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D.C. Mayor Prepares City for Cuts After Congress Goes on Break

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D.C. Mayor Prepares City for Cuts After Congress Goes on Break


The mayor of Washington, D.C., ordered citywide spending and hiring freezes on Tuesday and raised the possibility of furloughs after the U.S. House of Representatives left for recess with the District still facing a potential billion-dollar budget cut.

The order does not lay out specific cuts, but it paves the way for possible steep reductions to city services if Congress does not act in the next few weeks.

The budget crunch is not the only challenge the District has been wrestling with since Republicans took full control of the federal government. Mass layoffs of federal workers are projected to cost the city a billion dollars in lost revenue over the next three years. At the same time, President Trump and multiple Republican lawmakers have threatened to strip the city of its local government entirely.

But the looming budget emergency has been particularly frustrating to local officials, who believe it reflects a basic misunderstanding of how the city’s budget works.

In the resolution that Congress passed in March to fund the federal government for another six months, the budgets of all federal agencies were frozen at the level of the 2024 fiscal year. But in a departure from decades of practice, the House’s resolution did not exempt the District from that freeze, even though the budget funds being frozen were locally raised tax revenues, not federal dollars. The effect would be a $1.1 billion cut in anticipated spending, made all the more difficult because the District is already halfway through the current fiscal year.

District officials lobbied lawmakers for a fix, and after approving the funding resolution, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a bill sparing the District’s budget. With President Trump himself explicitly endorsing the bill, the odds seemed to suggest that the threat to D.C. would be headed off. But weeks passed and the House did not act, with some lawmakers hoping to add on amendments pertaining to matters like abortion and cannabis that could hinder any chance of quick passage.

The situation grew urgent when the House left for its two-week recess last week without approving the D.C. fix, and district officials began making their contingency plans public.

On Monday, Mayor Muriel Bowser sent a letter to congressional leaders notifying them that, under a 2009 federal law, D.C. has the authority to increase its local appropriations by 6 percent this year, partly closing the billion-dollar gap.

This would still leave the District with a roughly $410 million shortfall, and the mayor’s order on Tuesday was the strongest indication yet of the potential pain to come. While the order specified some facilities that would not be considered for closure, such as schools and shelters, all agencies — including the police and fire departments — would face hiring and overtime freezes, though waivers would be granted on a case-by-case basis.

D.C. officials are now preparing a supplemental budget with a litany of service cuts while still hoping the House acts when it returns at the end of the month.

At an event on Monday, Ms. Bowser expressed irritation about the entire situation. “It’s not like we’re talking about cutting services because we don’t have the money — we do have the money,” she said. But under federal law, the city needs permission from Congress to spend its own money, she said.

“I can only tell you how frustrating it is right now,” Ms. Bowser said.



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Marvin Levy, Oscar-Winning Publicist to Spielberg, Dies at 96

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Marvin Levy, Oscar-Winning Publicist to Spielberg, Dies at 96


Reporters trying to get interviews with Steven Spielberg would sometimes grouse that his publicist’s job amounted to speaking a single word: “No.”

But Marvin Levy, who served as Mr. Spielberg’s publicist for 42 years, was responsible for much more than body blocking the fifth estate (which he usually did with a gentlemanly grace). Mr. Spielberg did not become Mr. Spielberg because of his filmmaking alone: For 42 years, Mr. Levy was behind the scenes — promoting, polishing, spinning, safeguarding, strategizing — to ensure that his boss was viewed worldwide as Hollywood’s de facto head of state.

In addition to representing him personally, Mr. Levy helped devise and lead publicity campaigns for 32 movies that Mr. Spielberg directed, including several with sensitive subject matter, like “The Color Purple” (1985), “Schindler’s List” (1993) and “Munich” (2005).

Mr. Levy died on April 7 at his home in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 96. His death was announced by Mr. Spielberg’s production company Amblin Entertainment.

Over Mr. Levy’s 73-year entertainment career — an eternity in fickle and ageist Hollywood — he worked on more than 150 movies and TV shows. He helped turn “Ben-Hur” (1959), “Taxi Driver” (1976) and “Kramer vs. Kramer” (1979) into hits.

