Triple Yasu.

Murder ads.

“Most mornings I learn more from New Items than I do from all of the traditional papers I read combined.” — Michael Blair, Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School and former presiding partner, Debevoise & Plimpton.

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1. A string of mixed signals from the Trump administration over the weekend regarding tariffs on smartphones, laptops and other electronics fueled fresh uncertainty over U.S. trade policy, setting up another chaotic week on Wall Street and in Washington. Tech investors briefly rejoiced when a notice from U.S. Customs and Border Protection posted late Friday said computers, tablets, Apple watches, computer monitors, semiconductor equipment and other electronics were exempt from many tariffs on Chinese products and a 10% tariff on all U.S. imports. When asked about the exemptions late Saturday, President Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he would talk more about them on Monday, adding that “we’ll be very specific.” Administration officials on Sunday, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, said the tech products exempted from many tariffs will face separate levies in a month or two as part of a trade investigation into semiconductors. White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said Sunday the official policy is “no exemptions, no exclusions.” “There was no tariff ‘exception’ announced on Friday,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform Sunday, adding that the products will be in the separate tariff bucket with semiconductors. (Source: wsj.com)

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2. Many European and Asian partners aren’t sure to what extent they are still allied with Washington. Trump’s initial “Liberation Day” order, after all, slapped them with sky-high tariffs that made no distinction between long-term adversaries and faithful allies. The shock from this attack, partially reversed only as a result of a U.S. market rout, with additional exceptions quietly adopted on Friday, has added to months of concerns about how much Trump’s America can be relied upon in an increasingly brutal world. That is especially so now that Trump has linked trade concessions to security cooperation. (Source: wsj.com)

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3. China has suspended exports of a wide range of critical minerals and magnets, threatening to choke off supplies of components central to automakers, aerospace manufacturers, semiconductor companies and military contractors around the world. Shipments of the magnets, essential for assembling everything from cars and drones to robots and missiles, have been halted at many Chinese ports while the Chinese government drafts a new regulatory system. Once in place, the new system could permanently prevent supplies from reaching certain companies, including American military contractors. The official crackdown is part of China’s retaliation for President Trump’s sharp increase in tariffs that started on April 2. (Source: nytimes.com)

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4. Xi Jinping has warned that US protectionism will “lead nowhere” as the Chinese leader embarked on a tour of Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia to strengthen ties with export-reliant south-east Asian economies rattled by Donald Trump’s escalating trade war. The visit, Xi’s first foreign trip this year, comes days after the US president raised tariffs on Chinese goods to as high as 145 per cent, deepening fears of a decoupling between the world’s two largest economies and triggering a sell-off in global markets. Ahead of the visit, Xi called for greater co-operation with Vietnam and other developing economies to promote an “equal and orderly multi-polar world”. “Trade war and tariff war will produce no winner, and protectionism will lead nowhere,” Xi wrote in Vietnamese media, adding that the countries should “resolutely safeguard the multilateral trading system, stable global industrial and supply chains and an open and co-operative international environment”. (Source: ft.com)

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5. The dollar weakened for a fifth day as traders looked past a reprieve on the imposition of certain electronic tariffs and after President Donald Trump downplayed his exemption for the technology sector. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index was down 0.2% after tumbling to its lowest since October in early Asian trading. The gauge has slumped almost 6% this year amid escalating trade tensions with China, uncertainty over US policy and concern economic growth will slow. The dollar’s decline resumed after Trump said on Sunday he will still apply tariffs to phones, computers and popular consumer electronics, downplaying an earlier reprieve as a procedural step in his efforts to overhaul US trade. (Source: bloomberg.com)

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6. The Economist:

In 1990s Japan the worst days of a market crisis brought about a “triple yasu” loss: a fall in stockmarkets, a rise in bond yields and a declining currency. It is now America that must stomach this noxious combination. Although President Donald Trump’s tariff pause provided a brief respite, the triple yasu has made an unwelcome return. Most alarming lately have been movements in the bond and currency markets. In total since April 1st the dollar has fallen by more than 4% against a basket of major currencies, at the same time as yields on ten-year Treasury bonds have risen by 0.3 percentage points.

