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Via The Cradle

The Iranian Foreign Ministry affirmed on Friday that Tehran is committed to continuing the diplomatic process and negotiations regarding its nuclear program but that it "will not accept pressure and threats that violate international law and target the rights of the Iranian people."

In a statement, the ministry condemned the continued illegal sanctions on Iran and the "pressure on its economic partners," viewing them as "further evidence that the United States is not serious about adopting a diplomatic approach toward Iran."

Via Tehran Times

It also stressed that the continuation of these policies "will not change Iran's firm positions in defending its legitimate rights," and that "testing failed methods will only lead to a repetition of past failures."

The Foreign Ministry went on to say that the Iranian negotiating delegation, during the first three rounds, attempted to "reach a fair agreement that guarantees the rights of the Iranian people, within the specified frameworks that allow Tehran to use peaceful nuclear energy."

Tehran entered indirect negotiations with Washington following US President Donald Trump's letter to Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, to "resolve a fabricated crisis through diplomacy, based on good faith," the statement added.

The Ministry's statement came after Trump announced on Thursday that all purchases of Iranian oil or petrochemical products must stop, warning that any country or individual continuing such trade would face immediate secondary sanctions and be barred from doing business with the US.

"They will not be allowed to do business with the United States of America in any way, shape, or form," he wrote on Truth Social on Thursday. Secondary sanctions are a powerful tool for the US because of the size of its economy.

Trump's comments follow the postponement of the latest US talks with Iran over its nuclear program. The Iranian Foreign Ministry announced on Thursday that the fourth round of talks, which were due to take place in Rome on Saturday, had been rescheduled at the suggestion of the Sultanate of Oman for “logistical reasons.”

Sources speaking with Al Mayadeen explained that the postponement came "against the backdrop of the conflicting positions taken by the US administration regarding the talks, and Washington's efforts to change the general framework for negotiations that had been previously agreed upon."

In a related development, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio asserted on Thursday that Iran must "walk away" from both uranium enrichment and the development of long-range missiles. 

"They have to walk away from sponsoring terrorists, they have to walk away from helping the Houthis (in Yemen), they have to walk away from building long-range missiles that have no purpose to exist other than having nuclear weapons, and they have to walk away from enrichment," Rubio said in an interview with Fox News. 

Iran has always been five years away from a nuclear weapon, and we’ve always been at war with Eastasia https://t.co/ZSt8KzQ1iC

— Liam McCollum (@MLiamMcCollum) April 21, 2025

His comments came as the fourth round of nuclear negotiations between Tehran and Washington, set to take place in Rome on Saturday, were postponed. 

An Iranian official cited by Reuters said a new date for the talks would be set "depending on the US approach." Tehran has repeatedly affirmed that both its uranium enrichment and its defense capabilities are non-negotiable in the talks with the US.

Thought leaders dubbed ChatGPT’s emergence - and subsequent generative AI proliferation - as the “fourth industrial age.”

Whether it will re-shape the economy entirely still remains to be seen. But there’s no denying that most people are familiar with, and are actively using AI.

What are they using it for?

This ranking tracks the most popular AI use cases as sourced from an analysis done by Marc Zao-Sanders for Harvard Business Review. He examined thousands of forum posts over the last year in a follow-up to his 2024 analysis.

The top 30 ranks from this report have been visualized in this graphic via Visual Capitalist's Pallavi Rao. Labels have been edited lightly from the source for readability. 

This visualization is part of Visual Capitalist’s AI Week, sponsored by Terzo.

Here’s How Everyone is Using AI in 2025

People are using AI for support (both professional and personal) in 2025

In fact, the top three use cases (therapy, life organization, and finding purpose) all show that AI can assist humans in managing both emotions and their life.

2024 Use Case Category 2025 Use Case Category 1 Generate Ideas Content
Creation 1 Therapy & Companionship Support 2 Therapy & Companionship Support 2 Organize Life Support 3 Specific Search Research
& Analysis 3 Find Purpose Support 4 Edit text Content
Creation 4 Enhance Learning Learning &
Education 5 Explore Interests Learning &
Education 5 Generate Code Technical
Assistance 6 Fun & Nonsense Creativity &
Recreation 6 Generate Ideas Content
Creation 7 Troubleshoot Technical
Assistance 7 Fun & Nonsense Creativity &
Recreation 8 Enhance Learning Learning &
Education 8 Improve Code Technical
Assistance 9 Personalize Learning Learning &
Education 9 Creativity Content
Creation 10 General advice Support 10 Healthy Living Support 11 Draft emails Content
Creation 11 Interview Preparation Learning &
Education 12 Explainers Learning &
Education 12 Generate Images Creativity &
Recreation 13 Write & Edit Résumé Support 13 Specific Search Research
& Analysis 14 Excel Formulas Technical
Assistance 14 Explainers Learning &
Education 15 Email Writing Content
Creation 15 Cooking Guidance Creativity &
Recreation 16 Evaluate Copy Research
& Analysis 16 Troubleshoot Technical
Assistance 17 Improve Decisions Research
& Analysis 17 Personalize Learning Learning &
Education 18 Translation Technical
Assistance 18 Boost Confidence Support 19 Improve Code Technical
Assistance 19 Email Writing Content
Creation 20 Draft Document Content
Creation 20 Explain Legalese Technical
Assistance 21 Navigate
Personal Disputes Support 21 Child Entertainment Creativity &
Recreation 22 Summarize Content Learning &
Education 22 Corporate LLM Support 23 Make a Complaint Support 23 Student Essays Learning &
Education 24 Recommendations Creativity &
Recreation 24 Travel Itinerary Support 25 Cooking Guidance Creativity &
Recreation 25 Childcare Help Creativity &
Recreation 26 Generate Appraisals Content
Creation 26 Medical Advice Support 27 Creativity Content
Creation 27 Navigate Personal Disputes Support 28 Medical Advice Support 28 Generate Legal Document Content
Creation 29 Generate
Legal Document Content
Creation 29 Conversations Support 30 Fix Code Technical
Assistance 30 Anti-trolling Content
Creation

And aside from therapy, these were not the top uses in 2024: which revolved around idea generation and search.

Speaking of AI search, its popularity has fallen 10 spots. People are still interested in learning and making AI explain concepts or add context for them. But they’re not actively looking up information as much.

(This may also be because of Gemini’s integration in Google Search).

AI For Mental Health: Good or Bad?

With mental health support severely underfunded and the Loneliness Epidemic only continuing, it’s no surprise AI has emerged as a viable outlet for people to get some support in their life.

Experts say they can see its usefulness for teaching mindfulness or cognitive behavioral therapy to users.

However, the problem occurs when AI is used as a replacement for actual human relationships, preventing deeper human connections, in turn exacerbating loneliness.

