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The Headlines
The Secret Deals Behind Trump’s Crypto Firm, and a Revenge Porn Ban
00:11:45
Plus, let’s hear your best sea gull.
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- [00:00]
Narrator
April is Earth Month. But all around us, nature is disappearing. In fact, World Wildlife Fund estimates that wildlife populations have plummeted by 73% since 1970. But it's not too late to help nature recover. Even as the 24 hour news rapidly changes, WWF's commitment to restore and protect wildlife habitats remains constant. And today, they need your help. Make a monthly donation to WWF to help protect nature. In honor of Earth month. Donate@mywwf.org to make a world of difference.
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Tracie Mumford
From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracie Mumford. Today's Tuesday, April 29th. Here's what we're covering.
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Eric Lipton
Hello, bitcoiners.
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Tracie Mumford
Thank you very much.
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Eric Lipton
Hello, it's good to be with you.
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Tracie Mumford
The Times has been looking into the Trump family's growing ties to the crypto industry.
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Eric Lipton
I truly believe that this is the.
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Tracie Mumford
Beginning of a financial revolution, not just in America, but truly around the world. Along with his sons eric and Donald Jr. The president has embraced the once fringe financial product. And together with business partners, the Trump family even launched their own cryptocurrency firm this fall, World Liberty Financial.
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Eric Lipton
You know, obviously this is kind of the latest venture and the industry has.
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Tracie Mumford
Come to love us, right? The marketing pitch is that the firm eventually plans to operate as a new type of Internet bank. In the months since it launched, it's cut partnership deals around the world and sold its own cryptocurrency, reaping hundreds of millions of dollars. That's raised concerns about who's buying in and what they may expect in return.
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Eric Lipton
So we've spent months looking into World Liberty Financial and what we have found is really an unprecedented conflict of interest, ethical issues that just exceed anything that we witness during President Trump's first term.
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Tracie Mumford
Eric Lipton's part of the team at the Times that's been investigating the firm.
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Eric Lipton
In the crypto world, it's kind of hard to pin down who's buying individual cryptocurrency tokens. But we dug in and were able to identify investors from all over the world. From South Korea, from United Arab Emirates, from Israel, from Hong Kong. Normally, foreigners are prohibited from making campaign contributions to a president. But here you have foreigners investing in his company and bringing him personal profit. What we also found was that quite a number of the investors, particularly the high profile ones, have had run ins with the securities and Exchange Commission. This is the entity that polices cryptocurrency. And quite a number of the players that have been doing deals with World Liberty Financial have been targeted for fraud and illegal actions relating to the way that they have run their cryptocurrency businesses during the Biden administration. One of the things that we saw is that after investing in World Liberty Financial and effectively giving a financial benefit to President Trump, some of these investigations of these companies have been frozen or shut down by the commission. So they appear to have gotten direct benefit by becoming a business partner of President Trump. So when we think about what we found here, it's easy to compare it to the Trump hotel in Washington, D.C. during his first term, where lobbyists and foreign diplomats used to frequent. They were seen often in the lobby buying expensive drinks or staying in the hotel, people trying to buy access to him. But this is at a whole different scale. We're talking here about potentially a billion dollars worth of revenue for the Trump family, unknown players that are investing in World Liberty Financial. And it just makes the Trump Hotel in D.C. seem like a kid's lemonade stand compared to the dollars at play here now with World Liberty Financial.
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Tracie Mumford
The Times full investigation into the Trump family's crypto Firm is@nytimes.com now. Three other updates out of Washington. The Trump administration has taken aim at the country's flagship climate report, the National Climate Assessment. It details how global warming is affecting the US and helps businesses and local governments prepare for heat waves, floods, droughts and other crises. Yesterday, the administration dismissed all of the hundreds of scientists and experts who had been putting together the next version of the assessment. The report, which is released every few years, is mandated by Congress. Now, some of the scientists involved fear the administration might disregard their work and try to write an entirely new report from scratch that downplays the risks of rising temperatures.
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Mark Carney
Also, we tell them these are the president's priorities. This is what we will be focusing on. And en masse, dozens and now over 100 attorneys decided that they'd rather not do what their job requires them to do.
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Tracie Mumford
And the head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division is defending the agency's dramatic overhaul even as it set off an exodus of career staff.
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Mark Carney
The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology.
