April 17 2025

Trump's Chip Export Ban Signals Hardline Stance on China AI

Uncle Ming's Blog Fuels Surge in Chinese Nationalism

Federal Judge Threatens Contempt Over Trump's Venezuelan Deportation Flights

Texas House Approves Massive Taxpayer-Funded School Voucher Program

Scientists Discover Aliens?

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1. Trump's Chip Export Ban Signals Hardline Stance on China AI

New U.S. chip-export limits that rocked global markets on Wednesday are the clearest sign yet from the Trump White House that whatever advances China makes in AI will have to happen without America’s help. Trump administration officials have signaled for months that they were considering a crackdown on exports of processors from U.S. companies such as Nvidia that have helped enable major Chinese advances in artificial intelligence. The latest reckoning came this week, with U.S. authorities moving to stop the flow of billions of dollars of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices artificial-intelligence chips to the country. The move, spurred in part by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s surprising success in building powerful models with less computing power, put an end to Nvidia’s ability to skirt U.S. constraints on sales by tweaking its chips. While the changes affect a relatively small portion of the companies’ business, they squash any hopes of unimpeded future chip sales to China. Shares of Nvidia and AMD each dropped around 7% on Wednesday. The broader stock market sagged on news that any hope of a reprieve from the highest “reciprocal tariffs” imposed on China was short-lived. Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang isn’t giving up on China. On Thursday, Chinese state media said Huang arrived in Beijing, where he met a Chinese official and said the country was an important market for his company. He also visited Beijing in January for a company event.
Source: WSJ

2. Uncle Ming's Blog Fuels Surge in Chinese Nationalism

The Chinese do not call it the Korean War. They call it the “Anti-American War”. It is now best known to young Chinese through the Battle of Triangle Hill – Shangganling – a 1950s film about a unit of the 15th Corps that resisted waves of assault for 42 days, forcing the US to retreat. That film has been the rallying cry in China over the past week, trumpeted by Uncle Ming’s Remarks, a hugely popular WeChat blog, and relayed widely by China’s netizens – all reared on a rich diet of “patriotic education”. If a penniless and backward China was willing to face down America at the zenith of its global power in 1950, China is hardly likely to roll over today now that it is the world’s industrial hegemon and financial creditor – with some $6 trillion (£4.5 trillion) of foreign exchange assets, once you include the opaque holdings of state-owned banks. “How has it ever been possible in history that the world’s largest creditor would be defeated by the world’s largest debtor?” asks Uncle Ming. Well, indeed. America’s savings rate has collapsed to 0.6pc of GDP. The US treasury depends on foreign investors to fund a national debt rising higher than ever before, already 122pc of GDP with a structural fiscal deficit of 6pc to 7pc as far as the eye can see. The treasury must roll over 33pc of its $36 trillion federal debt over the next 12 months.
Source: Telegraph

3. Federal Judge Threatens Contempt Over Trump's Venezuelan Deportation Flights

A federal judge in Washington threatened on Wednesday to open a high-stakes contempt investigation into whether the Trump administration had violated an order he issued last month directing officials to stop planes of Venezuelan migrants from being sent to El Salvador. In a 46-page ruling, the judge, James E. Boasberg, said he would begin contempt proceedings against the administration unless the White House did what it had failed to do for more than a month: give scores of Venezuelan men deported to El Salvador under the expansive authority of a wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act a chance to challenge their removal.

Editors note: The situation echoes Andrew Jackson’s notorious defiance of the Supreme Court in the 1832 Worcester v. Georgia case, where the court ruled that Georgia laws had no force in Cherokee territory. Jackson purportedly responded, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it,” effectively ignoring judicial authority and allowing Cherokee removal to proceed. Similarly, the Trump administration faced judicial rebuke from Judge Boasberg for flouting a direct court order to halt deportations of Venezuelan migrants, risking contempt proceedings. Both instances illustrate tensions between executive power and judicial authority, raising fundamental questions about the enforceability of court rulings without executive cooperation.
Source: NYT

4. Texas House Approves Massive Taxpayer-Funded School Voucher Program

The Texas House of Representatives voted early Thursday morning to create one of the largest taxpayer-funded school voucher programs, a hard-fought victory for private school choice activists as they turn their attention to a nationwide voucher push. The measure still has some legislative hurdles to clear before Gov. Greg Abbott signs it into law, but the House vote — 85 to 63 — secured a win that was decades in the making, propelled by the governor’s hardball politics last year. It was also a significant defeat for Democrats, teachers’ unions and some rural conservatives who had long worried that taxpayer-funded private-school vouchers would strain public school budgets. The program would be capped at $1 billion in its first year, but could grow quickly, potentially reaching an estimated $4.5 billion a year by 2030. The funds can be used for private school tuition and for costs associated with home-schooling, including curriculum materials and virtual learning programs.
Source: NYT

5. Scientists Discover Aliens?

A distant planet’s atmosphere shows signs of molecules that on Earth are associated only with biological activity, a possible signal of life on what is suspected to be a watery world, according to a report published Wednesday that analyzed observations by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The peer-reviewed report in the Astrophysical Journal Letters presents more questions than answers, acknowledges numerous uncertainties and does not declare the discovery of life beyond Earth, something never conclusively detected. But the authors do claim to have found the best evidence to date of a possible “biosignature” on a planet far from our solar system. The planet, known as K2-18b, is 124 light-years away, orbiting a red dwarf star. Earlier observations suggested that its atmosphere is consistent with the presence of a global ocean. The molecule purportedly detected is dimethyl sulfide (DMS). On Earth it is produced by the decay of marine phytoplankton and other microbes, and it has no other known source. The astronomers want to observe the planet further to strengthen the evidence that the molecule is present. This possible detection of a biosignature could be “potentially one of the biggest landmarks in the history of science,” Madhusudhan said.
Source: Washington Post

April 17, 1907: Ellis Island has the busiest day in its history, processing 11,747 immigrants, more than double its 5,000 average.

On December 18, 2023, U.S. Border Patrol reported approximately 12,600 migrant encounters along the southwest border, surpassing Ellis Island’s all-time busiest day of 11,747 immigrants on April 17, 1907. The daily average of about 9,740 border encounters during December 2023 was nearly double Ellis Island’s typical daily processing rate of around 5,000 immigrants.

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Sources

1. https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/trump-chip-exports-nvidia-h20-china-amd-d2c4c866?mod=hp_lead_pos2 (WSJ)
2. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/04/15/donald-trump-has-already-lost-his-trade-war-against-china/ (Telegraph)
3. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/us/politics/trump-probable-cause-contempt-deportation-flights.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare (NYT)
4. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/us/texas-trump-private-school-vouchers.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare (NYT)
5. https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/04/16/alien-life-exoplanet-webb-telescope/ (Washington Post)