After joining Mr. Spielberg, Mr. Levy was involved with nearly every film made by Amblin and another of Mr. Spielberg’s companies, DreamWorks, including “Back to the Future” (1985), “Men in Black” (1997) and “Shrek” (2001).

“Simplicity was his mantra,” Mr. Spielberg said in an email. “The bicycle across the moon image we used for ‘E.T.’ or the hand of the little girl in red being held by Oscar Schindler. Those are simply two examples of Marvin’s indispensable place in my Amblin family.”

Mr. Levy received an honorary Oscar in 2018. He is the only publicist in the motion picture academy’s 98-year history to be given one, making him a folk hero among Hollywood’s unseen publicity armies.

Tom Hanks said of Mr. Levy at the ceremony, “A marketing department can make you aware of a title, but it takes something of a storyteller to get an audience hooked on the story without giving away the story.”

Marvin Jay Levy was born in Manhattan on Nov. 16, 1928, to Max Levy, a real estate appraiser, and Edna (Hess) Levy.

He graduated in 1949 from New York University, where he majored in English and was part of the R.O.T.C. program. After a brief stint writing questions for a game show (he was fired because his were too easy), Mr. Levy found work with Tex McCrary, an old-school public relations man, and his wife, Jinx Falkenburg, an actress and model. Tex and Jinx, as they were known, helped popularize the TV talk-show format in the 1950s. Mr. Levy credited them with igniting his interest in publicity.

In 1952, he took a two-year hiatus to serve in the Air Force. He was stationed in Michigan and assigned to advertising and public relations work. He returned to his job with Tex and Jinx in 1954.

By the mid-1970s, Mr. Levy had moved to Los Angeles to work at Columbia Pictures — most notably shepherding Mr. Spielberg’s intimate “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977) into theaters.

As the film moved through postproduction, Columbia executives began to worry that it would fizzle. It was nothing like Mr. Spielberg’s pulpy “Jaws,” which had riveted audiences two years earlier. Maybe the studio should scale back its marketing and distribution plan?

“Marvin said, ‘You’re all wrong,’ and moved heaven and earth to make ‘Close Encounters’ a success,” said Terry Press, Amblin’s president of strategy and communications.

Mr. Levy retired last year.

He married Carol Schild, who worked in advertising, in 1952. She survives him, along with their sons, Don and Doug, and two grandsons.

“She always knew what my job entailed,” Mr. Levy said of his wife when he accepted his Academy Award. “But most friends and relations outside the industry really had no clue. I never could explain the full range of what the job really entails.”

“At least now,” he quipped, “they’ll know I got an Oscar for it.”

Richard Sandomir contributed reporting.



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The First Ever Sighting of a Colossal Squid

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The First Ever Sighting of a Colossal Squid


In March, Kathrin S.R. Bolstad returned from an Antarctic expedition where she had used a new camera system specially built to search for the elusive colossal squid.

No one had captured footage of one of these animals swimming in the deep sea. She didn’t spot one on this voyage either.

On the day she left the ship, though, Dr. Bolstad learned about a recent video taken on March 9 from the South Sandwich Islands. fA dive team searching for new marine life, in a Schmidt Ocean Institute submersible, had happened upon a young cephalopod, and people wanted Dr. Bolstad’s help identifying it.

The juvenile was about 30 centimeters long (a little less than a foot), with a transparent body, delicate arms and brown spots. It was a colossal squid.

“Pretty much as soon as I saw the footage, I knew there was a good chance,” Dr. Bolstad, a cephalopod biologist at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, said. She consults remotely for Schmidt’s Antarctic work.

It’s been 100 years since the colossal squid was formally described. In its adult form, the animal is larger than the giant squid, or any other invertebrate on Earth, and can grow to 6 or 7 meters long, or up to 23 feet.

Scientists’ first good look at the species in 1925 was incomplete — just arm fragments from two squid in the belly of a sperm whale. Adults are thought to spend most of their time in the deep ocean. A full-grown colossal squid occasionally appears at the ocean’s surface, drawn up to a fishing boat while it’s “chewing on” a hooked fish, Dr. Bolstad said. Younger specimens have turned up in trawl nets.

