Good morning. It is April 25th. It's another warm morning in New York City, if not as bright as the previous mornings have been. The birds are singing with everything they've got, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Let's start in the poultry aisle, where the Associated Press reported yesterday “the Agriculture Department will not require poultry companies to limit salmonella bacteria in their products, halting a Biden administration effort to prevent food poisoning from contaminated meat. The department on Thursday said it was withdrawing a rule proposed in August after three years of development. The rule,” the AP goes on to say, “would have required poultry companies to keep levels of salmonella bacteria under a certain threshold and test for the presence of six strains most associated with illness, including three found in turkey, and three in chicken. If the levels exceeded the standard or any of those strains were found, the poultry couldn't be sold and would be subject to recall, the proposal had said. The plan aimed to reduce an estimated 125,000 salmonella infections from chicken and 43,000 from turkey each year, according to USDA. Overall, salmonella causes 1.35 million infections a year, most through food and about 420 deaths, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” Turkey's share of the infections there seems pretty high. It looks like, according to numbers from the National Chicken Council, Americans per capita consumption of chicken last year was 102.6 pounds, to 13.8 pounds of turkey. That would mean Americans ate only about 13.5 percent as much turkey as they ate chicken, while turkey accounted for 34.4 percent as many salmonella infections as chicken. Are turkeys or turkey processors that much filthier? Is that why the six strains that cause the most illness in people are evenly divided between chickens and turkeys, despite the chickens being much more numerous? Does turkey’s relative rarity mean that people are more incompetent at cooking it when they take their one whack a year at cooking one at Thanksgiving? The AP notes that the National Chicken Council, which it describes as an industry trade group, supported withdrawing the rule, saying the proposed rule was legally unsound, misinterpreted science, would have increased costs, and created more food waste, all with no meaningful impact on public health. The story also notes earlier this month, the USDA said it would delay by six months the enforcement of a final rule regulating salmonella levels in certain breaded and stuffed raw chicken products. Enforcement, which was set for May 1st, now begins November 3rd. That covers foods such as frozen chicken cordon bleu and chicken Kiev dishes that appear to be fully cooked but are only heat treated to set the batter or coating. Such products have been linked to at least 14 salmonella outbreaks and at least 200 illnesses since 1998, according to the CDC. 

And in another piece of the rich collage of news created by the second Trump administration, the Associated Press also reported yesterday, “President Donald Trump has pardoned a Nevada Republican politician who was awaiting sentencing on federal charges that she used money meant for a statue honoring a slain police officer for personal costs, including plastic surgery. Michele Fiore,” the AP writes, “a former Las Vegas city councilwoman and state lawmaker who ran unsuccessfully in 2022 for state treasurer, was found guilty in October of six counts of federal wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. She was out of custody ahead of her sentencing, which had been scheduled for next month. Federal prosecutors said at trial,” the AP writes, “that Fiore, 54, had raised more than $70,000 for the statue of a Las Vegas police officer, who was fatally shot in 2014 in the line of duty, but had instead spent some of it on cosmetic surgery, rent, and her daughter's wedding. Fiore, who does not have a law degree,” the AP continues, “was appointed as a judge in deep red Nye County in 2022, shortly after she lost her campaign for state treasurer, Fiore,” the story notes, “said she plans to return to the bench next week.” 

And in other action from Donald Trump's busy Thursday, CNN reports that he signed a memorandum “targeting Act Blue, the Democratic Party's main fundraising platform, taking aim at one of the key pillars of the financial infrastructure for Democratic candidates. A fact sheet about the memo said it directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to launch an investigation into online fundraising platforms, with the goal of cracking down on illegal straw donors, or those who make donations in the name of others, and foreign contributions in U.S. elections.” On the one hand, it's an open-ended fishing expedition by the corrupt attorney general, to try to break the basic operating mechanisms of the opposition party. On the other hand, this might be the only thing the Trump administration ever does that would reduce the number of scammy texts received by the American public.