Need More AI Insights? From our AI Week coverage, brought to you by Terzo, check out the Countries Accumulating the Most AI Patents and much more on the AI content hub and discover where the future of AI is going to emerge.

Authored by Jonathan Lesser via RealClearEnergy,

A recent article published in Nature claims that climate liability lawsuits, such as the ones various U.S. states and municipalities continue to pursue, are on rock-solid legal grounds, thanks to the authors’ new research “proving” that the world would be $28 trillion richer today but for carbon emissions from fossil fuels over a 30-year period, 1991 -2020. Ignoring the emissions from developing countries, notably China, which today accounts for one-third of all energy-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the authors focus instead on oil companies, which they call the “carbon majors” – especially Saudi Aramco, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, and Gasprom.

For example, according to the authors Chevron has caused an estimated $2 trillion in damages, and perhaps as much as $3.6 trillion. Exxon Mobil is right behind at $1.9 trillion. Similarly, Saudi Aramco and Gazprom are each responsible for $2 trillion in damages. BP is the laggard, at just under $1.5 trillion in damages. Levying fines of those amounts, which greatly exceed these companies’ market values, would lead to their immediate bankruptcy. While the authors may consider such an outcome a “win,” bankrupting these companies would not change the physical and economic realities that the world depends on fossil fuels and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. (Moreover, it is not clear who would levy the fines and who would receive the monies received – other than trial lawyers.)

To derive their damage estimates, the authors combine bad science with bad economics. First, they use simplified climate models to predict what average world temperatures would have been had there been no GHG emissions from fossil fuels. Next, they use other models to determine how many fewer extreme heat events, which they define as the hottest five days of each year, there would have been absent GHG emissions from fossil fuels. Finally, they calculate the damages in terms of lost GDP based on a simplistic regression model that assumes lost GDP increases in proportion to the square of temperature increases, and which ignores the myriad other economic factors that affect economic growth. They justify this absurd specification, which has no economic basis, on “peer-reviewed research” – a previous article they published.

The approach used by these authors is a form of “attribution science,” which attempts to link specific weather-related events to GHG emissions. That approach, which was first developed about two decades ago to attribute a 2003 European heat wave to climate change, is statistical legerdemain that depends on counterfactual models, just as the authors use here.

Ironically, the authors acknowledge the benefits of fossil fuels, stating that “fossil fuels have also produced immense prosperity.” Yet, they purposefully ignore those benefits because, as they state, “these companies have already been handsomely paid.” This latter statement reveals further economic ignorance. Without fossil fuels, modern life would be impossible. The benefits of fossil fuels to modern society are probably incalculable, but they far exceed the profits these companies have made, and far exceed the damage estimates the authors calculate.

The authors claim that fossil fuel damages are what economists call an “externality” and that “Courts may need to consider how the benefits of energy use are balanced against its externalities and the potential duty of care these companies have to the public.” (They also raise the discredited claim that oil companies “knew” about climate change and hid the evidence from the public.)

Externalities are a real phenomenon of energy development and use. But in this case the externalities are unobservable and instead estimated based on theoretical models having little accuracy. Moreover, levying penalties to “internalize” an externality that would cause far greater economic losses is unjustified.

Ultimately, this article is simply an advocacy piece for specious lawsuits against oil companies with deep financial pockets. Nature should be ashamed of itself for publishing it.

Jonathan Lesser is a Senior Fellow with the National Center for Energy Analytics. His report, “The Social Cost of Carbon: A Flawed Measure for Energy Policy,” was released on April 23.

Authored by Ana Kasparian via RealClearInvestigations,

Smiley Martin should have been behind bars. 

A career criminal with a long rap sheet involving firearms, he was given a 10 year sentence in 2018 for punching, dragging and severely beating his girlfriend with a belt. In prison, Martin was found guilty of beating another inmate and engaging in other criminal activity. Nevertheless, he was freed just four years later, thanks to a plea deal that categorized him as a “nonviolent offender” and a California ballot measure that sharply reduced sentences for “good behavior.”

Just two months after his release, Martin and several accomplices, including his brother, were arrested for carrying out the worst mass shooting in Sacramento’s history – leaving six dead and 12 others injured on April 3, 2022. Martin was charged with three counts of murder and illegal possession of a firearm, including a machine gun. He will not stand trial on those charges, since the 29-year-old died in jail of a drug overdose last September.

Martin’s life and death have brought attention to the criminal justice reform that helped put him back on the streets: Proposition 57. The ballot measure was sold to the public in 2016 as a way to relieve the state’s chronically overcrowded prisons by rewarding “nonviolent” offenders for good behavior by shortening their sentences. It was supposed to be a humanitarian answer to what social justice activists described as an epidemic of “mass incarceration.” It has instead put tens of thousands of violent offenders such as Martin back on the streets.

Many of them have been rearrested. The latest Recidivism Report from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation shows that nearly two thirds (64.2%) of the 34,215 inmates granted early release between July 1, 2019 and June 30, 2020 had been rearrested as of April 2, 2025.

Breaking down the recidivism rate for prisoners within three years of their release, it reported that “22.1% of the release cohort (7,567 individuals) were convicted of a felony offense, and 17.0% (5,828 individuals) were convicted of a misdemeanor offense.” The Department of Corrections also reports almost half the inmates granted early release had not earned any credits for good behavior.

Prop 57 critics are not surprised. In the run-up to the 2016 ballot measure – which was approved with the support of 65% of voters – the measure’s opponents warned that violent criminals like Martin would likely benefit from the initiative.

But they were denounced as scaremongers. When Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert warned that Prop 57 would free perpetrators of domestic violence, then-Gov. Jerry Brown, who was the top proponent for the ballot measure, shot back; “That’s a complete red herring, and it’s very disingenuous of these highly politicized prosecutors to make that claim.” Brown assured voters that each inmate’s crime and behavior in prison would be considered before release was granted. 

While supporters of Prop 57 described it as a humane response to a court order, critics say its proponents misrepresented the bill to secure its passage. At a time when President Trump is putting progressive criminal justice organizations in his crosshairs, the troubled history of Prop 57 highlights the challenges of rehabilitating inmates while also reducing prison overcrowding without building more prisons.

Gov. Jerry Brown's Role 

The single most aggressive advocate for Prop 57 was former Democratic Gov. Brown, who had to contend with the consequences of a sentencing reform he had signed in 1976 during his first stretch as governor, when tough-on-crime measures were enacted. Now decades later, with Brown governor again, California’s prisons were housing nearly double the capacity of inmates they were built for. Facilities were so severely overcrowded that the U.S. Supreme Court found their conditions violated inmates' Eighth Amendment Constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. In May 2011, months following Brown’s inauguration, the court ruled in a split decision that the state must remedy the issue.