Yet until now, humans had not witnessed a colossal squid at home, swimming in the deep Antarctic sea.

One reason they’re so elusive is the sheer size of that home. Additionally, the squid are probably avoiding us, Dr. Bolstad said. “They’re very aware of their surroundings, because any disturbance in the water column around them might mean a predator.”

Sperm whales, the squid’s main predator, can dive up to two kilometers (1.25 miles). Perhaps to help them avoid the whales, colossal squid have evolved the world’s largest eyes — bigger than a basketball.

They also have “a unique combination of suckers and hooks on the arms and the tentacles,” Dr. Bolstad said, which is how she was able to confirm on closer inspection that the young sea creature in the new footage was a colossal squid.

The footage was taken by a remotely operated submersible called SuBastian, which the Schmidt Ocean Institute uses to explore the deep sea. This particular dive was not searching for squid; it was a partnership with Ocean Census, an initiative to discover unknown species. As the submersible was descending, it stopped for a few minutes to film the small, transparent cephalopod.

“I think it’s very exciting,” said Christine Huffard, a biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California who wasn’t involved in the expedition.

Dr. Huffard has used other remotely operated submersibles in her research. She said these open-ended, exploratory missions in the ocean have “tremendous value” for science. For example, her own observations of octopuses walking bipedally on the ocean floor — using two arms to stroll, and the other six to possibly camouflage themselves as a clump of algae or a coconut — happened by chance. The findings have been useful to researchers in soft robotics, she said.

Capturing footage of rarely seen marine animals like the colossal squid, Dr. Huffard said, can also inform decisions about human activities such as deep-sea mining.

She said it would help to know where these animals spend their time, where they travel to mate or spawn, or how long they live. “But right now we don’t really have a solid understanding of that,” she said.

The young colossal squid in the video was swimming around 600 meters down, Dr. Bolstad said, not in the deeper waters where the adults likely dwell. Other deep-sea squids also spend their early lives in shallower waters, she said. Having a transparent body, like the young colossal squid and others in its family do, may help it swim undetected by predators before it descends to the darker ocean as an adult.

A submersible’s camera can detect the squid — and transmit images instantaneously. Unlike the scientists of a century ago, who had to dig through partly digested carnage in a whale’s belly, anyone could watch the Schmidt “dive-stream” from home to be part of the moment of finding the colossal squid, Dr. Bolstad said. “To be able to participate in these explorations and discoveries, essentially in real time, from anywhere on the planet — that’s an amazing thing that humans can do.”

She’ll continue looking for a full-grown animal. “I can’t wait to see what a live adult colossal squid looks like, at home in the deep sea where it belongs,” she said.

But she said she was also glad that the first sighting of the species in the wild was not of the adult version — an enormous, hook-wielding leviathan, but “this beautiful early life stage that looks like a little glass sculpture.”

“I actually love that this is our first glimpse of what will become a true giant,” Dr. Bolstad said.



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Trump Says He’s Powerless to Return Deported Migrant. But He’s Done So Before.

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Trump Says He’s Powerless to Return Deported Migrant. But He’s Done So Before.


In August 2018, during President Trump’s first term, an Iraqi immigrant named Muneer Subaihani went missing.

A refugee who had been living in the United States for nearly 25 years, Mr. Subaihani was among hundreds of Iraqis who had been protected from deportation under a federal court order. His lawyers figured he was still in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he had been placed after he was swept up in an ICE raid.

A search of the federal ICE database turned up nothing, so the attorneys went to the Justice Department, looking for an answer. Within a day, they got one.

The government said it had made a mistake, according to Margo Schlanger, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School who was one of Mr. Subaihani’s lawyers. Mr. Subaihani had been deported to Iraq, in violation of the court order.

The case has striking similarities to one that is playing out now in Mr. Trump’s second term, after the United States deported a Salvadoran man because of what the government has acknowledged was an “administrative error.”

But the Trump administration’s response in the two cases could not be more different, a sign of how emboldened Mr. Trump has become in his defiance of the courts and in his determination to take a hard line on deportations, regardless of legal constraints.

