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--:-- Tracy Mumford: From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Friday, May 2nd. Here's what we're covering.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In the first major shakeup in White House staffing this term, President Trump has removed his national security advisor, Michael Waltz, who'd come under scrutiny for organizing a group chat on Signal about military strikes and accidentally including a journalist.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: I'm sure everybody out there has had a contact where it was said one person and then a different phone number. But you've never talked to him before, so how's the number on your phone? I mean, I'm not an expert in any of this, but it's just... Even before that mistake, Waltz was on thin ice in the administration.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Trump's close advisors had decided he was too hawkish, too aggressive on foreign affairs, to work for a president who campaigned on not intervening abroad. For example, as recently as this week, Waltz had been arguing internally for sharp sanctions against Russia.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Trump's aides tell The Times that the only reason Waltz kept the job this long is in part because the president didn't want to be seen as giving in to the media's coverage of the group chat controversy. And even now, he's not sending Waltz away entirely.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The president has just written on Truth Social that Mike Waltz is going to become the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Well, there you go. They're no longer the national security advisor. Fabulous.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The news that Trump nominated Waltz to be the U.N. ambassador instead was so sudden, it caught the State Department's spokeswoman by surprise at a briefing after a reporter read it from the president's social media post.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: It is clear that I just heard this from you. Though short, Waltz's tenure is longer than Trump's first national security advisor back in 2017, who was fired after four weeks. Trump ended up going through three more.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: For now, the National Security Advisor position will go to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who will hold both jobs. Rubio's collected a remarkable number of titles in the administration so far.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: He's also the acting administrator of what's left of USAID, the foreign aid agency. And he's the acting national archivist, a role he was assigned after Trump abruptly fired the previous one.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: For years, online shopping has almost seemed like a race to the bottom. Literally, it was like 99 cents, I think, for this whole pack. Testing just how cheap things could get.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: This is insane. Let's do a Timu haul. On sites like Timu, you could get a deal on just about anything. Bedazzled phone cases, gadgets that would make you dog-shaped waffles, and fast fashion brands like Shein could churn out an endless stream of new designs for shockingly low prices.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: I think I got like 15 things, maybe 16. I don't really know. And it was like $96. That new economy was made possible in part by a loophole in America's trade policy.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Shipments from China that were worth less than and were being sent directly to consumers could sail across the border with almost no paperwork and avoid tariffs that had been in place since Trump first term.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: As many as a billion packages a year had been coming into the U that way But as of 12.01 a.m. today, the so-called de minimis exemption is over.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: President Trump ended it, claiming it was being used by drug traffickers to ship the ingredients for fentanyl into the U.S. and that the cheap shipments had been undermining American manufacturing.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: For a lot of shoppers in recent years that have been buying from these websites, they probably had no idea how much they were benefiting from this particular loophole.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: But now that it's gone, it's going to become very obvious to them very quickly. Julie Cresswell is a Times business reporter.
--:-- Julie Cresswell: She says there will now likely be processing delays for the shipments and higher costs that the companies are already starting to pass along.
--:-- Julie Cresswell: I spent a lot of time on some of these websites. Sheen, for instance, shoppers there were saying prices were increasing on some of the goods.
--:-- Julie Cresswell: You know, a customer that I spoke to in Atlanta had put a couple dresses into her shopping cart late last week, and they were like $9, $11. And by Sunday, those prices had gone up to $13 or $15 after Sheen said it had built the tariffs into the prices.
--:-- Julie Cresswell: It'll be interesting to see in the next few weeks and months how this does change overall online shopping behavior, especially among Gen Zers.