In writing for the five-member majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy argued that the state’s prison system was stretched so thin that it failed to provide basic medical care, which, as he wrote, was "incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in a civilized society.” Citing how one prisoner was dying every week due to deficient medical care, Kennedy declared that the courts "must not shrink from their constitutional obligation to enforce the rights of all persons, including prisoners.”

At the prison population’s peak in 2006, more than 165,000 inmates were locked up in a system meant to handle 85,000. But budgetary pressures meant that the state legislature wasn’t willing to allocate the funding necessary to build more space to house inmates. So, the court ordered them to reduce the prison population by 30,000 inmates in order to limit overcrowding to 137% capacity. While there is no specific constitutional level for overcrowding, the majority opted to give California a little more wiggle room than the 130% capacity recommended by the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Brown, eager to get federal oversight off his back, joined the state legislature and sprung into action with the passage of AB109, which transferred inmates from crowded state detention facilities into county jails. But some county jails were riddled with the same problems and lacked the capacity to house an influx of inmates. With resources stretched thin, counties began releasing criminals years before they served their sentences. 

By 2014, a Los Angeles Times investigation found more than 13,500 inmates were being released early from county jails each month across the state. Although the public was assured that only those who posed little danger were let go, data shows that some counties completely halted incarceration of those convicted of crimes like domestic violence and child abuse. 

The early release of convicted sex offender Sidney DeAvila was one particularly gruesome example of the unintended consequences of AB109. After DeAvila was let out early from San Joaquin County Jail in February 2013, he went on to rape, kill and dismember his 76-year-old grandmother.

Undeterred by the impact AB109 had on public safety, Brown later campaigned for Prop 47, a 2014 ballot measure that was advertised to Californians as simply lowering penalties for nonviolent crimes like petty theft and drug possession. But the public was left in the dark about how the measure would also lower penalties for car thieves, drug traffickers and open-air drug markets. 

Nevertheless, Brown began promoting additional reforms aimed at lowering California’s prison population.

Officially known as the Public Safety and Rehabilitation Act of 2016, Prop 57 would, according to Brown, address the state’s prison overcrowding problem while keeping communities safe. Brown pitched the measure as an enlightened step that “orients the prison toward rehabilitation” while appreciating the human capacity for change. “All of us learn. I’ve learned in 40 years,” Brown said at the time. “I think prisoners can learn.” 

But Brown also assured voters there were limits to his progressive vision. He repeatedly noted the ballot measure’s language that only people “convicted of a nonviolent felony offense and sentenced to state prison shall be eligible for parole consideration after completing the full term for his or her primary offense.”  Brown told the Mercury News newspaper in 2016 that“we had planned to offer parole to violent offenders, but we took that out.”

Brown estimated that only about 1,100 prisoners per year would qualify for the program. Prosecutors who opposed the measure in the run-up to the vote also underestimated the number of beneficiaries when they pegged it at 16,000.   

Critics, including some law enforcement groups, district attorneys, and victims’ advocates, argue that Brown’s miscalculation was part of an effort to mislead voters about Prop 57’s reach. Despite repeated assurances that violent criminals would not qualify for early release under the measure, the legislature's previous crime reclassification efforts meant that only 23 specific crimes – such as murder, rape, arson and carjacking – were considered offenses that would disqualify prisoners from the measure’s benefits. Many crimes the public would consider violent, including Smiley Martin severely beating his girlfriend, are not included on that list.

“Dozens of serious crimes would be considered non-violent for parole purposes,” warned CalMatters columnist Dan Walters, including “assault with a deadly weapon, soliciting murder, intimidating or harming a crime victim or witness, resisting arrest that injures a police officer, violent elder or child abuse, arson with injury, human trafficking and several forms of manslaughter.”

Plea bargains also make some violent criminals eligible for early release. Martin, for example, was originally charged with kidnapping, which is identified as a violent offense in the penal code. But that charge was withdrawn in his deal.

Brown also assured voters that felons who had been convicted of various sexual crimes would not be considered for early release. However, rape of an unconscious person, sex trafficking and even the trafficking of children for sex are not considered violent felonies according to California’s Penal Code. In confirming the deceptive criminal classifications in the state, Attorney General Rob Bonta told CalMatters that these crimes “should be discussed and potentially changed under whatever the appropriate means is for Prop 57.” 

The state legislature agreed with Bonta on the prosecution of child sex predators. Soliciting minors under the age of 16 for sex was considered a misdemeanor in California up until September 2024, when Gov. Gavin Newsom finally signed legislation reclassifying it as a felony with tougher penalties. Previously, soliciting a minor for sex, or paying for it, was simply a misdemeanor punishable by two days in jail and a $10,000 fine.

In 2021, California’s Supreme Court weighed in on Prop 57 and unanimously sided with those who had argued that Brown falsely portrayed the measure’s reach. In writing the unanimous decision, Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye stated that “there are portions of [Prop 57’s] opponents’ argument that the [Corrections] Department must concede were correct, including the characterization that individuals convicted of and currently serving sentences for offenses … like assault with a deadly weapon would be eligible for nonviolent offender parole consideration, or that an individual with a prior violent felony conviction for murder would not be excluded from nonviolent offender parole consideration.”

The Chief Justice addressed how perpetrators of serious sex crimes were also qualifying for early release under the measure. She wrote that “the initiative’s language provides no indication that the voters intended to allow the [Corrections] Department to create a wholesale exclusion from parole consideration based on an inmate’s sex offense convictions when the inmate was convicted of a nonviolent felony.”

While the Court didn’t mention Gov. Brown by name, his promotion of the ballot measure was subtly cited by the Chief Justice. “Had the drafters of Proposition 57, and by extension the voters, intended to exclude inmates from nonviolent offender parole consideration based on prior or current sex offense convictions,” the Chief Justice wrote, “it would have been a simple matter to say so explicitly.”

The court’s ruling made little difference, because mere weeks before its decision, voters overwhelmingly rejected another poorly written ballot measure that was supposed to close the violent crime loophole in Prop 57. The measure, known as Proposition 20, sought to alter Prop 57 by denying early release to perpetrators of violent crimes that had not been listed in the California Penal Code. 

However, the measure was misleadingly described as limiting “access to parole programs established for nonviolent offenders.” In other words, there was a fundamental problem with using the word “nonviolent” to describe the gaps in Prop 57 that the measure sought to remedy. Most voters were unaware that the state penal code listed violent crimes like the rape of a unconscious person as nonviolent offenses. So, they were under the impression that Prop 20 sought to impose harsh punishments for petty crimes, which many in liberal California are against. 

Prop 20’s timing may have also led to its demise. Voters decided on the measure in the aftermath of George Floyd’s 2020 murder while in the custody of Minneapolis police and the country was amid what many referred to as a “racial reckoning.” The country, and especially liberal states like California, were less interested in public safety and more open to criminal justice reforms due to concerns over mass incarceration and what they saw as racist policing.

