Lazy Caturday Reads: Space Cats with Today’s News

Good Afternoon!!

Cats in space, vintage postcard, 1911

As usual, much of today’s news is awful. Trump is working hard to destroy the U.S. Government, but his actions here have had a positive effect on the leadership of two of our allies. First liberals took over in Canada and now they’ve done it in Australia.

Michael E. Miller at The Washington Post: Australia’s Labor Party, buoyed by anti-Trump bump, wins reelection.

SYDNEY — Australia’s center-left government convincingly won reelection Saturday in a remarkable turnaround driven partly by anger over President Donald Trump’s disruptive trade war and its impact on the close U.S. military ally.

Anthony Albanese became the first Australian prime minister to win a second term in more than two decades as his Labor Partydramatically increased its parliamentary majority. It marked a stunning comeback for the progressive leader, who trailed in the polls two months ago.

In a jubilant victory speech, the 62-year-old struck a tone of unity while also alluding to his opponent’s failed embrace of Trump-like policies.

“We do not need to beg or borrow or copy from anywhere else,” Albanese said to a raucous Sydney crowd. “We do not seek out our inspiration overseas. We find it right here in our values and in our people.”

Trump’s tariffs — first 25 percent on Australia’s aluminum and steel, then 10 percent across the board — had driven voters toward the even-keeled incumbent and away from his conservative opponent, Peter Dutton, whose plans and rhetoric had echoed the American president, said Sean Kelly, a political columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald.

“Trump has absolutely dominated the trajectory of this election,” Kelly said, adding that the global uncertainty unleashed by Trump had made “Albanese’s boringness quite an appealing commodity.”

By Hilary Whiteman and Angus Watson at CNN: Australia’s center-left Labor Party retains power in vote seen as test of anti-Trump sentiment.

Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has secured a second term in office in a disastrous night for his conservative rivals, as voters chose stability over change against a backdrop of global turmoil inflicted by US President Donald Trump.

Australia’s return of a left-leaning government follows Canada’s similar sharp swing towards Mark Carney’s Liberal Party, another governing party whose fortunes were transformed by Trump. The loss of Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton’s seat mirrors that of Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre.

While Australia wasn’t facing the same threats to its sovereignty as Canada, Trump’s global tariffs and policy swings have undermined Australians’ trust in the US, according to recent surveys.

Albanese’s victory makes him the first Australian Prime Minister to win re-election for two decades and he will start his second term with at least 87 seats in the 150-seat lower house, according to the most recent estimates.

A clearly emotional Albanese took the stage to cheers just before 10 p.m. local time to thank Australians for choosing a majority Labor government, defying predictions both major parties would lose seats.

“In this time of global uncertainty, Australians have chosen optimism and determination,” Albanese said, at the Labor victory party in Sydney.

Dutton, who had hoped to end the night as prime minister, lost the outer-suburban Brisbane seat that he’s held for more than 20 years, ending a brutal night for the veteran politician who held senior seats in the last Coalition government.

Here in the USA, things aren’t so great. Trump’s tariffs are kicking in, the economy is struggling, he is trying to destroy education and the arts, RFK Jr. is working to make Americans sick, and Elon Musk and DOGE are wreaking havoc in government agencies. Here’s the latest.

Elisabeth Buchwald and Ramishah Maruf at CNN: A massive tariff on millions of Americans’ purchases just went into effect — cue the chaos.

Many Americans might not have felt major effects from President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs — until now.

That’s because a major shipping loophole expired at one minute past midnight on Friday. The de minimis exemption, as it’s known, allowed shipments of goods worth $800 or less to come into the United States duty-free, often more or less skipping time-consuming inspections and paperwork.

The loophole helped reshape the way countless Americans shop, allowing ultra-low-cost Chinese e-commerce sites like Shein, Temu and AliExpress to pour everything from yarn to patio furniture, clothes to photography equipment and more into US homes.

Its impending end has rung alarm bells across social media, with a baseline tariff as high as 145% depending on the carrier set to take effect on Chinese imports, potentially more than doubling the cost for all those cheap products deal-hungry Americans scooped up.

