult.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: If the organs could be frozen and stored, transplant surgeons say that would be a game changer. For the recent breakthrough, researchers took inspiration from another animal, Canadian wood frogs.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In the winter, the frogs can basically freeze themselves. All of their cellular processes stop, so do their hearts. They're basically dead until spring.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Scientists realized the frog secret was that they flooded their cells with glucose before the cold set in. Scientists used a version of that technique with the pig kidney to protect it from damage in the freezing process.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The research is still ongoing and far from being tested on a human, but the hope is it will eventually help cut back on the wait lists for a kidney transplant. Those lists currently have almost 100,000 people on them.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And finally, the price of Lego sets has been skyrocketing among fans and collectors. Some of the themed kits of plastic bricks are going for way over their original purchase price.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: One Spider-Man set from 2013 is now valued at over $16,000, which is a lot for something you could accidentally vacuum up a piece of.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The eye-popping prices have come with a dark side. A Pierce County Lego retailer is out of thousands of dollars after someone breaks into their store and loads a U-Haul with high-end collectible sets.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: There have been Lego heists around the country. More than $400,000 worth of Legos were stolen from Walmarts and Target stores.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Stores say they've dealt with it for a few years, but it's been ramping up as people have been clamoring online for limited editions and special kits.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: One expert who runs a YouTube channel about investing in Lego told The Times that the sets have basically become just like other coveted merchandise that can be stolen and resold, like jewelry or rare sneakers.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: One thing I learned this morning, the plural of Lego is Lego, never Legos, according to the company.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: So if your 7,500-piece Millennium Falcon set goes missing, you'll need to say, I'd like to report my stolen Lego.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, a closer look at the case of the man who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador and how it's become a test of presidential power.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: That's next in The New York Times audio app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.