Credit Where Credit Wasn’t Due

Even if voters had been aware that those found guilty of trafficking children or strangling their wives would still be eligible for early release under Prop 57, no one was under the impression that felons would have their sentences cut short without enrolling in rehabilitation programs or earning good behavior credits. However, the latest CDCR report discloses that of the 34,215 inmates who were released early in fiscal year 2019, 13,833 did not earn any enhanced behavior credits to justify a reduction in their prison sentence. Some 44% of those who didn’t earn any credits would be convicted of a new crime following their release.

Even more damning is that the CDCR’s report concedes that the state released “high risk” inmates who are more likely to reoffend. Based on the California Static Risk Assessment (CSRA), a tool used to calculate the risk of a parolee committing a new crime, “high, moderate, and low-risk individuals recidivate at about 60 percent, 40 percent, and 20 percent, respectively.” Yet in fiscal year 2019, “approximately 41.2 percent of individuals in the release cohort have a high-risk score according to the CSRA.”

Indeed, many of the inmates who were released under Prop 57 in 2019 went on to reoffend and get convicted of new crimes (44.0%). However, there were fewer convictions for those who did earn rehabilitative credits in prison (35.8%). 

Of the 39.1% of parolees in fiscal year 2019 who were convicted of other crimes within the first three years of their release, 22.1% were for felonies and 17% for misdemeanors. But only 17.4% of the convicted felons returned to prison. Even so, according to the report, “the percentage of individuals returned for crimes against persons increased by 2.9 percentage points, the largest increase of any return type.”

While overcrowding was the very issue that led to measures like Prop 57, state officials have shuttered several state prisons in recent years. Four were closed in 2021 alone, and it appears that state officials are intentionally avoiding prison time for convicts because their objective is to close more for fiscal and ideological reasons. 

A local Los Angeles publication reported last spring that “because of the declining inmate headcount, California can close up to five more of its 33 prisons and eight yards within operating prisons while still complying with a federal court order that caps the system’s capacity.”  According to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, the state could save up to $1 billion a year by doing so. The cost to the public’s safety when there’s nowhere to detain perpetrators of violent crimes was not factored into its analysis. 

By November 2024, many Californians were fed up. More than 65% of Alameda County voters approved the recall of Oakland’s progressive District Attorney Pamela Price. Similarly, Los Angeles denied a second term to D.A. George Gascon, another criminal justice reformer. Gascon was replaced with his tough-on-crime challenger Nathan Hochman. Finally, nearly 70% of voters approved Proposition 36, which would reverse an earlier ballot measure that weakened punishments for certain offenses like shoplifting and drug crimes, including trafficking. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom was, and still is, vehemently against Prop 36, citing the financial burden of holding criminals accountable in one of the highest taxed states in the country. Nonetheless, Prop 36 is “an unfunded mandate” that will “set this state back,” according to Newsom. After all, if drug traffickers and repeat smash-and-grab thieves are met with harsher punishments like prison time, the spotlight would be on Newsom for preemptively closing the very facilities necessary to serve their sentences.

In a recent interview, Los Angeles Police Department Chief Jim McDonnell expressed frustration over serving the public safety demands of the community with less prison space available. “While the [District Attorney] will file cases that are now available to us through Prop 36, you still have a jail system that is decreasing in size continuously,” McDonnell stated. “When I was Sheriff, there were 18,000 beds available [in Los Angeles County]. It’s now down to 12,400,” he continued. Chief McDonnell argues that the lack of beds is the reason many offenders are back on the streets “without the resources or rehabilitation that we would have liked to have seen.”

While Gov. Newsom has claimed that he “absolutely will implement the will of the voters,” following the passage of Prop 36, the state legislature has refused to allocate the funding necessary to implement it. The truth is, even if the state’s lawmakers provided the money, Californians would still have a mountain to climb with all the various ways the state has chipped away at public safety, including Prop 57, crime reclassifications and prison closures.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has advised new parents to research vaccines recommended for their children, as he also disclosed that health officials are looking into how some children start experiencing symptoms of autism shortly after vaccination.

During an April 28 town hall with Phil McGraw, also known as Dr. Phil, a mother asked Kennedy what his advice would be to new mothers with regard to vaccines.

“I would say that we live in a democracy, and part of the responsibility of being a parent is to do your own research,” Kennedy said. 

“You research the baby stroller, you research the foods that they’re getting, and you need to research the medicines that they’re taking as well.”

Kennedy, who heads the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said before becoming health secretary that no vaccines are safe. 

During his confirmation hearings, he described himself as “pro-safety” and not “anti-vaccine.” 

“I believe vaccines have saved millions of lives and play a critical role in health care,” he said at one point.

About one-third of respondents to a Gallup survey in 2021 said that they do their own research when their doctor gives them important medical advice.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is part of HHS, currently recommends that children receive 12 vaccine doses in their first four months of life, and dozens more before they become adults. Many of the vaccines are required to attend school.

The CDC’s last report on the four required vaccinations found that coverage declined between the 2019–2020 and 2022–2023 school years, while the exemption rate increased.

Additionally, just 13 percent of children have received the currently available COVID-19 vaccines, according to CDC data.

Kennedy confirmed during the town hall that he’s considering removing COVID-19 vaccines from the childhood vaccination schedule.

“We’re seeing a lot of adverse events from the vaccine—particularly in children—myocarditis, pericarditis, even strokes. ... American people are trusting us to make a good risk-benefit judgment when we recommend these products, and we need to go back and look at that recommendation,” he said.

Kennedy also said that officials are examining whether there is a link between autism and vaccines.

A woman asked Kennedy to explain how the ingredients in the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine can cause inflammation of the brain and autism.

“We’re in the process of researching all those questions. That’s something—because it’s so often reported by parents and physicians, that chain of events, where somebody ... goes in for their 16-month or wellness visit, and they get the MMR and maybe a number of other vaccines at the same time,” Kennedy said.

“Many of them, many of the parents have reported that their kid, that their child developed autism immediately after the vaccine—so that’s something that we’re looking at right now.”

The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has identified some cases of vaccine-induced brain injuries, and some vaccine experts have said there’s evidence that vaccines can cause autism. Others have said there is no link. The CDC states on its website that studies “show that vaccines are not associated with ASD,” or autism spectrum disorder.

The rate of autism, a disorder whose symptoms include difficulty learning, has been increasing in recent years. Officials said in April that the rate was up to one in 31 children, and Kennedy has vowed to identify the causes.

Kennedy on April 28 also reiterated his stance that health officials recommend receipt of the MMR vaccine to lower the risk of contracting measles, amid several outbreaks in the United States. However, he also said that the MMR vaccine has problems and that officials are studying it.

“The problem is really with the mumps portion of the vaccine and the combination, and it was never safety-tested—that combination was never safety-tested,” Kennedy said. 

