April 30 2025

White House Slams 'Hostile' Amazon, as Walmart Doubles Down on 'Made in America' Amid Tariffs

Trump Touts '100 Days of Greatness,' but Supporters Voice Tariff and Inflation Worries in Swing State Michigan

Church-State Battle Intensifies as SCOTUS Considers Oklahoma's Religious Charter School Proposal

Harvard Reels From Scathing Reports on Antisemitism, Islamophobia Amid Trump Admin Scrutiny

Europe's Energy Transition Faces Scrutiny After Catastrophic Power Grid Collapse Hits Spain, Portugal

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1. White House Slams 'Hostile' Amazon, as Walmart Doubles Down on 'Made in America' Amid Tariffs

A. The White House has lashed out at what it called a “hostile and political act by Amazon” after a report alleged the tech giant was planning to display price increases caused by Donald Trump’s tariffs on its products. The story originally reported by Punchbowl News on Tuesday said the ecommerce group would “soon” display the impact of the levies on “the price of each product” it sold. Trump spoke with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to complain about the company’s plans, and the company swiftly walked back the proposal. “Jeff Bezos was very nice,” Trump later said. “He was terrific. He solved the problem very quickly and he did the right thing. He’s a good guy.” FT

B. Walmart is expanding support for American-made products through new programs to help small businesses, the retailer shared exclusively with Axios Tuesday. Growing the pipeline to have more items made in the U.S. can help insulate the world's largest retailer — and consumers — from the effects of tariffs and the trade war. Walmart announced a new "Grow with US" program and shared details of the upcoming 2025 Open Call to make it "easier for U.S.-based entrepreneurs to navigate the complexities of retail and bring their products to a national stage." Axios

Editors note: The Big Box culture wars! Amazon is based in Washington, a deep blue state, while Walmart is based in Arkansas, a ruby red state.

2. Trump Touts '100 Days of Greatness,' but Supporters Voice Tariff and Inflation Worries in Swing State Michigan

WARREN, Mich.—President Trump swept into a sports complex here and declared the first 100 days of his administration a success. “You haven’t even seen anything yet,” said Trump, who stood in front of jumbo screens that read “100 Days of Greatness.” At a shopping complex down the road from the rally, a more mixed picture came through. Concerns about the economy and the president’s tariffs were on the mind of some Trump supporters and converts such as Valerie Walker. “Everything still costs a lot—groceries, bills, housing,” said Walker, 64, a Ford assembly worker who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but switched to Trump in November, helping the Republican narrowly win this swing state. She likes Trump’s immigration policies but is concerned about tariffs, even though Trump says they are designed to grow American manufacturing jobs such as hers. “Like he says, it’s going to take time,” Walker said of Trump’s economic plans. The 89-minute rally Tuesday marked a return to the campaign-style events that have helped turn Trump into a political force. WSJ

Editors note: Inflation price increases are not going to reverse in absolute terms. Inflation is like a ratchet. Trump’s only chance of success is to increase wages and thus make prices relatively lower. Oil/energy is the big exception; cheaper oil will make everything cheaper, because it is an input to everything.

3. Church-State Battle Intensifies as SCOTUS Considers Oklahoma's Religious Charter School Proposal

the Supreme Court considers what could be a lifeline for struggling religious schools and an opportunity for many more: a proposal to create taxpayer-funded charter schools that fully incorporate religion. The idea of religious public schools, considered far-fetched not long ago, now stands on the precipice of reality. Religious leaders, politicians and public policy observers predict an explosion of government-funded religious schools if the court sides with the Catholic Church officials in Oklahoma whose proposed school is at the center of the case. They have questions about the trade-offs involved in taking public money but say that robust public funding will be too tempting for many school leaders to pass up. WaPo

4. Harvard Reels From Scathing Reports on Antisemitism, Islamophobia Amid Trump Admin Scrutiny

A Harvard task force released a scathing account of the university on Tuesday, finding that antisemitism had infiltrated coursework, social life, the hiring of some faculty members and the worldview of certain academic programs. A separate report on anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian bias on campus, also released on Tuesday, found widespread discomfort and alienation among those students as well, with 92 percent of Muslim survey respondents saying they believed they would face an academic or professional penalty for expressing their political opinions. The findings, conveyed in densely packed reports that are hundreds of pages long, come at a delicate time for the university. Harvard is being scrutinized by the Trump administration over accusations of antisemitism, and is fighting the administration’s withdrawal of billions of dollars in federal funding. Harvard has sued the Trump administration in hopes of restoring the funding, the first university to do so. Other schools that have been targeted by the administration are watching the litigation closely. In a letter accompanying the two reports, Dr. Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, apologized for the problems that the task forces revealed. He said the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023 and the war that followed had brought long simmering tensions to the surface, and promised to address them. NYT

5. Europe's Energy Transition Faces Scrutiny After Catastrophic Power Grid Collapse Hits Spain, Portugal

Spain and Portugal on Monday were hit by a complete power outage, leaving trains stranded in tunnels, office workers stuck in lifts and mobile phone services cut, in the biggest blackout in Europe for two decades. The catastrophic failure of the electricity supply has raised pressing questions about the resilience of grid infrastructure across Europe as governments race to roll out renewable energy systems and reduce carbon emissions from their power sources. Spain’s electricity grid collapsed shortly after 12.30pm local time, taking Portugal’s with it. Officials and engineers are still trying to figure out why and what implications the outage could have for energy infrastructure more widely. At 12.33pm local time on Monday, the frequency on Spain’s electricity grid suddenly dropped, from the 50 hertz level at which the grid’s operator tries to maintain it, to 49 hertz, according to Aurora Energy Research, a consultancy. A move bigger than 0.1 hertz forces many power stations to automatically switch off for safety reasons. Any loss of power in Spain has an immediate knock-on effect in Portugal, which relies heavily on its neighbour for electricity supplies. What triggered the frequency to fall in the first instance is not yet clear. On Tuesday, Eduardo Prieto, director of operational services at Spain’s grid operator Red Eléctrica, blamed an unexpected loss of generation in south-west Spain, home to a lot of solar plants. Other theories include electricity cable damage. FT

April 30, 1993: World Wide Web (WWW) launches in the public domain

On April 30, 1993, four years after publishing a proposal for “an idea of linked information systems,” computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee releases the source code for the world’s first web browser and editor. Originally called Mesh, the browser that he dubbed WorldWideWeb becomes the first royalty-free, easy-to-use means of browsing the emerging information network that developed into the internet as we know it today.

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Sources

1. https://www.ft.com/content/a06e80e7-97d0-4f29-9153-1e4219a88713 
2. https://www.axios.com/2025/04/29/walmart-products-made-america-small-business-program 
3. https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-rally-michigan-8da2c5ec?mod=hp_lead_pos4
4. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2025/04/30/supreme-court-religious-charter-schools-taxpayer/
5. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/us/harvard-antisemitism-islamophobia-reports.html
6. https://www.ft.com/content/e922cda3-801d-40df-8455-5d3aeae34288