And the end of the de minimis exemption for Chinese goods will also distill abstract, complicated, messy, hard-to-follow trade policy into something much easier to understand: a receipt.

Major carriers like UPS, FedEx, DHL and the United States Postal Service say they’re prepared for the changes. The government says it, too, is set; a US Customs and Border Protection spokesperson told CNN that “We are prepared and equipped to carry out enhanced package screenings and enforce orders effectively.”

But whether regular American shoppers are ready for the changes is another matter.

Read more at CNN.

Caroline Petrow-Cohen and James Rainey at The Los Angeles Times:

Amid a wave of unprecedented tariffs, anxiety is running high for truck drivers like Helen, who makes her living delivering cargo containers from the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors to warehouses and other customers around Southern California.

After a strong start to the year, the number of jobs has started to slip in recent days and truck drivers have heard reports predicting a sharp decline in incoming cargo for May and June….

“There’s real concern that we’re going to be struggling,” said Helen, a Downey resident who declined to give her last name for fear she might lose work if she is considered disgruntled. “If ships are not coming in and there are no loads, then there is no work. If there is no work there’s no money.”

As President Trump’s aggressive tariffs rattle business owners and shake the foundation of American importing, the men and women who work on the ground at the country’s busiest port are feeling the effects too.

Thousands of dockworkers, heavy equipment operators and truck drivers support a flurry of activity at the Port of Los Angeles, which covers 7,500 acres on San Pedro Bay and processed more than 10 million 20-foot-long cargo units in 2024. The neighboring Port of Long Beach moved 9.6 million 20-foot equivalent units, or TEUs, last year.

With a 145% tariff on China, a 25% tariff on Canada and Mexico, and 10% tariffs on dozens of other countries, the flow of goods into the U.S. is expected to slow drastically.

Fewer shipments into the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach mean less work for the Californians who move cargo, said Raman Dhillon, chief executive of the North American Punjabi Trucking Assn.

“The truckers are scrambling right now,” he said. “They are at the verge of collapsing. The administration needs to move quickly, or it’s going to be chaos and price hikes and empty shelves.”

Trump isn’t worried about a recession and he doesn’t care how it will affect Americans. It’s just a transition period, he says.

Alexandra Marquez at NBC News: Trump downplays recession fears, saying the U.S. would be ‘OK’ in the long term.

President Donald Trump on Friday downplayed concerns about potential economic trouble, saying everything would be “OK” in the long term, even if the U.S economy experienced a recession in the short term.

Cat Astronaut, Michael Raiano

Asked twice by “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker whether it would be OK in the long run if there were a recession in the short term, the president said, “Look, yeah, it’s — everything’s OK. What we are — I said, this is a transition period. I think we’re going to do fantastically.”

Following up, Welker asked Trump if he was worried about a recession, to which he responded, “No.” Asked whether he thinks one could happen, Trump replied, “Anything can happen, but I think we’re going to have the greatest economy in the history of our country.”

The remarks come as analysts on Wall Street are increasingly worried that the country could face a recession due to Trump’s changing tariff policy.

“Well, you know, you say, ‘Some people on Wall Street say’ — well, I tell you something else. Some people on Wall Street say that we’re going to have the greatest economy in history. Why don’t you talk about them?” Trump said during the interview at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

“There are many people on Wall Street say this is going to be the greatest windfall ever happen,” the president added.

Really? Who are those people? Name one.

Trump doesn’t want the government to support the arts.

Michael Paulson at The New York Times: Trump Seeks to Eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts.

President Trump proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities in the budget he released Friday, taking aim once again at two agencies that he had tried and failed to get rid of during his first term.

The endowments, along with the Institute of Museum and Library Services, were among the entities listed in a section titled “small agency eliminations” in his budget blueprint for the next fiscal year. The document said that the proposal was “consistent with the president’s efforts to decrease the size of the federal government to enhance accountability, reduce waste, and reduce unnecessary governmental entities” and noted that Mr. Trump’s past budget proposals had “also supported these eliminations.”

