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NPR Announcer
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Lakshmi Singh
I'm Lakshmi Singh. As U.S. markets extend losses, President Trump is meeting with his Cabinet.
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Donald Trump
This be transition difficulty, but we had a in history. It was the biggest day in history. The markets so very, very happy with the way the country is running. We're trying to get the world to treat us fairly. This is something that should have been done 25 years ago and it wasn't. Should have been done 40 years ago and it wasn't.
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Lakshmi Singh
President Trump defending his use of tariffs, also referencing yesterday's rally on Wall street after he announced a 90 day pause on latest tariffs for most countries except for China. He was handed a victory today after House Republicans narrowly approved a multi trillion dollar budget framework that allows the party now to begin the process of drafting legislation to enact key elements of Trump's domestic policy agenda, which include tax cuts and spending on defense, energy and immigration policy. Inflation cooled last month thanks in part to a sharp drop in gasoline prices. NPR's Scott Horsley reports. Egg prices are still climbing, but just ahead of Easter.
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Scott Horsley
Consumer prices in March were up 2.4% from a year ago. That's a smaller annual increase than forecasters had expected. Prices actually fell slightly between February and March, with gasoline prices dropping nearly 6%. Airline tickets and used cars also got cheaper last month, while new cars and clothing were more expensive. Egg prices continue to climb in March thanks to the lingering effects of avian flu, stripping out volatile food and energy prices. So called core inflation over the last 12 months was 2.8%. That's the lowest it's been in four years. Although President Trump has suspended many of his new tariffs, he's left some import taxes in place that could put upward pressure on prices in the months to come. Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington.
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Lakshmi Singh
President Trump signed two executive orders targeting political allies turned critics. He wants former national security official Miles Taylor and former top cybersecurity official Chris Krebs stripped of their security clearances. NPR's Ashley Lopez has more on Krebs role during the first Trump administration and his stance on the outcome of the 2020 election.
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Ashley Lopez
For folks who don't remember this right after the 2020 election, Krebs, who, by the way, has described himself as a lifelong Republican and he had been appointed by Trump basically refuted Trump's big lie about the election being stolen. As you can imagine, Trump didn't like that. He fired Krebs at the time, and now he's ordering the attorney general, the director of national intelligence and other agency leaders to immediately suspend any active security clearances held by him and entities associated with him.
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Lakshmi Singh
That's NPR's Ashley Lopez reporting. The Dow is down more than 1300 points, or more than 3%. The S&P has fallen nearly 4%. The Nasdaq is down nearly 5%. You're listening to NPR News. Tech companies have pledged hundreds of billions of dollars to build data centers across the U.S. mississippi has $20 billion in data center projects underway, and the state is calling them the largest economic development projects in state history. But Stephen Basaha of the Gulf States Newsroom says data centers lead to few permanent jobs.
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Stephen Besahan
Data centers are basically giant warehouses where the Internet physically lives, the computer chips powering the AI boom, and the hard drives that let you save your photos online. But the co director of the Wharton Business School's AI Research Center, Karta Kasanegar, says data centers often only need a few hundred workers to run.
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Karta Kasanegar
So when you see numbers like a $10 billion data center investment and you are asking what does it mean for our local economy, you have to really discount that number quite heavily.
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Stephen Besahan
Data centers also eat up a ton of electricity. In fact, Mississippi Power will burn coal at one of its plants for rough a decade longer than planned to fuel the state's upcoming data centers. For NPR News, I'm Stephen Besahan.
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Lakshmi Singh
Birmingham, Alabama, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is countersuing Elon Musk. In the suit file yesterday, the maker of ChatGPT accused is the world's richest person of unlawfully waging malicious campaigns to undermine his rival. Musk was an early OpenAI investor before he broke with the company as the head of his own AI firm. Musk launched a legal offensive against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, more than a year ago on the grounds that they were putting commercial interests over public interests in violation of OpenAI's founding contract. It's NPR News.
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NPR Announcer
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