In Mr. Subaihani’s case, the government recognized its error to the federal court, setting off a monthslong odyssey to track down and retrieve a man who never should have been deported in the first place.

The Salvadoran man, 29-year-old Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, is facing a very different path. Trump officials have accused Mr. Abrego Garcia of being a member of the MS-13 gang, although he has never been charged with being in a gang and they acknowledge his deportation was an error.

U.S. officials would not have to search far to find Mr. Abrego Garcia because they know exactly where he is: a notorious Salvadoran prison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center. But Mr. Trump and his top officials have argued that the case is out of their hands. Only El Salvador can decide to send the man back, the Trump administration says.

President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, a Trump ally who visited the White House on Monday, made clear he would not be sending Mr. Abrego Garcia back to the United States, calling the idea “preposterous.” Mr. Abrego Garcia, a father of three who is married to an American citizen, is now facing an indefinite lockup in El Salvador.

“The administration’s unwillingness to work to bring Mr. Abrego Garcia back to the United States is the complete opposite of how it handled Mr. Subaihani’s case,” said Miriam Aukerman, an attorney with the A.C.L.U. of Michigan. “ICE immediately and affirmatively went to the court to acknowledge that it had violated the court’s order, and then worked — pursuant to court orders — to facilitate his return, including coordination with the U.S. Embassy in Iraq and communication with the Iraqi government.”

In one court document from Aug. 23, 2018, the government owned up to its mistake, saying Mr. Subaihani had been removed to Iraq despite the court’s order.

Locating Mr. Subaihani was complicated because nobody knew where he had gone, or even if he had made it to Iraq. By September 2018, several weeks after Mr. Subaihani had been deported, a federal judge demanded ICE go to great lengths to find him.

ICE officials complied, explaining to the court that they were in touch with State Department staff in Iraq and in other countries he had transited through. They even called airline officials — Mr. Subaihani had been deported on a commercial flight — for more on his whereabouts.

By late September, ICE officials notified the court that they had found evidence Mr. Subaihani had made it to Iraq. In October, Mr. Subaihani’s attorneys — who had hired private investigators to help look for him — set about working with ICE to get him back to the United States.

Mr. Subaihani told an NPR station at the time that he hid during his sojourn in Iraq.

“I stayed in that house six months. I’m not going nowhere,” he said to the station, WPLN, Nashville’s NPR affiliate. “It’s not safe.”

In January 2019, he was back on U.S. soil.

“I’m so happy,” he said. “I can’t believe it.” His location is currently unknown.

The next steps for Mr. Abrego Garcia are unclear. His wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, said the Trump and Bukele administrations were playing “political games” with her husband’s life.

“My heart is heavy, but I hold on to hope and the strength of those around me,” she said.



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Sarah Palin’s Libel Trial Against The New York Times Begins

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Sarah Palin’s Libel Trial Against The New York Times Begins


A retrial of the yearslong defamation case brought by Sarah Palin against The New York Times got underway before a Manhattan jury on Tuesday.

Ms. Palin, the former Alaska governor and onetime Republican vice-presidential nominee, sued The Times in 2017 over an editorial that erroneously linked her campaign’s language to a mass shooting, which she claimed defamed her.

A federal judge and a jury both ruled against her in a 2022 trial of the case, but Ms. Palin successfully appealed and a new trial was ordered. The same judge, Jed S. Rakoff, is hearing the case again. The arguments are largely the same, but the media landscape in the United States is very different. There have been several high-profile defamation cases that have resulted in multimillion-dollar payouts. And President Trump has continued his multipronged attack on the news media.

In opening statements on Tuesday, lawyers for each side presented arguments over whether The Times had knowingly published a false statement about Ms. Palin. To clear the legal hurdle for defamation, a public figure must prove that the defendant acted with actual malice, or published something despite knowing it was false or with reckless disregard for the truth.

This case centers on a 2017 editorial published by The Times’s editorial board, which is separate from the newsroom, and headlined “America’s Lethal Politics.” It condemned violent political rhetoric in the wake of a gunman’s opening fire on a congressional baseball practice.