--:-- Julie Cresswell: They were really used to going on to these websites. You're going to see, I think, shoppers try to probably reduce some of their shopping from these places because they're just going to become more expensive than they've been used to.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Meanwhile, President Trump's trade policies are also driving up prices beyond fast fashion and online impulse buys.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: More and more companies are starting to warn customers that the new tariffs will cost them. This week, the power tool company Stanley Black & Decker, as well as Procter & Gamble, which makes everything from paper towels to laundry detergent, and Adidas, all said they expect to raise prices on their products.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Now, a few other quick updates on the Trump administration. The administration is pushing forward with new cuts to federal spending.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: President Trump has now moved to shut off all federal support for NPR and PBS, accusing the news outlets of producing left-wing propaganda.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The cuts are a relatively small percentage of the broadcasters' budgets, but could still cause widespread disruption for their audiences.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And at the Education Department, the administration has slashed a billion dollars for mental health services for children.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The funds were part of a bipartisan effort by Congress to help prevent gun violence after the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The Education Department says it cut the funds because the programs focused in part on increasing the diversity of mental health workers.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Also the administration is ramping up its military presence on the southern border The Pentagon announced last night that a narrow strip of land in southern Texas will effectively become an extension of an army base there allowing troops to detain anyone who crosses for trespassing before turning them over to immigration authorities.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Last month, the Pentagon created the same kind of military zone in New Mexico that's 200 miles long. Overall, 8,000 active-duty troops have now been deployed to the southern border.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Border crossings have plummeted. And across the country yesterday, police closed streets in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and other cities for annual May Day rallies that were supercharged by anger over the administration's policies.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The billionaire class should be afraid of the power of labor. At some of the events, there was a broad range of people, from labor groups to pro-Palestinian activists to anti-Trump protesters, who said they saw many of their concerns as overlapping.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: On Thursday, some of the country's largest insurance companies were accused of paying hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal kickbacks in exchange for steering people into private Medicare plans.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The new lawsuit, filed by a whistleblower along with the Justice Department, says that Aetna, Humana, and Elevance, formerly known as Anthem, incentivized insurance brokers to get people signed up for what are known as Medicare Advantage plans.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In recent years, those plans have been hugely lucrative for insurers, who've been accused of raking in billions of dollars by misrepresenting how sick patients are so they can overcharge the government.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Beyond the kickback allegations, federal prosecutors also accused some of the insurance companies and brokers of discriminating against people with disabilities.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: They say they steered them toward plans that earned them the most money instead of the ones best suited to the patient's health care needs.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Aetna, Elevance and Humana have denied the allegations.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And finally, Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, has proposed a new way to get people back into movie theaters, as box office numbers have tumbled.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The catch? It's an idea that many people find absolutely infuriating, going on your phone during the movie. Meta's experiment is an app called MovieMate, featuring a chatbot that will ping you with trivia and witty asides in real time as you watch, synced with the film.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The argument is that despite texting in movies still being largely taboo, a growing number of people are on their cell phones. Research shows 20% of young moviegoers already text in the theater, so why not channel that instinct?
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Meta teamed up with Blumhouse, the horror movie studio, to try it out. For one night only at a couple of theaters, they screened a movie from a few years ago, Megan, about a killer doll, and MovieMate texted along.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: One attendee at a screening in L thought it was kind of cool for about 20 minutes Then she told The Times she put her phone away and just looked at the messages later
--:-- Tracy Mumford: If you found yourself getting angry just listening to me describe this idea just know for now there are no public plans to try MovieMate anywhere else yet
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Those are the headlines. But stick around. Just after the credits, we are trying out a Headlines News Quiz.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: This show is made by Will Jarvis, Jessica Metzger, Jan Stewart, and me, Tracy Mumford. Original theme by Dan Powell. Special thanks to Isabella Anderson, Larissa Anderson, Jake Lucas, Zoe Murphy, Paula Schumann, and Chris Wood.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Now for the news quiz. For the next month, we're going to give you a chance to test your news knowledge on Fridays. So, we've got questions about three stories The Times covered this week.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Can you get them all? First up, in Spain on Monday. I definitely had avocado toast and what else did I? Oh, fruit. Tennis star Coco Goff was giving a post-match interview when... Maybe I just need to like not get a lot of sleep.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: What happened? The answer, there was a massive power outage. Across Spain and Portugal, tens of millions of people were plunged into a blackout that lasted almost 18 hours. The cause is still a mystery, and officials say an investigation is underway.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Okay, next question. Five, four, three. It was Jeff Bezos versus Elon Musk this week. Amazon launched its first batch of satellites to try and take on Starlink.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: That's Musk's satellite internet service that can beam high-speed data to almost any point on the globe. How many satellites did Amazon send up? Was it 27, 155, or 578?
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The answer is 27. But Amazon says it's going to need to get 578 satellites up into Earth's orbit before it can get the service started.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: They think they'll be able to do that by the end of the year, but they're still way behind Starlink, which has 7,000 satellites up in space and is launching more almost every week.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And last one, a little town in Belgium held a competition where participants from more than a dozen countries had to do their best impression of what animal's distinctive screech.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: It was a seagull for the European Gull Scream Championship, but the real question that I have for you is can you tell human from bird? Which one of these is the real gull and which one is the winner of the competition?
--:-- Tracy Mumford: We put in a little ocean sound to level out the playing field. The first squawk was a real gull, the second was Anna Brinald of Denmark, the reigning champion.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: That's it for the news quiz. The headlines will be back on Monday, and we'll try a few more questions next Friday.