In 2017, during his first term, Mr. Trump proposed eliminating both the arts and the humanities endowments. But bipartisan support in Congress kept them alive, and in fact their budgets grew during the first Trump administration.

Since Mr. Trump returned to office this year, his administration has taken aim at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, canceling most of their existing grants and laying off a large portion of their staffs. But the arts agency had yet to announce major cuts.

The proposal to eliminate the endowments drew a quick and furious reaction from Democrats. One, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, vowed to fight the plan to eliminate the N.E.A. “tooth and nail.”

Representative Chellie Pingree of Maine, who serves as the top Democrat on the House subcommittee overseeing the N.E.A., said in an interview that Mr. Trump was “making a broad-based attack on the arts, both for funding and content.” She cited his proposals to eliminate the endowments as well as his takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington and his efforts to influence the Smithsonian Institution.

“We were able to restore the funding last time,” she said, “but as you know, based on the first 100 days of this administration, they’re in no mood to keep much of government alive anymore, and their attack is focused on everything, and the arts have already got a bull’s-eye on their back.

Outerspace laser cats (greeting card)

Of course Trump is also attacking our vital educational institutions. The latest is his threat to remove Harvard’s tax-exempt status. Here in Boston, Harvard and MIT are gearing up to fight back.

Andrew Duehren, Maggie Haberman and Alan Blinder at The New York Times: Harvard Signals It Will Resist Trump’s Efforts to Revoke Tax-Exempt Status.

Harvard University signaled Friday that it would resist President Trump’s renewed threat to revoke the school’s tax-exempt status, a move for which it said there was “no legal basis” as the president escalated his bitter dispute with the nation’s oldest university.

Harvard stopped short of explicitly pledging a legal challenge to a revocation of its tax status, a change that would upend the university’s finances. But a spokesperson for the university said in a statement that there was “no legal basis to rescind Harvard’s tax-exempt status.”

“Such an unprecedented action would endanger our ability to carry out our educational mission,” the statement said. “It would result in diminished financial aid for students, abandonment of critical medical research programs and lost opportunities for innovation. The unlawful use of this instrument more broadly would have grave consequences for the future of higher education in America.”

Mr. Trump declared Friday morning on social media that the government would be “taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status.” Mr. Trump added, “It’s what they deserve.”

Despite Mr. Trump’s assertion online and Harvard’s sharp response, it was not immediately clear Friday whether the I.R.S. was in fact moving forward with revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status, a change that could typically occur only after a lengthy process. Federal law prohibits the president from directing the I.R.S. to conduct tax investigations, and I.R.S. employees who receive such a command are required to report it to an internal government watchdog.

Hilary Burns at The Boston Globe: At MIT, leaders discussed a strategy for navigating Trump administration funding cuts in private meeting.

The unrelenting high-velocity attacks from the Trump administration have forced leaders of the nation’s premier universities to navigate an extraordinary and bruising balancing act, choosing when to take a stand in the face of continued threats while trying to mitigate the loss of federal funding.

Among the schools where that intense drama is playing out is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the sobering realities of the administration’s funding cuts were discussed at a meeting convened by senior leaders in April.

Under one scenario presented at that meeting by treasurer Glen Shor, MIT risks losing the equivalent of 23 percent of revenues for its central budget, according to a recording of the presentation to school staff obtained by the Globe.

“Unfortunately, we should expect a prolonged period of challenge,” MIT president Sally Kornbluth told staff, according to the recording. “We really have to balance things. And I have to say, I feel a grave responsibility to you all . . . to ensure the livelihoods of this community and to make sure that we can continue to function. I need to balance all of these goalsthat are, again, often in great tension with each other.”

Kornbluth also outlined how she is trying to preserve institutional independence while being pragmatic with so much money hanging in the balance. MIT needs to “adapt” where necessary to the priorities of the federal government, she said, but also resist by suing when it feels the administration had overreached. Senior leaders are also working to improve the university’s reputation in Washington, D.C., and among the broader public.

