Wealthy Americans are fleeing to the Cotswolds, England

The Guardian » US applications for UK citizenship hit a record high last year at more than 6,100, a 26% increase from 2023. There was a 40% year-on-year rise during the final three months of the year, around the time of Trump’s re-election.

In the prime London real estate market, which covers areas such as Knightsbridge and Mayfair, the number of American buyers overtook Chinese buyers for the first time last year, analysis by the property agent Knight Frank found.

The Ugly

Trump has ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to add at least 20,000 officers to enforce his deportation policies

BBC » Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the sub-agency that primarily deals with illegal immigration, currently has more than 21,000 employees.

Of those, ICE has 6,100 deportation officers and more than 750 enforcement removal assistants, according to the agency website.

Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, song glorifying Hitler gets millions of views on X while other platforms struggle to remove it

NBC » Spotify, SoundCloud and other tech platforms have worked to remove a new song from Ye that praises Adolf Hitler, but the song and its video have continued to proliferate online including across X, where it has racked up millions of views.

On various mainstream and alternative tech platforms this week, Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, has been able to share his latest song, titled “Heil Hitler,” along with its companion title, “WW3,” which similarly glorifies Hitler, the architect of the Holocaust.

Trump administration halts research meant to help newborns with heart defects

NBC » For James Antaki, a biomedical engineering professor at Cornell University, the $6.7 million government grant meant babies would be saved. Awarded by the Department of Defense on March 30, it would allow his team at Cornell to ramp up production and testing of PediaFlow, a device that boosts blood flow in infants with heart defects.

A week later, that all changed.

The Defense Department sent Antaki a stop-work order on April 8 informing him that his team wouldn’t get the money, intended to be distributed over four years. Three decades of research is now at risk, and Antaki said he has no idea why the government cut off funding.

“I feel that it’s my calling in life to complete this project,” he said Friday, in his first news interview since losing funding. “Once a week, I go through this mental process of, ‘Is it time to give up?’ But it is not my prerogative to give up.”

Trump’s Worldwide Trade and Tariff War

Zero ships from China are bound for America’s ports. Officials haven’t seen that since the pandemic

CNN » On Friday morning, West Coast port officials told CNN about a startling sight: Not a single cargo vessel had left China with goods for the two major West Coast ports in the past 12 hours. That hasn’t happened since the pandemic.

Six days ago, 41 vessels were scheduled to depart China for the San Pedro Bay Complex, which encompasses both the Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach in California. On Friday, it was zero.

Crazy Begets Crazy

The Daily Beast » With respect to one of those appearances, Trump’s meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell offered a similar observation, arguing that the president is “clearly off his game.” Like leaders in other recent presidential meetings, Carney “both humbled and humiliated Trump at the same time without Donald Trump having the slightest idea it was happening,” O’Donnell said, labeling Trump’s oft-repeated proposal that the U.S. annex Canada as “demented.”

That’s a sentiment that many others have also suggested in response to presidential initiatives—from seizing the Panama Canal to watching a TV movie about Alcatraz and hours later suggesting the decrepit prison facility, which has been shut down for more than half a century, should be reopened.