In Japan the triple yasu was associated with national decline. Yet a flight from all American assets represents a far greater loss. That is because the dollar and Treasury bonds are the world’s havens, and the global financial system has been built on the assumption that they are safe.

If bond yields were rising because of stronger American economic growth, they would bring about a stronger greenback. That the dollar is falling instead suggests investors are worried about America’s economic stability. It is an ominous repeat of a pattern that struck in Britain after Liz Truss’s disastrous “mini-budget” in 2022, which promised unaffordable tax cuts. Although Mr Trump’s tariffs raise money for the government, such revenue could be dwarfed by the higher payouts required by rising bond yields. (Source: economist.com)

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7. Tyler Cowen:

The bottom line is that the smartest entities in the world—the top AI programs—will not just be Western but likely even American in their intellectual and ideological orientations for some while to come….

One of the biggest soft power victories in all of world history occurred over the last few years, and hardly anyone has noticed.

Chinese growth in the past half-century has been built on the premise that the Communist Party is the smartest and wisest entity in the country. (However much you may disagree with particular Chinese decisions or values, there is no denying that China has evolved from a very poor country to one of the world’s two most important economic and military powers.)

Moving to a world where the AIs are the smartest entities in China, rather than the CCP, is for China a radical change—and one the CCP is probably very afraid of. Much of the legitimacy of the CCP sprang from its claim to be a wise manager of the Chinese legacy. But now it will be outsourcing that management to Western-based AI models. From a Western geopolitical point of view, that could end up a lot better, and more effective, than planting a bunch of spies in the Chinese government. It will be a flipped version of a world where most Western textbooks and instructional practices and consulting firms were derived from the ideas of Chairman Mao. (Source: thefp.com)

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8. Iran and the US completed a successful opening round of indirect talks in Oman designed to prevent the weaponization of Iran’s nuclear program. In a sign the talks over a joint agenda had gone well, they agreed to meet again on 19 April. A breakdown would have come if Donald Trump had demanded the complete dismantling of Iran’s civil nuclear program, something that Iran is not prepared to contemplate. Iran insists it is pursuing only a civil nuclear program, but Donald Trump took the US out of the previous nuclear deal claiming Tehran’s regime was seeking a nuclear weapon. It appears he is resolved to pursue an updated version of the deal. (Source: theguardian.com)

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9. Authorities in several countries in Central Europe are working to contain an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease among cattle populations that has caused widespread border closures and required the killing of thousands of animals. The outbreak was first detected on a cattle farm in northwestern Hungary in early March, and animals on three farms in neighboring Slovakia tested positive for the highly transmissible virus two weeks later. Since then, animals from an additional three farms in Hungary and another three in Slovakia have tested positive for the virus, the first outbreak of the disease in either country in more than half a century. (Source: apnews.com)

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10. To show me just how bad gang crime has become in Sweden, all journalist Diamant Salihu has to do is forward a few mobile phone messages. At first glance, they look like spam, written in garish fonts and promising large sums of money, there to be earned. It’s only on closer examination that the purpose of the pistol and skull emojis becomes clear. These are so-called “murder ads” – posted online by gang leaders, offering bounties to anyone willing to carry out the hits. “All types of jobs are available,” reads one, promising up to one million krona (£78,000). “Age doesn’t matter”, adds another – explaining why many of Sweden’s new contract killers aren’t hardened hitmen, but children. Part of the problem, some say, is that Swedish law dictates anyone aged under 15 is too young to be prosecuted. “We have so many child soldiers that nobody can count anymore,” sighs Salihu, an investigative reporter for SVT, Sweden’s answer to the BBC. Barely a week passes in Sweden today without a teenager being arrested for such a hit, keeping Salihu extremely busy, and the public in the grip of a national crisis like no other before it. (Source: telegraph.co.uk)