The recording offers a rare inside look into how institutions are trying to respond to a fast-moving and ever-changing dynamic, with new lines of pressure from the administration coming from unforeseen angles.

I’m terrified by what is happening to public health under RFK Jr. Here’s the latest on that.

Jessica Glenza at The Guardian: World may be ‘post-herd immunity’ to measles, top US scientist says.

A leading immunologist warned of a “post-herd-immunity world”, as measles outbreaks affect communities with low vaccination rates in the American south-west, Mexico and Canada.

The US is enduring the largest measles outbreak in a quarter-century. Centered in west Texas, the measles outbreak has killed two unvaccinated children and one adult and spread to neighboring states including New Mexico and Oklahoma.

“We’re living in a post-herd-immunity world. I think the measles outbreak proves that,” said Dr Paul Offit, an expert on infectious disease and immunology and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

“Measles – because it is the most contagious of the vaccine-preventable diseases, the most contagious human disease really – it is the first to come back.”

The US eliminated measles in 2000. Elimination status would be lost if the US had 12 months of sustained transmission of the virus. As of 1 May, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported 935 confirmed measles cases across30 jurisdictions.Nearly one in three children under five years old involved in the outbreak, or 285 young children, have been hospitalized.

Three large outbreaks in Canada, Mexico and the US now account for the overwhelming majority of roughly 2,300 measles cases across the World Health Organization’s six-country Americas region, according to the health authority’s update this week. Risk of measles is considered high in the Americas, and has grown 11-fold compared with 2024.

Is RFK Jr. concerned about this situation? Not really.

Teddy Rosenbluth at The New York Times: Kennedy Orders Search for New Measles Treatments Instead of Urging Vaccination.

With the United States facing its largest single measles outbreak in 25 years, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will direct federal health agencies to explore potential new treatments for the disease, including vitamins, according to an H.H.S. spokesman. The decision is the latest in a series of actions by the nation’s top health official that experts fear will undermine public confidence in vaccines as an essential public health tool.

The announcement comes as Mr. Kennedy faces intense backlash for his handling of the outbreak. It has swept through large areas of the Southwest where vaccination rates are low, infecting hundreds and killing two young girls. On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported more than 930 cases nationwide, most of which are associated with the Southwest outbreak.

Critics have said Mr. Kennedy has focused too much on untested treatments — such as cod liver oil supplements — and offered only muted support for the measles vaccine, which studies show is 97 percent effective in preventing infection.

The decision to put more resources into potential treatments, rather than urging vaccination, could have grave consequences at the center of the outbreak….

Scientists have already thoroughly studied various vitamins and medications as potential treatments for measles, said Michael Osterholm an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota.

Decades of research have turned up no miracle treatment for the measles virus, which can cause pneumonia, making it difficult for patients to get oxygen into their lungs, and brain swelling, which can cause blindness, deafness and intellectual disabilities.

RFK also wants to eliminate fluoride from our water. And check this out from Texas. Beth Mole at Ars Technica: Texas goes after toothpaste in escalating fight over fluoride.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is investigating two leading toothpaste makers over their use of fluoride, suggesting that they are “illegally marketing” the teeth cleaners to parents and kids “in ways that are misleading, deceptive, and dangerous.”

Space cats from Mars, Damien Northmore

The toothpaste makers in the crosshairs are Colgate-Palmolive Company, maker of Colgate toothpastes, and Proctor & Gamble Manufacturing Co., which makes Crest toothpastes. In an announcement Thursday, Paxton said he has sent Civil Investigative Demands (CIDs) to the companies.

The move is an escalation in an ongoing battle over fluoride, which effectively prevents dental cavities and improves oral health. Community water fluoridation has been hailed by health and dental experts as one of the top 10 great public health interventions for advancing oral health across communities, regardless of age, education, or income. But, despite the success, fluoride has always had detractors—from conspiracy theorists in the past suggesting the naturally occurring mineral is a form of communist mind control, to more recent times, in which low-quality, controversial studies have suggested that high doses may lower IQ in children.

These people are insane.

Just a few Elon Musk stories before I wrap this post up.