The editorial made reference to a 2011 mass shooting that seriously wounded Representative Gabby Giffords and killed six people. Before the shooting, Ms. Palin’s political action committee had put out an ad with stylized cross hairs over some Democratic-controlled congressional districts. The editorial incorrectly made a link between the map and the shooting.

The Times published a correction 14 hours after the original publication, noting that it had “incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords” and had also incorrectly described the map.

Ms. Palin’s lawyer, Shane Vogt, told the nine-person jury that his team would show that James Bennet, who was then the opinion editor for The Times and in charge of editorials, was the “driving force” behind libeling Ms. Palin and had “injected that narrative” into the editorial that she was to blame for the shooting.

Mr. Vogt also told the jury that the correction that The Times had made was insufficient because it did not mention Ms. Palin by name, nor had The Times apologized personally to Ms. Palin.

Felicia Ellsworth, a lawyer for The Times, acknowledged that The Times had made a mistake in the editorial and said Mr. Bennet, who had rewritten a draft, “made some quick edits on a tight deadline.” Mr. Bennet left The Times in 2020.

“The moment they had reason to think they might have gotten something wrong, they moved quickly to fix it,” Ms. Ellsworth said, noting that The Times had also apologized in a tweet to readers.

The jury must decide, Ms. Ellsworth said, whether this was “an honest mistake or done on purpose,” noting the freedom of speech protections granted by the First Amendment. She added that Ms. Palin was not claiming she had suffered any financial damage from the editorial.

An appeals panel ruled last year that Judge Rakoff had made a number of errors in the last trial, including wrongly preventing jurors from hearing evidence that might have shown that Mr. Bennet was aware or should have been aware that Ms. Palin did not incite the 2011 mass shooting.



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The U.S. Wants to Break Up Google and Meta. That Could Be Hard.

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The U.S. Wants to Break Up Google and Meta. That Could Be Hard.


The last time the courts seriously weighed the wisdom of breaking up a giant technology company was a quarter-century ago, after Microsoft was found to have illegally stifled competition in personal computer software.

A Federal District Court judge said yes to forcing Microsoft to split in two, separating its monopoly Windows operating system from its Office productivity products and other software. But an appeals court threw out the order, calling the breakup option “a remedy that is imposed only with great caution, in part because its long-term efficacy is rarely certain.”

In a pair of landmark proceedings this month in two Washington courtrooms, the issue of possibly breaking up a big tech company will be on the judicial table again.

In an antitrust trial that began on Monday, the Federal Trade Commission argued that Meta maintained an illegal monopoly in social media through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. The agency seeks to force Meta to divest both. Next week at a separate proceeding, a federal judge will hear arguments from the Justice Department about why the court should break up Google in order to remedy the company’s monopoly in internet search.

“Divestiture can be an entirely acceptable remedy, depending on the severity of the harm,” said William Kovacic, a law professor at George Washington University and a former chairman of the F.T.C. “But it can be risky surgery.”

For generations, the courts have faced the quandary of what action to take in major antitrust cases once a dominant company has been found to have engaged in anticompetitive behavior. In a 1947 Supreme Court ruling, Justice Robert H. Jackson memorably wrote that if a court’s solution did not open the market to competition, the government would have “won a lawsuit and lost a cause.”

But while a court’s ruling is based on examining facts in the past, its remedy looks to the future. The goal is to free up markets rather than hobble them — and create a competitive environment that results in more new ideas, new companies, more innovation and lower prices.

The challenge is taking on new significance as regulators make a major push to rein in the tech giants in a string of antitrust cases objecting to the power they have over communications, commerce and information.

In a different lawsuit against Google, the Justice Department is awaiting a judge’s decision on the company’s dominance in advertising technology. The department has also sued Apple over its tactics to protect its lucrative iPhone franchise. The F.T.C. has sued Amazon, saying the company illegally shielded its monopoly in online retailing from competition.

This wave of antitrust litigation, including appeals, is likely to last for years. And if the government wins any of its cases, a judge could order a breakup — the worst-case outcome for the companies.

History shows that these orders can be effective, antitrust experts said. But the results in improving competition has been mixed.

