NPR News Now - NPR News: 05-29-2025 2PM EDT

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

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Lyle from NPR News, I'm Lakshmi Singh. President Trump's facing another legal setback. A second federal court is now blocking Trump's authority to unilaterally impose tariffs. It ruled in favor of two Illinois toy importers. This decision comes less than a day after the Court of International Trade also ruled against Trump's tariffs policy. The administration says it'll appeal the matter all the way to the Supreme Court. White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt presented a forceful defense today. The president's rationale for imposing these powerful tariffs was legally sound and grounded in common sense.

President Trump correctly believes that America cannot function safely long term if we are unable to scale advanced domestic manufacturing capacity, have our own secure critical supply chains, and our defense industrial base is dependent on foreign adversaries. Danielle Pletka The Trump government's also in a legal standoff with Harvard University over an attempt to prevent the school from enrolling international students and adding to the turmoil the government's tightening visa restrictions. The move stands to affect hundreds of thousands of Chinese students studying in the U.S. and

many more seeking to go to school here. For member station GBH in Boston, Kurt Karapes reports Trump supporters see it as a national security issue. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the focus will be on students tied to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in quote critical fields. Right now more than 270,000 Chinese students are enrolled in US colleges. Simon Hankinson, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the longtime Foreign Service Officer, supports more visa scrutiny. In my career over 23 years I saw us go from one sheet of paper front and back to multiple forms online and I think the more information we have about people

that we let in the country the better. International education advocates here in Massachusetts though call these restrictions self-defeating. For NPR News I'm Kurt Terapeza in Boston. The head of the US Census Bureau says the federal agency has lost more than a thousand employees. Part of the US Census Bureau says the federal agency has lost more than a thousand employees, part of the administration's push to shrink the federal government. NPR's Hansi Lo Wang reports the agency's now planning to scale back its work on producing statistics for the country. Speaking at a data users conference, the Census Bureau's Acting Director Ron Jarman

compared over 1,000 employees around the country taking early retirement or voluntary separation offers to a pivotal Marvel movie scene with the supervillain Thanos. For those of us who are still here, feels a little bit like Thanos snapped his finger and a lot of your friends and colleagues went away. But fortunately they didn't turn in the dust, they just retired. But this is going to have an impact. German said the bureau will keep giving high priority to the 2030 census and the surveys that produce key economic indicators.

But the Bureau is figuring out what other statistical work it will stop doing. Many census advocates are concerned about the Bureau's ability to produce accurate 2030 census results that are set to be used to redraw voting maps in the next decade. That sounds like low-wang. It's NPR. Amid President Trump's trade wars, the U.S. economy shrank in the first quarter. Today, the government posted a two-tenths of a percent decline in the January to March period during which many U.S. companies raced to bring in foreign goods before new tariffs took effect.

Best Buy is among the companies to cut its annual profit outlook due to on-again, off-again tariffs. The electronics retail giant has already increased prices on some items, adding to factors likely complicating fiscal projections last night's federal court ruling that struck down many of President Trump's tariffs. Well, roughly 140,000 people die every year from snake bites. Experts gathered at the World Health Assembly in Geneva to talk about a problem that's often hidden, and peers Jonathan Lambert with the latest. Venomous snake bites aren't often at the top of the global health agenda, but each year

millions of people get bitten, often far away from antivenom treatment. To raise awareness, a new initiative called Strike Out Snake Bites scattered human-sized snake statues throughout Geneva. They were pretty spectacularly colored and colorful and pretty large. They certainly, I think, attracted lots of attention. That's David Lalu, vice chancellor of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Going forward, he says the initiative aims to boost funding for antivenom research and help bolster health systems so they can get bitten people to treatment before it's too late. Jonathan Lambert, NPR News.

US stocks are trading higher this hour. The Nasdaq is up 51 points, the S&Ps climbed 13, and the Dow is up 10 points. I'm Lakshmi Singh, NPR News.