The Headlines - The Secret Deals Behind Trump’s Crypto Firm, and a Revenge Porn Ban

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

Plus, let’s hear your best sea gull.On Today’s Episode:Secret Deals, Foreign Investments, Presidential Policy Changes: The Rise of Trump’s Crypto Firm, by Eric Lipton, David Yaffe-Bellany and Ben ProtessAll Authors Working on Flagship U.S. Climate Report Are Dismissed, by Brad Plumer and Rebecca DzombakTrump Recasts Mission of Justice Dept.’s Civil Rights Office, Prompting ‘Exodus,’ by Devlin BarrettHouse Passes Bill to Ban Sharing of Revenge Porn, Sending It to Trump, by Michael Gold and Cecilia KangMark Carney Wins New Term as Canada’s Prime Minister on Anti-Trump Platform, by Matina Stevis-GridneffAmazon Launches First 27 Project Kuiper Internet Satellites, by Karen Weise and Kenneth ChangTo Win This Contest, Just Squawk Like a Seagull, by Amanda HolpuchTune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. 

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Tuesday, April 29th. Here's what we're covering. Hello Bitcoiners. Thank you very much. Hello. It's good to be with you.

The Times has been looking into the Trump family's growing ties to the crypto industry. I truly believe that this is the beginning of a financial revolution, not just in America, but truly around the world. Along with his sons, Eric and Donald Jr., the president has embraced the once-fringe financial product. Together with business partners, the Trump family even launched their own cryptocurrency firm this fall, World Liberty Financial. Obviously, this is kind of the latest venture and the industry has come to love us. The marketing pitch is that the firm eventually plans to operate as a new type of internet

bank. In the months since it launched, it's cut partnership deals around the world and sold its own cryptocurrency, reaping hundreds of millions of dollars. That's raised concerns about who's buying in and what they may expect in return. So we've spent months looking into World Liberty Financial, and what we have found is really an unprecedented conflict of interest, ethical issues that just exceed anything that we witnessed during President Trump's first term. Eric Lipton's part of the team at the time, so it's been investigating the firm. In the crypto world, it's kind of hard to pin down who's buying individual

cryptocurrency tokens, but we dug in and were able to identify investors from all over the world, from South Korea, from United Arab Emirates, from Israel, from Hong Kong. Normally, foreigners are prohibited from making campaign contributions to a president. But here you have foreigners investing in his company and bringing him personal profit. Eric says they also found that some of the investors in World Liberty Financial appear to have directly benefited

from doing business with the Trump family. He says, for example, some of them had previously been investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the government agency that polices cryptocurrency. But after investing in Trump's crypto company, those investigations were frozen or shut down. So when we think about what we found here, it's easy to compare it to the Trump hotel in Washington, D.C. during his first term, where lobbyists and foreign diplomats used to frequent. They were seen often in the lobby buying expensive drinks or staying in the hotel, people trying

to buy access to him. But this is at a whole different scale. We're talking here about potentially a billion dollars worth of revenue for the Trump family, unknown players that are investing in World Liberty Financial. And it just makes the Trump Hotel in D.C. seem like a kid's lemonade stand compared to the dollars at play here now with World Liberty Financial. The Times' full investigation into the Trump family's crypto firm is at nytimes.com. Now, three other updates out of Washington. The Trump administration has taken aim at the country's flagship climate report,

the National Climate Assessment. It examines how global warming is affecting the U.S. and the research helps businesses and local governments prepare for heat waves, floods, droughts, and other crises. By law, it's supposed to come out every few years. Yesterday, the administration dismissed all of the hundreds of scientists and experts who had been putting together the next version. Also, at the Justice Department… The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology. Also, at the Justice Department, the head of the Civil Rights Division is defending dramatic changes to the agency's mission.

Traditionally, the divisions worked to protect the constitutional rights of minority communities by doing things like monitoring police departments and fighting housing discrimination. Now, current and former staff say it's effectively become an enforcement arm for President Trump's agenda, targeting college administrators, investigating campus protests,

and trying to prevent trans students from playing women's sports. In response to the overhaul, hundreds of attorneys and staff have left their positions there. And... The yeas are 4-0-9. The nays are 2.

In a rare moment of bipartisanship, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill targeting what's known as revenge porn. The legislation makes it illegal to share sexually explicit photos and videos of others without their consent, and requires social media companies and other online platforms to take them down within two days of any request.

The new law includes a ban on sharing deepfake pornography—AI-generated nude images of real people. Lawmakers said they were particularly concerned about the rise of so-called nudification apps, which have made it easy for teenage boys to generate and share nude images of their female classmates. President Trump is expected to quickly sign the bill into law. I have a question. Who's ready? Who's ready to stand up for Canada with me? In Canada, the Liberal leader Mark Carney has won a new term as Prime Minister after an election dominated by rising tensions with the U.S.

President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us. That will never, that will never ever happen. While his party was behind by double digits a few months ago, Carney's tough stance against President Trump's tariffs and his threat to make Canada the 51st state energized his campaign. The conservative candidate, meanwhile, Pierre Poliev, was seen by some voters as too closely aligned with Trump. During the campaign, he railed against radical woke ideology and pledged to cut Canada's foreign aid. His support dropped so much, he's lost his seat in parliament altogether. With results still coming in this morning,

it's unclear whether the Liberals will win enough votes to form a majority government, or if they'll need to work with other parties to get bills passed. At Cape Canaveral in Florida yesterday, Amazon launched 27 satellites into Earth's orbit, the first phase of the company's effort to break into the satellite internet industry. The technology allows for internet access in hard-to-reach places like offshore oil rigs, rural communities, and even war zones. The launch is a big deal because they are playing major catch up to SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet, which is from Elon Musk's business.

Karen Weiss is a technology correspondent at the Times. Starlink has thousands of satellites up in space, and they are improving and updating the generation of satellites that they have up there to be able to provide faster data speeds and are really making a big push to kind of dominate the sky. Karen says that it could take days for Amazon to determine if the first batch of satellites has successfully deployed. There are only a fraction of the nearly 600 satellites the company says it needs in order to start beaming wireless internet from space. The company says it expects to switch on the service later this year.

And finally, oh did you think you were at the beach? The pleasant sound of seagulls around you? No, no, those, those are humans participating in potentially, very potentially, the greatest sport of our time, the European Goal Scream Championship. The fifth annual contest was held this weekend in a little beach town in Belgium. The goal is right there in the name, who can scream the most like a gull? The organizer, who is both an environmental educator and an amateur comedian,

said the point is to create a more positive image of seagulls. The birds can get a bad rap for being loud, snagging people's food, and loving to eat trash. But he says it's really humans who've infringed on the bird's habitat and gotten into the bad habit of feeding them. For the contest, more than 70 people gave it their all, some in full costume, and a jury judged the screeches. You could also score points for gull-like behavior, like if you're willing to smash

your head into a bag of chips and peck them out. In the junior category, the winner was 10-year-old Cooper Wallace of England, who took the top prize for the second year in a row. And the winner in the adult category was Anna Brunald of Denmark. She said she studied the birds on TikTok, practiced in front of the mirror, and in front of possibly the most discerning audience, real life seagulls. Those are the headlines.

Today on The Daily, a landmark legal agreement last year was supposed to make buying a house cheaper by bringing down realtor's commission fees. Why that hasn't happened. That's next in the New York Times audio app where you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.