Standard Oil, an energy giant founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1870, was the defining case of the progressive, trustbusting era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The company was broken up by the Supreme Court in 1911, split into 34 entities that had made up the original Standard Oil Trust, which controlled the oil industry’s production, refining, distribution and pricing. While that initially helped competition, over time the trust’s descendants became oil giants of their own, including Exxon Mobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips.

The breakup of AT&T, in a settlement in 1982, followed a lengthy antitrust suit by the Justice Department, which accused the company of illegally monopolizing the telecommunications market in America. The local phone business was split into seven regional “Baby Bell” companies, and the order opened up the long-distance phone and telephone equipment markets, increasing competition and driving down prices.

In antitrust jargon, a “structural” solution like this generally means a breakup. But there are steps short of a forced sell-off that can shape markets and stimulate competition, antitrust experts said.

In 1969, under pressure from a government antitrust suit accusing it of monopolizing the computer market of its day, IBM unbundled its hardware from software — treating them as separate businesses, sold and priced independently. Software would no longer be “free,” included in the price of a computer. That helped ignite the rise of the commercial software industry, with Microsoft as the biggest winner.

Microsoft avoided a breakup, but its eventual settlement in 2001 contained a prohibition against contracts that had essentially used its Windows monopoly as a club by restricting personal computer makers from distributing the software of upstart rivals. That restraint kept the door open to new competition in browser software and search. Google was the leading beneficiary.

“Those were strong remedies without a breakup that created more competition,” said Fiona Scott Morton, an economics professor at the Yale University School of Management.

The next powerful tech companies to face courtroom scrutiny are Meta and Google.

On Monday, the F.T.C. and Meta, formerly Facebook, presented their opening statements in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, then took the stand. The essence of the government’s case is that Facebook vastly overpaid more than a decade ago for Instagram and WhatsApp, to kill them off to protect a lucrative monopoly in social networking.

Meta replied that Instagram and WhatsApp had grown and flourished under its ownership. And, the company argued, there is plenty of competition in the social networking market, including the meteoric rise of TikTok.

Should the government win the Meta case, the likely remedial step, antitrust experts said, would be a court order to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp.

Next week in the same Washington court, Google faces the remedies stage in the lawsuit by the Justice Department and a group of states over its internet search monopoly. In August, Judge Amit P. Mehta found that Google illegally maintained a search monopoly.

To restore competition, the government asked the court to order Google to sell Chrome, its popular web browser, and either spin off Android, its smartphone operating system, or be barred from making its services mandatory on Android phones. Chrome and Android are powerful distribution channels for Google search.

Google has described the government’s list as a “wildly overboard proposal” that “goes miles beyond the court’s decision” and that would harm consumers by offering them inferior products. The company has also said it will appeal.

Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University who was a White House adviser on technology and competition policy in the Biden administration, supports breakups in the Google and Meta cases.

“If you want to stir the pot, structural solutions are clean and essentially self-executing — you break it up and walk away,” he said. (Mr. Wu writes for The New York Times’s opinion section.)

But any breakup order would be appealed, and the higher courts today seem to echo the skepticism of the Microsoft era.

In a rare unanimous decision in 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that the National Collegiate Athletic Association could not use its market power to stop payments to student-athletes. It was essentially a wage price-fixing case, decided entirely for the plaintiffs.

Yet Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, writing for the court, digressed to make a broader point about judicial restraint in antitrust matters.

“In short,” he wrote, “judges make for poor ‘central planners’ and should never aspire to the role.”



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How Trump Might Unwittingly Cut Emissions From Online Shopping

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How Trump Might Unwittingly Cut Emissions From Online Shopping


Fast-fashion giants like Shein and Temu have been doing booming business in the United States in recent years, in part because of a tariff exemption that’s helped to keep prices low on packages shipped from China.

Now, President Trump has ordered the loophole closed as part of new tariffs, starting with packages from China and Hong Kong. It could have the effect, probably unintended, of putting a dent in global airfreight emissions linked to the fashion industry.

Last year, 1.36 billion packages entered the United States through that loophole, which is known as the de minimis exemption and allows goods worth less than $800 to enter the country without tariffs. The largest source of shipments under the exemption was China, and most of those packages crossed the ocean by plane, according to data from Customs and Border Protection.