“And people just assume that if three separate vaccines were safe, and when you combine them, they would also be safe. But we now know there’s some viral interference and the combination vaccine seemed to be linked to a lot of adverse events that they were not getting from the separate vaccines.”

The CDC’s website states that the MMR vaccine typically protects people against measles and rubella for life, “but immunity against mumps may decrease over time.”

Possible side effects include a mild rash and high fever that could cause a seizure.

Dr. Monica Gandhi, associate chief of the University of California, San Francisco’s Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine, told The Epoch Times in an email that the MMR vaccine does work for mumps.

“The vaccine is safe and efficacious,” she said, encouraging parents to take their children to receive the shot.

Authored by J.Peder Zane via RealClearPolitics.com,

The Department of Government Efficiency noticed a snag: the sign-in button on the IRS homepage wasn’t where it ought to be. Instead of the upper right-hand corner where we, the people, have been trained to look for logins, it was stacked with other buttons in the middle of the page. It was not too hard to find, but its unusual placement disrupted the interface between taxpayers and tax collectors.

It was a simple fix.

Yet an IRS engineer reportedly estimated that it would take at least 103 days to move the button. 

Thankfully, Elon Musk’s team posted last month on X:

“This engineer worked with the DOGE team to delete the red tape and accomplished the task in 71 minutes.”

If DOGE has revealed anything in its first 100 days, it is the depth of government dysfunction. While Musk’s detractors are reveling in his most obvious shortcoming – to date, it has cut an estimated $160 billion in government spending instead of the promised $2 trillion – the urgent need for reform is clear. The difficulty smart and dedicated cost-cutters are encountering in paring the mounds of federal waste is the canary crying in the coal mine.

To take a favorite word of progressives, the issues we face with government inefficiency are systemic. Fraud and abuse are real problems, but, as the IRS button example shows, the deeper issues involve what passes for standard operating procedure. We have built a leviathan that is strangling us with process.

Fred Kaplan provides a telling example in his New York Review of Books piece on Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff’s new book, “Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War.”

As a U.S. Air Force captain, Shah was flying missions over Iraq in 2006, Kaplan writes, when he noticed that his F16’s display screen did not “indicate his location in relation to coordinates on the ground.” Back in his barracks, Shah loaded a pocket PC he had for playing video games “with digital maps and strapped it to his knee while he flew. The software in that $300 gadget let him see where he was – basic information that the gadgetry on his $30 million plane could not provide.”

A decade later, Shah was tapped to lead a small Pentagon start-up, the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), that sought to apply Silicon Valley innovations like the pocket PC to the military. An early challenge was coordinating the refueling of planes in midair.

Kaplan wrote that this is a “very complicated task … Yet to plan these operations, they were moving magnetic pucks around on a whiteboard, just as their forebears had done during World War II.”

He continued: “Northrop Grumman had won a contract to overhaul this system; by the time Shah saw the whiteboard, the company had spent $745 million – twice the original estimate – over ten years with nothing to show for it, and the Air Force was now asking Congress for more. ”

Kaplan reports that Shah connected with “a small Silicon Valley firm” that developed “a working product … in four months, at a cost of $1.5 million.” Needless to say, “they faced intense resistance from the Air Force officer managing the Northrop Grumman program and from staffers on the House subcommittee overseeing the defense budget.” Happily, an advocate in the Pentagon brass helped them “break through the blockage.”

No one knows how many $745 million problems can be solved with a $1.5 million solution, but it seems safe to assume that the answer is plenty. As much as DOGE has drawn attention for firing federal workers and closing a few government programs, its most significant contribution has been exposing the jaw-dropping patterns of waste and inefficiency that bloat the size and cost of government.

One more example: On March 21, DOGE reported that “the IRS has the transaction volume of a mid-sized bank, running similar infrastructure. Those banks typically have an Operations and Maintenance (O&M) budget of ~$20M/yr. The IRS has a ~$3.5B O&M budget (which doesn’t include an additional $3.7B modernization budget).” Keep that in mind when you read the next scaremongering headline about job cuts at the IRS.

Error is inevitable in human action. DOGE has certainly made mistakes. But a bigger blunder is pretending that every government worker and government contract is essential. That is the implicit argument of Musk’s detractors. Even if that risible claim were correct, our current spending trajectory is unsustainable. Something has to give.

Still, there is reason for hope. Instead of just celebrating those who found a way to move a homepage button in 71 minutes, let’s identify and eliminate the layers of bureaucracy that would have turned it into a 103-day ordeal. If software engineers can solve Pentagon problems on the cheap, let’s compile and void a list of stupidly expensive contracts – before increasing its annual budget north of $1 trillion. It can be done.

This effort might even be bipartisan. As the Trump administration has proposed funding cuts to scientific research, his opponents have argued this will kneecap one of America’s greatest strengths: our unrivalled ingenuity and know-how. Why don’t we all agree to use that dynamism to create a government as smart and effective as our nation?

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via DailySignal.com,

At the end of the 100 days of the Trump administration, let’s just review for a moment the opposition to it. 

And it’s actually, if you think about it, a tripartite, a threefold opposition:

1. pollsters, 

2. the media, 

3. and the Democratic Party and the institutionalized Left.

The pollsters have President Donald Trump down four or five points. But when you actually look at the Rasmussen poll or Mark Penn’s poll, a Democratic centrist, Trump is almost even. And then when you look with greater clarity at The New York Times poll that has him way down, you see that only 37% of the people polled voted for Donald Trump. But Donald Trump won by almost a point and a half. Don’t you think it should have been, I don’t know, 51%-49%? So, they were deliberately, in the case of The New York Times, under-polling Trump supporters.

The same was true with The Washington Post. They polled over 2,000 people, but only 840 were identified as Trump voters. Shouldn’t that have been half?

So, what am I getting at? 

We’re getting right back to what happened in 2016 when the polls were completely wrong. 

The same thing happened in 2020 when they overestimated former President Joe Biden’s strength by four or five points. And then, even in 2024, the NPR poll had—on the last day of the election—they had then-Vice President Kamala Harris winning by four points.

The Des Moines Register had Iowa lost to Trump by three points. He won it by 12.

So, what the pollsters are doing—not that Trump hasn’t lost some to the controversy over the trade wars—but the pollsters are trying to create momentum, fundraising, and jazz up opposition.

Then we turn to the media. The media’s in a fight with the Democratic Left now because of the scandal of Joe Biden. The Democratic Left is saying, “Well, you were a journalist. If you thought he was demented or cognitively challenged, why didn’t you report it?” But the journalists are saying, “We couldn’t get close to him. He looked OK for us because you had him in such a guarded environment.” In truth, they’re both guilty.

Do you remember those press conferences by then-White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre? Did anyone ever hear one question on those daily or three or four times a week press conferences? “Miss Jean-Pierre, is Joe Biden cognitively able to navigate himself to the podium? What is the nature of his cue cards? Have you had a Montreal Cognitive Assessment of him?” There was nothing. 