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11. Ecuador’s electoral authority declared President Daniel Noboa the winner of Sunday’s election, giving him a full four-year term to try to rein in cocaine violence and rouse the economy from its lost decade. Socialist opposition candidate Luisa González declined to concede, however, and demanded a recount. With 94% of ballots tallied, investor favorite Noboa, 37, led González by 55.8% to 44.2% Electoral authority chief Diana Atamaint said that this gap and an “irreversible trend” made Noboa the victor. (Source: bloomberg.com)

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12. One of the hottest guests on MAGA podcasts nowadays is a bearded philosopher from Moscow who argues that Russian soldiers should march across Ukraine and obliterate what he calls the country’s “Nazi regime.” Alexander Dugin, a longtime fixture of Russian far-right politics, spent years calling for Moscow to reject Western-style liberal democracy and restore its lost empire, before Vladimir Putin embraced such policies himself. Some analysts have dubbed him “Putin’s brain,” although he rejects the label and says his influence over the Russian president is exaggerated. Now, Dugin is trying to find common ground with supporters of President Trump. Over the past year, he has given interviews to pro-Trump media personalities such as Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones. Appearing on their shows, he has attacked “wokeism,” transgender activists and George Soros, winning praise from his hosts. (Sources: wsj.com, newyorker.com)

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13. Gary Saul Morson:

After the fall of the USSR, ideologies competed to replace communism. Liberalism, considered foreign, was overwhelmed by various types of nationalism, one of which, Eurasianism, seems to have achieved the status of a semiofficial ideology. Putin uses Eurasianist phrases, the army’s general staff academy assigns a Eurasianist textbook, and popular culture has embraced its ideas and vocabulary. The better to build an empire, Eurasianism, like Stalinism, carries the banner of anti-imperialism, claiming to unite the world under Russian leadership in order to liberate it from Western cultural colonialism. It could be no other way. As Aleksandr Dugin, the movement’s current leader, explained, “Outside of empire, Russians lose their identity and disappear as a nation.” (Sources: slavic.northwestern.edu, nybooks.com)

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14. America's most prestigious law firms have agreed to provide almost $1 billion worth of legal work to President Trump — and that total will likely grow. Trump announced deals with 5 firms Friday. He's now gotten the giants of Big Law to pledge a combined $940 million in pro bono legal work for conservative causes. (Source: axios.com)

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15. A progressive Democratic lawmaker is seeking a simple but jarring remedy of last resort for California’s college students navigating the state’s housing crisis: Let them sleep in their cars. While roughly half a dozen state legislative proposals this year seek to fund student or faculty housing or loosen building regulations, the benefits would come far too late for current students struggling to stay afloat. With one in four California community college students experiencing homelessness in the past year, Democrats — who have a supermajority in the statehouse — face increasing pressure to deliver on affordability issues. Assemblymember Corey Jackson, a Southern California Democrat who has a doctorate in social work, said lawmakers can build long-term solutions while offering an immediate stopgap for a “worst case scenario.” His proposal, which cleared its first committee last month, would require community colleges and the California State University system to plan for an overnight parking program for students. (Source: politico.com)

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16. Painted ladies are the ultramarathoners of the butterfly world—even more so than monarchs. Scientists have long known about their globetrotting tendencies, but only recently have their exact migratory routes come into focus. Over several generations the butterflies can fly up to 9,300 miles annually from Scandinavia to equatorial Africa and back. Although not every painted lady travels widely, researchers recently detailed in PNAS Nexus that certain individuals fly up to 2,500 miles from Europe to overwintering grounds in the African Sahel, journeying over the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara Desert on the way. A few even inadvertently cross the Atlantic Ocean to South America, other researchers found. In North America, meanwhile, painted ladies flutter between Mexico and Canada. In Asia, they’ve even been spotted cutting through the Himalayas. “They’re not passive riders on the wind,” says Arthur M. Shapiro, an emeritus lepidopterist at the University of California, Davis. “They’re directing themselves.” In ideal breeding conditions, “the air is just completely full of them,” he adds. (Sources: scientificamerican.com, academic.oup.com, pnas.org, nature.com)

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