And that means a lot of planet-warming emissions: Flying a package across the sea is 68 times more carbon-intensive than shipping it by ocean freight, according to the Climate Action Accelerator, a nonprofit group based in Switzerland.

Many countries allow shipments below a certain value to cross their borders untaxed. In Europe, the threshold is 150 euros. In Argentina, it’s $400. Since 2016, when Congress last increased the de minimis exemption in a bipartisan vote, the U.S. has drawn the line at $800.

These policies help simplify the customs process for small packages and prevent bottlenecks at the border. But the U.S. exemption has also opened the door wide for foreign e-commerce platforms to compete on price with domestic retailers like Amazon and Walmart.

That’s helped Shein to carve out a U.S. niche in low-cost apparel. The company gets another boost from “haul” videos on social media, in which buyers show off their purchases. And Temu, an e-commerce platform that encouraged customers to “shop like a billionaire” in a Super Bowl commercial last year, was the most-downloaded app in Apple’s U.S. app store in 2023 and 2024.

Annual de minimis shipments to the U.S. have increased nearly tenfold in the past decade or so, rising to 1.36 billion in 2024 from 140 million in 2013. According to estimates from China’s national customs office, small packages sent to the United States were worth about $23 billion last year.

President Joe Biden announced a crackdown on these shipments last fall, citing concerns about health and safety compliance, potential contraband like fentanyl, and intellectual property rights.

Trump also briefly ordered an end to de minimis exemptions in February, but reinstated the rule a few days later amid concerns about implementation. He announced the end of the exemption again in April as part of his broader tariff package.

The new rules will be phased in over the coming weeks, with the steepest levies to take effect on June 1. The Trump administration has proposed fees of up to $200 per package or 120 percent of the package value, with the carrier choosing which option to apply, on shipments from Hong Kong and mainland China.

Before the pandemic, airfreight was largely used for perishable goods, said Josh Archer, a senior global corporate campaigner at Stand.Earth, an environmental nonprofit group. That was in part because shipping by air, while more expensive, is faster than shipping by sea. But Amazon’s introduction of one-day shipping changed consumers’ expectations about how fast their packages should arrive, and other retailers ramped up their use of air cargo to compete.

Airfreight emissions grew by 25 percent between 2019 and 2023, according to Archer’s research.

In 2024, more than a billion packages entered the U.S. via airfreight under the de minimis exemption, or roughly eight per household. Last year, Cargo Facts Consulting estimated that Temu, Shein, Alibaba.com and TikTok were flying the equivalent of about 108 Boeing 777 cargo planes full of packages every day.

“It’s just been an absolute explosion in the sector that we don’t really have a solution for decarbonizing,” Archer said.

Neither Shein nor Temu responded to requests for comment.

Trump’s abortive attempt to close the loophole back in February offered a glimpse of what might happen.

After he announced the end of the exemption, sales on Shein started dropping. Three days later, they were down 41 percent compared with the same day a week before, according to a Bloomberg Second Measure analysis of credit- and debit-card data. Temu saw similar, though smaller, declines in sales.

The change may shake up e-commerce even if sales don’t take a hit: Companies could shift to sending much bigger shipments to U.S. warehouses by ocean freight rather than mailing individual packages on demand. That could mean lower tariffs, with a potential side benefit of lower emissions, too.

Temu is already doing this, and has said about half the products ordered in the U.S. are delivered from domestic warehouses.

Crowds of tourists bound for Antarctica have brought prosperity to Ushuaia, Argentina’s southernmost city. A decade ago, about 35,500 Antarctic passengers set out on cruise ships from Ushuaia. Last year, that number was around 111,500. But the boom is also squeezing locals and stressing the environment. — Lautaro Grinspan



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More Than 20,000 IRS Employees Accept Trump Administration’s Resignation Offer

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More Than 20,000 IRS Employees Accept Trump Administration’s Resignation Offer


About 22,000 employees at the Internal Revenue Service have signed up for the Trump administration’s latest resignation offer, according to four people familiar with the matter, an exodus that could weaken the agency’s ability to collect taxes.