It was a combination of the Democratic Party, the Biden insiders, and the media.

And here’s another point, very quickly.

The media has gained a lot of influence and power in the opposition because there is no opposition on the Democratic Party. So, in lieu of an alternate agenda, the media has taken it upon themselves to use the only strategy that the Democratic Party can come up with. And that is to attack Donald Trump.

Now, what do I mean by that? If you look at the Democratic Party and the Left in general, they have boxed themselves in. 

On the one hand, they have no institutional power; no ability to pass legislation, losing the House and the Senate; no presidency, White House; no executive orders. 

Ultimately, all of the cherry-picked district and circuit judges will be overturned by a largely conservative Supreme Court.

In lieu of actual power, then you look at what is the alternative. 

Maybe the alternative is a 1994 Newt Gingrich Contract with America, an alternate agenda: Yes, we can do better on the border than you can. Yes, we have a better foreign policy with Iran. 

There’s nothing. There’s no shadow government. There’s not a young Bill Clinton ascendant. There’s no young Barack Obama. There’s nobody. There’s no leaders. There’s no agenda. Nothing. It’s nihilism.

And so, let’s look at the third element. 

Do they have a good old days?

Can they say, “Donald Trump ruined things”? “They were so good under Biden. The border was—we liked it open. Twelve million, we could have got 20 million illegal aliens. Let’s go back to that. We had a wonderful retreat from Afghanistan. Picture perfect. We can do it again. The Iran—the theater war in Ukraine and Iran, that wasn’t our fault. Maybe it was inevitable. We had a really good inflation—we had a little hyperinflation of 9%.”

So, there is no alternative good old days. They can’t say Donald Trump wrecked something because they had wrecked the country.

So, what are we left with? 

We’re left with Donald Trump wore a blue suit at the Vatican funeral. Donald Trump is a fascist. No. According to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, he is a Nazi. No. According to former Vice President Al Gore, he is a Nazi. No. According to members of the Congress, is he deserving a polite conversation? You have to use the F-word. Or maybe it’s the S-word.

It’s smutty mouth, potty mouth video.

What is the one principle that ties them all together? 

We’re gonna talk about that in the next video.

But it’s about fear that Donald Trump’s first 100 days are not as chaotic and bad as they tell us. 

But we might be on the cusp of something that will be very, very successful and will ensure Donald Trump has a successful presidency.

In an ultra-provocative and quite bold move set against the backdrop of the growing trade war following Trump's tariffs, the Central Intelligence Agency on Thursday released two high quality social media videos inviting disillusioned Chinese officials to spy for the United States.

The Mandarin-language videos were published across several platforms, and are clearly well-produced cinematic vids that clearly a lot of planning and thought went into, akin to similar videos issued in recent years urging Russians to spy.

"Today, the CIA released Mandarin-language videos aimed at recruiting Chinese officials to steal secrets," CIA Director John Ratcliffe said in a statement. He has vowed to make China a top priority for the agency's intelligence gathering. 

Each video runs over two minutes long and has a fast-moving plot line in the style of popular 'mini-movies'.

"No adversary in the history of our Nation has presented a more formidable challenge or capable strategic competitor than the Chinese Communist Party," he said.

The CIA chief added, "Our Agency must continue responding to this threat with urgency, creativity, and grit, and these videos are just one of the ways we are doing this."

The videos seem aimed at disgruntle CCP officials who are tired of corruption:

One video aims to appeal to senior Communist Party officials who live in perpetual fear of being snapped up by Xi’s seemingly endless crackdown on corruption and disloyalty. The campaign has punished millions of high-flying officials and low-ranking cadres alike, shaking government agencies, the military and state-owned companies.

"As I rise within the party, I watch those above me get discarded like worn-out shoes, one after another. But now, I realize that my fate is just as precarious as theirs," the narrator says, as a Chinese official and his wife walk into a lavish dinner with Chinese government agents tailing him.

Watch: below is the first video which was released to CIA media channels on Thursday...

"It’s all too common for someone to suddenly vanish without a trace. What I fear most is that my family’s fate is tied to my own. I must prepare an escape route," the narration continues, suggesting disloyal officials quickly get 'disappeared'.

A second video focuses more on the youth and the corrupt, luxurious lifestyle of Chinese bosses. Beijing didn't immediately respond, and typically doesn't speak on intelligence issues, even when it comes to foreign adversaries.

The new CIA recruitment ads are being mocked in both Russian and Chinese media...

CIA releases recruiting vids in Mandarin, tells potential turncoats to ‘take the first step’

Offers Chinese officials a path out of ‘hardship and toil’

FLASHBACK: China identified/arrested/executed every CIA spy in country in 2010

Will anyone take the risk? pic.twitter.com/qnaDtfXiD0

— RT (@RT_com) May 1, 2025

Both videos actually end with scenes of the Chinese protagonists reaching out to the CIA on the agency’s website via secure apps, according to agency instructions.

Nikkei Asia meanwhile writes that the campaign "has been met with derision in China" given also that "the clips are narrated in what some viewers described as awkward Mandarin." Chinese government officials, however, likely just got a little more paranoid.

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

“The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology.” 

- Harmeet Dhillon, US Assistant AG for the Civil Rights Division

When a claque of deep state shills such as Norm Eisen, Chuck Schumer, Bill Kristol, David Brooks, and Larry Summers holler about Mr. Trump’s attempt to reform a depraved political culture as “an assault on norms,” are you not prompted to wonder what, exactly, those norms might be?

Looks like they are describing a colossal matrix of racketeering operations in concert with an epic program of crypto-Marxist mind-fuckery, mountains of money purloined under color-of-law, swindles galore of practically every public enterprise, the capital city of a so-called republic fogged in gaslight to conceal a Satyricon of pedophilia, sodomy, and sado-masochism in every closet, cabinet, and pigeon-hole of the political class.

So, along comes Mr. Trump for the second round, with a supernaturally able clean-up crew this time, and the monsters feeding off that depraved normality commence to shriek in mortal panic as the scaffold of their crimes gets methodically disassembled and secrets are revealed.

Many of you have been pouting over the lack of criminal prosecutions these first hundred days. Why is AG Ms. Bondi preening on Fox News when she should be banging-out subpoenas and arrest warrants, you ask? And what broom-closet is Dan Bongino hiding in over at the Hoover Building? How is Hillary Clinton still at-large in the land? Does Alejandro Mayorkas still make his Saturday excursions to the boutiques along M Street? Looks like the months of May and June are setting up to be the season of shocks and consequence.

Item: James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas (he was cancelled from it) and now running O’Keefe Media Group, put out a mighty strange eighteen-second video this week. 

Looks like it was filmed in a basement somewhere. “I’m going dark, he says ruefully. “I’m not suicidal. Pray for me. This one scares me, guys.”

