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Bulletins and News Discussion from April 14th to April 20th, 2025 - The Lamentations of a Levy-Loving Leader

Image is of Trump's initial set of reciprocal tariffs. Source is CNN and Reuters.

It's difficult to keep up with the news around the tariffs; they get instated, then dropped, then reinstated... for example, on Friday, Trump said that certain electronics like smartphones would be exempt, causing markets to rally a great deal, but now the Commerce Secretary has said that they might not be exempt? The state of play right now, if you haven't been keeping up this week, is that the US recently announced a 90-day global pause on implementing the tariffs he had planned (that is, 25% on certain Canadian and Mexican goods, and at least 10% on every other nation) but nonetheless increased tariffs on China to 145%.

Meanwhile, China has been - quite remarkably - standing their ground, increasing tariffs on the US to 125%, and putting restrictions on rare earths. Xi Jinping has been in Vietnam and has made statements against a tariff war there, saying that it would have no winners. Meanwhile, a Chinese spokesperson has essentially said that China can endure the tariff war due to the increasing demand from its domestic market in combination with its growing economic ties with other countries.

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  • Alessandro Di Battista on Pope Francis death:

    In the coming days, we will witness the usual and hypocritical posthumous glorification by politicians and journalists. There will be broadcasts, television marathons, and miles of editorials written to commemorate “the innovative Pope,” “the reformist Pope,” “the pontiff from the end of the world.” World leaders will come to Rome to pay their respects at his funeral.

    But remember this: many of those who will now praise him (politicians and journalists alike) are the same people who completely ignored him, treated him as irrelevant, when Francis dared to speak out against the arms industry, when he broke the veil of hypocrisy by discussing the origins of the war in Ukraine and NATO's responsibilities, and above all when he cried out in absolute indignation over the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

    “It is necessary to investigate whether a genocide is taking place in Gaza,” Francis said on November 17, 2024. Virtually no political leader (except for the Israelis who attacked him) commented on his words. Those who now glorify him ignored him when he denounced the horror (even last night, Israeli terrorists bombed displaced civilians) taking place just a few hundred kilometers from Rome. Hypocrites, merchants of the temple! Francis was a man of peace, and in times as dark as these, that seems to me an extraordinary merit.

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