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A growing number of ads on Chinese social media offer exporters in China re-exporting and freight forwarding services to hide the place of origin of goods.

A flurry of so-called “origin washing” advertisements have flooded Chinese social media platforms, offering exporters ways to avoid steep U.S. tariffs by re-exporting and freight forwarding goods or falsely labeling their place of manufacture.

Video ads posted on Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, and Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, show businesses promoting “one-stop re-export and freight forwarding services” via Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and Thailand to circumvent growing restrictions on export re-routing via these markets.

“Chinese manufacturers that have the U.S. as their main market must find a way to survive,” Taiwanese businessman Lee Meng-chu told Radio Free Asia, noting the “huge demand” for transit solutions that enable exporters to sell to the U.S. but evade the 145% U.S. tariffs imposed on Chinese imports.

Donald Trump, who publicly touts himself as a “dealmaker-in-chief,” is privately upset at his failure to strike deals to stop the two wars he has promised to end, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

At a closed-door meeting with top donors at Mar-a-Lago last week, Trump admitted that the frustration he feels from his inability to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine keeps him up at night, people in the room told the WSJ.

He said that Russian President Vladimir Putin, who Trump has frequently claimed is negotiating in good faith, has been driving an especially hard bargain. Putin wants “the whole thing,” Trump said, referring to Ukraine.

A probe launched from the Soviet Union more than five decades ago has plummeted back to Earth, splashing down in the Indian Ocean. Kosmos 482 had been bound for Venus but never reached its destination.

Russian space agency Roscosmos on Saturday said a Soviet space probe that took off in March 1972 to explore the planet Venus crashed into the Indian Ocean.

Planetary lander Kosmos 482 never made it to Earth's sister planet because it was dragged off course after a malfunction in its launch vehicle's upper stage.

The Trump administration must halt much of its dramatic downsizing of the federal workforce, a California judge ordered Friday.

Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco issued the emergency order in a lawsuit filed last week by labor unions and cities, one of multiple legal challenges to Republican President Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the size of a federal government he calls bloated and expensive.

“The Court holds the President likely must request Congressional cooperation to order the changes he seeks, and thus issues a temporary restraining order to pause large-scale reductions in force in the meantime,” Illston wrote in her order.

Summary

Revlimid, a cancer drug derived from thalidomide, has generated over $100 billion in sales and extended thousands of lives, but its nearly $1,000-per-pill price has pushed many patients into debt.

Celgene, the original maker, exploited regulatory loopholes to block generics and inflate prices 26 times since 2005.

Despite costing just 25 cents to produce, Revlimid’s high price fueled lavish executive pay and Wall Street gains.

Even after generic entry, prices remain exorbitant. Critics, including patients and lawmakers, decry the drug’s pricing as exploitative and harmful.

The Trump administration has fired the head of the U.S. Copyright Office, two sources familiar with the situation confirmed to CBS News Saturday. 

The firing of Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter came after Perlmutter and her office earlier this week issued part three of a lengthy report about artificial intelligence and expressed some concerns and questions about the usage of copyrighted materials by AI technology.

…

Democratic Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, ranking member of the Committee on House Administration, said in a statement that Perlmutter's firing was "a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis." 

Morelle speculated that there was "surely no coincidence he acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk's efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models," in reference to the report released by the Copyright Office this week.

Summary

A man checked out 100 books from Beachwood Library in Beachwood, Ohio, covering Jewish history, African-American history, and LGBTQ topics, and later posted social media videos showing the books with captions referencing “cleansing” libraries before burning them.

Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative alerted the library about the posts.

The books were worth about $1,700. Since they are not overdue, the library will bill the man later.

Police say the matter is civil unless he fails to pay. He is now banned from returning to the library.

Trump is trying to blame Buttigieg for air safety issues from this past week.

Spotify, SoundCloud and other platforms have pulled the song, but its spread underscores the challenges tech platforms face in removing content that violate their policies.

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.

While some platforms have taken steps to attempt to pull down the song, others have seemingly let it spread freely.

The newly appointed Pope Leo XIV spoke out against Russia's continued war against Ukraine in an interview on May 9.

Speaking with Peruvian news outlet Semanario Expresión, Pope Leo condemned Russia's war against Ukraine, characterizing it as a "a true invasion, imperialist in nature, where Russia seeks to conquer territory for reasons of power.”

Pope Leo was appointed just earlier this week on May 8, following the death of Pope Francis on April 21 at the age of 88. On May 7, cardinals officially opened the historic conclave in the Vatican to choose the next head of the Catholic Church.

By clearing naming Russia's imperialist aspirations in Ukraine, the new pope's comments come as a departure from his predecessor's position on the war.

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official confirmed Saturday that arrests of Democratic members of Congress "is definitely on the table" following a confrontation at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Newark, New Jersey.

This statement comes after Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested on Friday at the Delaney Hall detention center, sparking a dispute over what actually occurred during the incident.

A legal move to arrest officials would mark a significant escalation in confrontations between the Trump administration and Democratic officials. It raises questions about the separation of powers and congressional oversight authority, as members of Congress routinely conduct site visits to federal facilities.

As the outbreak in West Texas slows, other states are reporting multiple cases.

The U.S. surpassed 1,000 measles cases Friday, even as Texas posted one of its lowest counts of newly confirmed cases since its large outbreak began three months ago.

Texas still accounts for the vast majority of cases in the U.S., with 709 confirmed as of Friday in an outbreak that also spread measles to New Mexico, Oklahoma and Kansas. Two unvaccinated elementary school-aged children died from measles-related illnesses in the epicenter in West Texas, and an adult in New Mexico who was not vaccinated died of a measles-related illness.

Other states with active outbreaks — which the CDC defines as three or more related cases — include Indiana, Michigan, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.