T-minus seven days. pic.twitter.com/wcU4tJvHLF

— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) April 30, 2025

A week earlier, O’Keefe announced that he had bombshell recordings of public figures breaking the law, involving billions of dollars, which he expected would lead to indictments.

What spooked him in the week since then?

I guess we’ll have to stand by to find out, or see if JO’K was bluffing.

Meanwhile Virginia Guiffre, a former Jeffrey Epstein teen sex slave, likewise said just over a week ago: “I am making it publicly known that in no way, shape, or form am I suicidal. If something happens to me, for the sake of my family do not let this go away and help me to protect them. Too many evil people want to see me quieted.” 

This was a month after she was injured in a traffic accident with a school bus in Western Australia. 

On April 24, she reportedly committed suicide at home, after release from the hospital. 

What do you suppose changed her mind?

An ominous silence surrounds the promised release of the Epstein case material, whatever it consists of: depositions, flight logs, photographs, video recordings of prominent people in compromising situations. Remember, not long after inauguration day, the FBI’s New York field office was found to be sitting on a huge trove of previously hidden Epstein case evidence. 

The DOJ swiftly “retired” the chief agent of the office, James Dennehy, who additionally had failed to cooperate with requests to disclose the names of agents involved in the Jan-6 investigations. 

Supposedly, since the discovery of the Epstein trove, a thousand agents were assigned to “process” it, redact the names of the innocent victims, so they say. 

Are they close to finishing?

Speaking of the J-6, 2021 matter, pressure is building for the Republican majority Congress to hold hearings on exactly what went on that fateful day. FBI Director Patel has yet to disclose how many government agents (not just FBI), and how many “confidential human sources” (i.e., provocateurs), were in the crowd around and inside the US Capitol. It’s getting to be past time to ask Mr. Patel for a straight answer on that in an official proceeding, and continue from there to related business, such as Nancy Pelosi’s failure to reinforce the Capitol Police with National Guard troops that day, and the strange doings around the DNC pipe bomb ploy few blocks away. Personally, I doubt that Mr. Patel is inclined to lie or dissemble about all that. But the natives are getting a little restless.

Mr. Kennedy at HHS is already pretty frisky in his role supervising the enormous cluster of agencies that have done so much to wreck the nation’s health in recent years. Goodbye fluoride in the drinking water. Hello to placebo testing for new drugs and vaccines. Welcome to a vigorous six-month campaign to determine a likely cause of the autism epidemic. RFK is even asking what exactly is in those aviation contrails that folks have been observing and complaining about for so many years. And then there was the bomb he dropped during this week’s cabinet meeting: that under Joe Biden, HHS acted as a major vector for the trafficking of children. Say, what??? Lotta people wondered, did Bobby really say that? And does he know exactly who in HHS is responsible. . . like, names attached? I guess we’ll find out.

On a brighter note, not only did Klaus Schwab, the comic book villain who leads the World Economic Forum (WEF), resign last week, but he stands formally accused of misusing its funds. An inquiry ensues. Mr. Schwab’s daughter, Nicole, supposedly revealed to possibly sketchy alt-journalist Medeea Greere, that the WEF sought to reduce the global population by billions, and not in a nice way. Standing by on that one. . . . But, at least old Klaus is gone. His temporary replacement is Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, former CEO of the Nestle conglomerate, with a record of nefarious activity in the marketing of infant bottle formula in the third world and other turpitudes. Prediction: the WEF is toast. It was always a bit too bizarre to be taken seriously, but its demise signals real trouble for the foundering Globalist endeavor.

So, the month of May is shaping up to be merry as all get-out, and then June will be bustin’ out all over. That thing you felt. . .? That was the ground shaking and the earth moving. Strap in.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller could land the position as President Donald Trump’s next National Security Adviser, according to Axios. 

Miller, one of Trump’s longest and most trusted aides, emerged as a leading contender for national security adviser following Mike Waltz’s removal from the role. Waltz, who has taken considerable heat from the mainstream media for his role in so-called SignalGate, was nominated for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations just hours after reports of his removal. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is currently serving as the interim national security adviser.

Axios reports:

One White House source told Axios via text that Miller has made the Homeland Security Council run "like clockwork," and that it's "infinitely more effective than the NSC [National Security Council] with a tiny fraction" of the staff.

"Marco and Stephen have worked really closely on immigration and it might be a perfect match," said another White House source.

It remains uncertain whether Stephen Miller would pursue the national security adviser role, as it could divert him from immigration policy.

Politico also reports that Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy currently spearheading critical negotiations with Russia, Iran, and Hamas, is a contender for the national security adviser position.

Additionally, NSC senior director for counterterrorism Sebastian Gorka and Trump’s special envoy for special missions Richard Grenell are generating buzz as potential candidates for the role.

When Politico asked about the impending announcement, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said, “We will not comment on reports based on anonymous sources.”

Authored by Robert Spencer via PJMedia.com,

On Thursday, President Trump gave Americans another Liberation Day: He signed an executive order ending federal funding for two of the left’s principal propaganda organs, National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). 

Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that these two vicious taxpayer leeches and leftist disinformation entities will disappear, but at least patriots won’t be forced to shell out for programming that is designed to destroy everything they hold dear.

The left, predictably enough, is howling, led by NPR and PBS themselves. NPR issued a statement warning of imminent apocalypse:

“Eliminating funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting [CPB] would have a devastating impact on American communities across the nation that rely on public radio for trusted local and national news, culture, lifesaving emergency alerts and public safety information.” 

The statement was yet another example of what a cruel joke NPR and PBS are on the American people. No one actually trusts NPR and PBS except the indoctrinated cadres of the left and those who are uninformed enough to continue to believe in these propaganda organs’ claims to be free from bias. The grim reality is that NPR and PBS are the left at its most cynical, opportunistic, and parasitical. American taxpayers, including those who are patriots, are forced to subsidize two of the left’s shrillest and most nakedly biased mouthpieces, all the while being gaslit about how it’s their patriotic duty to support a free press.

And so Trump wrote in his executive order that the joke was over: 

“Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence. The CPB Board shall cease direct funding to NPR and PBS, consistent with my Administration’s policy to ensure that Federal funding does not support biased and partisan news coverage. The CPB Board shall cancel existing direct funding to the maximum extent allowed by law and shall decline to provide future funding.”

That bit about “biased and partisan news coverage,” which is putting the reality of NPR and PBS extremely mildly, is eliciting reactions from the left on the order of the kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar insisting that he doesn’t even like cookies. 

CNN laments that “America’s two biggest public broadcasters” have “faced a series of attacks from the White House and Republican lawmakers accusing them of biased reporting.” 