The I.R.S. had about 100,000 employees before President Trump took office. Roughly 5,000 employees have resigned since January, and an additional 7,000 probationary employees were laid off, though those firings have been contested in court. If those layoffs take effect, the agency would be on track to lose about a third of its work force this year.

Under the terms of the Trump administration’s deferred resignation offer, employees who take the deal will be put on paid administrative leave through September and then leave their federal jobs. Some employees who took the offer could still opt out of resigning.

Losing a third of I.R.S. staff — with remaining employees bracing for further layoffs and funding cuts — is expected to decrease the amount of revenue the federal government is able to collect. The cuts have already caused the I.R.S. to abandon some audits, current and former employees said, and taxpayers may feel more emboldened to try and avoid paying taxes if the I.R.S. is diminished.

The Biden administration had expanded the I.R.S. by about 20,000 employees in hopes of increasing the amount of tax revenue it collected. A Treasury spokesperson said the department was aiming to reverse the hirings from the last administration and still improve service.

“The Secretary is committed to ensuring that efficiency is realized while providing the collections, privacy and customer service the American people deserve,” the spokesperson for Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.

Among the resigning I.R.S. officials is the acting commissioner, Melanie Krause. She and other top I.R.S. officials decided to leave the agency in part because of an agreement to share taxpayer information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Trump administration’s decision to use I.R.S. data to help deport undocumented immigrants has caused widespread concern at the tax collector, which has long kept taxpayer information confidential.



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'You cannot do that!' | Is this the strangest fielding HOWLER ever?

Eye Observer
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'You cannot do that!' | Is this the strangest fielding HOWLER ever?




Punjabi Kings’ Xavier Bartlett had a nightmare in the field, giving away the strangest boundary you’ve seen.



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Canada Conditionally Waives Retaliatory Tariffs on U.S.-Made Cars and Trucks

Eye Observer
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Canada Conditionally Waives Retaliatory Tariffs on U.S.-Made Cars and Trucks


In a partial roll back of its retaliation against U.S. tariffs, Canada’s finance minister said on Tuesday that the government would let automakers import vehicles assembled in the United States duty-free provided that they continued to build cars in Canada and continued with previously announced expansions.

Last week, Canada began charging 25 percent tariffs on vehicles imported from the United States in response to President Trump’s levies of the same amount on cars.

The great majority of Canadian-made cars and trucks end up in the United States. Mr. Trump has repeatedly said that he wants carmakers to move all of their manufacturing to the United States, a move widely seen in Canada as a direct assault on the country’s largest export aside from oil and gas.

Auto trade between the United States and Canada has become tightly integrated since the two countries signed a trade deal 60 years ago that eased the flow of vehicles and related goods across the border. The resulting trade has been generally balanced between the two nations, though there have been occasional, slight surpluses in the United States’ favor.

François-Philippe Champagne, Canada’s finance minister, did not specify in his statement exactly how many U.S.-made cars and trucks each of the five major automakers would be allowed to import without tariffs.

But his statement suggested that those numbers would be linked to Canadian manufacturing: “The number of tariff-free vehicles a company is permitted to import will be reduced if there are reductions in Canadian production or investment.”

A spokeswoman for Canada’s Department of Finance was unable to immediately provide further details. Stellantis, one of the major automakers, declined to comment on the announcement. Ken Chiu, a spokesman for Honda, said the company’s factories in Alliston, Ontario, would continue to produce as many vehicles as it could. The other three companies did not respond to questions.

Only Toyota and Honda, which account for about two-thirds of Canadian auto production, are currently operating at or near full capacity in Canada.

Stellantis recently stopped renovating a factory in the Toronto suburb of Brampton that would have made gasoline and electric Jeeps, in what the company described as a pause. Its larger plant, in Windsor, Ontario, is in the middle of a two-week shutdown that was induced by the U.S. tariffs.

Ford’s factory in Oakville, Ontario, was closed for a now-abandoned plan to convert it for electric vehicles. It is now retooling to make large pickups. And General Motors announced that it would largely shut down production of a poor-selling electric van made in Ingersoll, Ontario, until October.



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