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Tracie Mumford
The Civil Rights Division has traditionally worked to protect the constitutional rights of minority communities by doing things like monitoring police departments and fighting housing disorders discrimination. Now, current and former staff say it's effectively become an enforcement arm for President Trump's agenda, targeting college administrators, investigating campus protests and trying to prevent trans students from playing women's sports. The former head of the agency in the Obama administration told the Times that the civil Rights Division is now, quote, being used as a weapon against the very communities it was established to protect.
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Eric Lipton
And the yays are 4,09. The nays are 2.
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Tracie Mumford
In a rare moment of bipartisanship, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill targeting what's known as revenge porn. The legislation makes it illegal to share sexually explicit photos and videos of others without their consent and requires social media companies and other online platforms to take them down within two days of any request. The new law includes a ban on sharing deepfake pornography. AI generated nude images of real people. Lawmakers said they were particularly concerned about the rise of so called nudification apps, which have made it easy for teenage boys to generate and share nude images of their female classmates. Senator Amy Klobuchar, who co sponsored the bill, said she'd been moved by stories of kids who experienced harassment or mental and emotional harm because of the images. President Trump is expected to quickly sign the bill into law.
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Mark Carney
I have a question. Who's ready? Who's ready? Who's ready to stand up for Canada?
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Tracie Mumford
With me in Canada, the Liberal leader, Mark Carney has won a new term as prime minister after an election dominated by rising tensions with the US As.
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Mark Carney
I've been warning for months, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country.
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Tracie Mumford
While his party was behind by double digits a few months ago, Carney's tough stance against President Trump's tariffs and his threat to make Canada the 51st state energized his campaign.
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Mark Carney
President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us. That will never, that will never, ever happen.
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Tracie Mumford
The Conservative candidate, meanwhile, Pierre Poiev, was seen by some voters as too closely aligned with Trump. During the campaign, he railed against radical woke ideology and pledged to cut Canada's foreign aid. His support dropped, with results still coming in this morning. It's unclear whether the Liberals will win enough votes to form a majority government or if they'll need to form a coalition that would force them to work with other parties. 3. We have ignition. 2. 1. At Cape Canaveral in Florida yesterday, planned liftoff of the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying satellites for Amazon's Project Kuiper Internet Constellation. Amazon launched 27 satellites into Earth's orbit, the first phase of the company's effort to break into the satellite Internet industry. The technology allows for Internet access in hard to reach places like offshore oil rigs, rural communities, and even war zones.
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Karen Weiss
The launch is a big deal because they are playing major catch up to SpaceX's Starlink satellite Internet, which is from Elon Musk's business.
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Tracie Mumford
Karen Weiss is a technology correspondent at the Times.
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Karen Weiss
Starlink has thousands of satellites up in space and is launching more almost every day. And they are improving and updating the generation of satellites that they have up there to be able to provide faster data speeds and are really making a big push to kind of dominate the sky. The big advantage SpaceX has is they own their own rockets, and that's a very dependable rocket system that has been sending up, you know, flight after flight after flight. Amazon needs to depend on third party launch companies and partners, and many of the rockets that they're working with are new and barely tested.
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Tracie Mumford
Karen says that it could take days for Amazon to determine if the first batch of satellites has successfully deployed. They're only a fraction of the nearly 600 satellites the company says it needs in order to start beaming wireless Internet from space. The company says it expects to switch on the service later this year. And finally. Oh, did you think you were at the beach? The pleasant sound of seagulls around you. No, no, those, those are humans participating in potentially, very, potentially the greatest sport of our times. The European Goal Scream Championship. The fifth annual contest was held this weekend in a little beach town in Belgium. The goal is right there in the name who can scream the most like a gull. The organizer, who is both an environmental educator and an amateur comedian, said the point is to create a more positive image of seagulls. The birds can get a bad rap for being loud, snagging people's food and loving to eat trash. But he says it's really humans who've infringed on the bird's habitat and gotten into the bad habit of feeding them. For the contest, more than 70 people gave it their all, some in full costume, and a jury judged the screeches. You could also score points for gull like behavior, like if you're willing to smash your head into a bag of chips and peck them out. In the junior category, the winner was 10 year old Cooper Wallace of England, who took the top prize for the second year in a row. And the winner in the adult category was Anna Brynald of Denmark. She said she studied the birds on TikTok, practiced in front of the mirror and in front of possibly the most discerning audience. Real life seagulls. Those are the headlines today on the Daily A landmark legal agreement last year was supposed to make buying a house cheaper by bringing down Realtors commission fees. Why that hasn't happened, that's next in the New York Times audio app, where you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.