The New York Times also pretended that Orange Man Bad and his henchmen were making up this whole bias thing, saying that they were “accusing the outlets of producing biased coverage and ‘left-wing propaganda.’” Note the scare quotes around “left-wing propaganda,” as if no reasonable person could believe that such a thing even exists, much less that NPR and PBS ladle it out to patriots as if they were cigarette-puffing meatballs doling out lunchtime glop to a sweaty chain gang.

Unfortunately, even if leftist judges don’t manage once again to arrogate to themselves the power of the executive branch and overrule Trump’s order, NPR and PBS will survive. The New York Post reports that “both have diverse revenue streams, including major foundation grants, advertising and voluntary viewer and listener donations, meaning that neither is likely to cease operations if they lose federal support.”

Still, if Trump succeeds, taxpayers will save a bit of money: “the CPB is set to receive $535 million in congressionally appropriated funds annually to distribute to public broadcasters in 2025 and 2026.”

Trump summed up what’s at stake in his executive order:

“At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage.  No media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer subsidies, and the Government is entitled to determine which categories of activities to subsidize. The CPB’s governing statute reflects principles of impartiality: the CPB may not ‘contribute to or otherwise support any political party.’”

This is simple common sense, and so Trump’s executive order is long overdue. Both NPR and PBS should have been cut off from federal funding the moment that their news coverage became 100% leftist propaganda, but too many leftist presidents benefited from that coverage to take a step of this kind until now. You can bet that if NPR and PBS reflected 100% patriotic perspectives, Barack Obama or Old Joe Biden or maybe even Bill Clinton would have cut them off long ago.

Better late than never. 

Update (1200ET): US equity markets extended gains this morning following a report from The Wall Street Journal that Beijing is considering ways to address the Trump administration’s gripes over China’s role in the fentanyl trade, potentially offering an off-ramp from hostilities to allow for trade talks to start.

So, despite all the legacy media's claims that 'no' talks were under way, WSJ reports that Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s security czar, Wang Xiaohong, in recent days has been inquiring about what the Trump team wants China to do when it comes to fentanyl.

In a visible shift in tone Friday, China’s Commerce Ministry said it was weighing starting talks with the U.S. to halt a trade war while expressing Beijing’s wish for the Trump administration to “show sincerity” to talk. Previously, the ministry had demanded that Washington slash its steep tariffs on China first as a condition for negotiations.

Stocks surged further on the report...

.

With the S&P 500 now having erased all losses post-Liberation Day...

* * *

China has quietly started to exempt some US goods from tariffs that likely cover around $40 billion worth of imports (or around 24% of Chinese imports from the US in 2024), in what looks like an effort to soften the blow of the trade war on its own economy. 

“China is likely trying to mitigate damage to its economy by avoiding a collapse in key imports,” DiPippo said. 

“The exemptions shouldn’t be interpreted as a signal to the US, as China has been quiet about its exemptions, working through business channels and avoiding public statements.”

While this move mirrors the shift by the Trump administration - exempting smartphones and other electronics from its own “reciprocal” tariffs, including the 145% levies on China (those US exemptions apply to about $102 billion, or roughly 22% of US imports from China last year) - we suspect there is more behind this decision.

As we highlighted just a week ago, China's already fragile economy faced a serious crisis from the tariff-driven cuts to supply of US ethane and the potential for that to force mass plastics factory closures.

"The situation is dire for China’s ethane crackers as they have no alternative to US supply,” said Manish Sejwal, an analyst at Rystad Energy AS, using an industry term for such facilities.

 "Unless they are granted tariff exemptions, they may have to stop production or close shop."

Well guess what just happened... buried deep among the 131 items is, you guessed it - industrial chemicals (which likely includes US Ethane supplies).

Bloomberg reports that it’s unclear where the list came from and it hasn’t been officially confirmed, but at least half a dozen companies in China have been able to bring in goods from the list without paying tariffs, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential information.

No matter the reason - forced by factory closure crisis or simply goodwill - there are tentative signs the US-China trade standoff could be shifting. 

The Chinese Commerce Ministry said on Friday it’s assessing the possibility of trade talks with the US, giving a lift to equity markets.

“The US has recently sent messages to China through relevant parties, hoping to start talks with China,” the ministry said in a statement released during a mainland holiday. 

“China is currently evaluating this.”

The timing of the tit-for-tat escalation and de-escalation is very similar to last time (though this time the pain was far greater to prompt the walkbacks on both sides)...

The list of exemptions is said to be dynamic and will be continuously adjusted depending on China’s needs, according to people familiar with the matter.

A key Trump demand of the Zelensky government was quietly dropped as a condition of peace talks as well as the Ukraine minerals deal, which was finally signed this week.

Washington is no longer seeking to pressure or force President Volodymyr Zelensky to hold elections that could result in his being ousted office for the sake of peace, according to information in The Telegraph. 

"The demand has been quietly dropped from the latest set of American proposals for a ceasefire," The Telegraph writes. "The American decision to stop demanding elections is designed to placate the Ukrainian officials who have argued against swathes of a seven-point peace plan tabled by Mr Trump."

The minerals deal still has to be formally approved by Ukraine's parliament, according to the nation's constitution. Below is said to be the current seven-point plan offered by Trump, aspects of which were previously rejected by Ukrainian officials...

As for dropping the demand for Zelensky and parliament to hold elections, the Kremlin itself seems to have somewhat quieted down on this in recent weeks.

Without doubt, Moscow still wants to see Zelensky go, but appears willing to not press the issue if he were willing to give up territory for the sake of ceasefire (which so far isn't happening - not even regarding Crimea).

Zelensky's term in office expired in May 2024, and Ukrainian parliament has recently reaffirmed the 'constitutionality' of Zelensky's mandate as leader of the country during wartime. Trump soon after taking the Oval called him a 'dictator' who canceled elections, and even long before that called him the "world's greatest salesman" as he received hundreds of billions from the US and Western allies.

Meanwhile, fresh statements from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio express continued optimism on the potential for peace. He says "they're closer" to peace - in reference to Moscow and Kiev.

Source: ANSA

"For a hundred days he has done efforts to bring about peace… Look, we’ve gotten closer. We – for the first time – we haven’t known this for three years – we kind of can see what it would take for Ukraine to stop. We can see what it would take for the Russians to stop," Rubio said.

He then noted, "They’re closer, but they’re still far apart. And it’s going to take a real breakthrough here very soon to make this possible… or I think the president is going to have to make a decision about how much more time we’re going to dedicate to this," he added.

It's been widely reported that during Zelensky's impromptu 15-meeting with President Trump on the sidelines of the pope's funeral last weekend he was able to ease the pressure on Kiev coming from Trump.

"Zelensky's advisers were divided about whether he should even risk the tête-à-tête after the disaster in the Oval Office," Axios reported days after the meeting. "But after it, Zelensky felt he'd managed to shift Trump's thinking about Putin for the first time, the sources say."