Lindsay Whitehurst at the AP: Trump administration asks Supreme Court to let DOGE access Social Security systems.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Friday to clear the way for Elon Musk ’s Department of Government Efficiency to access Social Security systems containing personal data on millions of Americans.

The emergency appeal is the first in a string of applications to the high court involving DOGE’s swift-moving work across the federal government.

It comes after a judge in Maryland restricted the team’s access to Social Security under federal privacy laws. The agency holds personal records on nearly everyone in the country, including school records, bank details, salary information and medical and mental health records for disability recipients, according to court documents.

The government says the team needs access to target waste in the federal government. Musk, now preparing to step back from his work with DOGE, has been focused on Social Security as an alleged hotbed of fraud. The billionaire entrepreneur has described it as a “ Ponzi scheme ” and insisted that reducing waste in the program is an important way to cut government spending.

Solicitor General John Sauer argued Friday that the judge’s restrictions disrupt DOGE’s important work and inappropriately interfere with executive-branch decisions. “Left undisturbed, this preliminary injunction will only invite further judicial incursions into internal agency decision-making,” he wrote.

I shudder to think what the Supreme Court will do with this.

Matthew Cunningham-Cook at Rolling Stone: Elon Musk and His DOGE Bro Have Cashed In on Americans’ Retirement Savings.

In the lead up to the April 1 election for the Wisconsin state Supreme Court, a little-known private equity executive by the name of Antonio Gracias joined Tesla billionaire Elon Musk on stage as the latter launched into a tirade clearly inspired by the white supremacist Great Replacement Theory — the discredited canard that the Biden administration was letting in millions of “illegals” to engage in mass voter fraud.

On the dais, Gracias described how his foray into Social Security had revealed something already widely known to immigration policymakers: that the Biden administration had substantially expanded the Temporary Protected Status program, allowing millions of immigrants to enter and work in the country legally. These noncitizens were given Social Security numbers, as is completely standard — in fact, the process was automated during Trump’s first term — but Gracias and Musk, the world’s richest man, treated it like a scandal.

“We started at the top of the system mapping the whole system of Social Security to understand where the fraud was — this is what jumped out at us,” Gracias said. “When we saw these numbers, we asked ‘What is this?’ In ‘21, you see 270,000 people, it goes all the way to 2.1 million in ‘24. These are noncitizens that are getting Social Security numbers. … This literally blew us away. We went there to find fraud, and we found this by accident.” Noting that his parents and siblings, like Musk, are immigrants, Gracias added, “I’m pro-legal immigration — this is about America and the future of America.”

The crowd of conservatives gasped as the billionaires made it sound as if they and their team at Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency had finally found proof of the waste, fraud, and abuse in the Social Security Administration that Musk has repeatedly talked about — examples that might help justify the massive upheaval that DOGE has created within the agency that manages America’s core retirement program.

Check this out:

Despite all of Musk and Gracias’ rhetoric about rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in Social Security, scant attention has been paid to how the pair has become phenomenally wealthy with support from Americans’ retirement funds.

It’s well-known that Musk’s space company, SpaceX, has long cashed in on federal contracts — a trend turbocharged by Trump’s administration. Gracias, for his part, has relied on significant investments from public retirement systems to fund his firm’s deals. In the past decade, Gracias’ private equity firm, Valor Equity Partners, has received at least $1.7 billion in investment commitments from state and local pension funds — which manage the retirement savings of unionized teachers, firefighters, social workers, bus drivers, and cops — according to a Rolling Stone review of public documents.

Much of this money has come from Democratic states and locales. For its most recent fund, Valor received $800 million in investment commitments from a range of state and local pension funds. Investors include the California Public Employees’ Retirement System; the California State Teachers’ Retirement System; the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund; the New York State Teachers’ Retirement System; a range of New York City pension funds; the Philadelphia Board of Pensions and Retirement; and the Hartford Municipal Employees Retirement Fund in Connecticut.

There’s much more at the link. If you clear your cache, you should be able to read it.

That’s all I have for you today. What’s on your mind?