The front of this morning's New York Times uses one of its alternative layouts, filling the top right lead news spot with a four-column headline over a four-column picture. Before getting to the text of the stories, the headline is “Deadliest Russian Assault on Kiev in Nearly a Year.” The picture is of a woman standing in front of the rubble of a residential building. The death toll is up to 12.

And the headline on the rightmost column below it is “TRUMP, IN RARITY, REBUKES MOSCOW / Ukraine’s Capital Shakes, With Dozens Injured.” The rebuke is that Truth social post from yesterday the “Vladimir STOP” one, and that's packaged with a NEWS ANALYSIS piece, “Crimea Is Zelensky’s Red Line. It’s Ukraine’s, Too / Recognition of Kremlin Sovereignty Claim Is Anathema,” I'll look at how the Trump administration, in trying to help Russia negotiate an end to the fighting over its invasion of Ukraine, is casually trying to get Ukraine to give up the Crimean Peninsula. “Inside Ukraine,” the Times writes, “formal recognition of Russian control of Crimea would be widely viewed as a dangerous concession to a duplicitous rival and an abandonment of Ukrainians still living in the region. It would also dash hopes for reunification of the families separated by the 2014 occupation, when many pro-Ukrainian residents fled while their elderly or pro-Russian relatives remained behind. When President Vladimir Zelensky said that Ukraine would absolutely never agree to recognize Russian control of Crimea, President Trump,” the Times writes, “expressed bewilderment and frustration, posting on social media that Crimea was ‘lost years ago’ and suggesting that the Ukrainian leader was prolonging the war over a pipe dream. The story goes on to note that the EU and Turkey are both opposed to recognizing Russian control of Crimea, as was the first Trump administration, which declared, “the United States reaffirms as policy its refusal to recognize the Kremlin’s claims of sovereignty over territory seized by force in contravention of international law.”

Another NEWS ANALYSIS piece runs beside and above that one from the top of the page, “Brushing Off Due Process For Migrants / White House Erodes
a Bedrock Principle.” Once again, the headline writers are softer than the story. “Brushing off” and “eroding” are not the words for what's in the piece, which says “in their rapid maximalist campaign to apprehend and deport as many migrants as possible as quickly as possible, Mr. Trump and top members of his administration have abandoned any pretense of being bound by the constitutional limits that have constrained presidents of both parties in the past on immigration. Instead, they are asserting that when it comes to people who entered the United States illegally, the president has unchecked power to expel them without recourse and that he has neither the time nor the obligation to do otherwise.” Then, conventions being conventions, after the story quotes Donald Trump as having posted, “we cannot give everyone a trial because to do so would take without exaggeration 200 years,” the Times retreats to say, “such statements are alarming to legal experts, who note that in the United States, civil rights are for everyone, not just citizens. Yeah, if we need to appeal to expert authority on that one, we really are pretty deep in trouble. 

And next to that the last headline at the top of the page is “‘GAME OF CHICKEN’ IN WHICH TRUMP IS FIRST TO VEER / BUDGING ON ECONOMY / Hard Line Meets Reality on Tariffs, China and the Fed Chief. After weeks of bluster and escalation, the Times writes President Trump blinked, then he blinked again, and again. He backed off his threat to fire the Federal Reserve chairman. His Treasury secretary, acutely aware that the S&P 500 was down 10 % since Mr. Trump was inaugurated, signaled he was looking for an off-ramp to avoid an intensifying trade war with China, and now Mr. Trump has acknowledged that the 145 % tariffs on Chinese goods that he announced just two weeks ago are not sustainable.” Notably in this context, not even under a news analysis rubric, the Times basically sneers at the Trump administration's attempt to describe Trump's capitulations as something other than capitulations. “This is not, of course, the explanation of the events of the past few days that the White House is putting out,” the Times writes. “Mr. Trump's aides insist that his maximalist demands have been an act of strategic brilliance, forcing 90 countries to line up to deal with the president. It may take months, they acknowledge, to see the concessions that will result. But bending the global trade system to American will, they say, takes time. On the Chinese tariffs,” the story reports, “the White House kept hinting that the Chinese were beginning to negotiate, seeking a way to end the tariffs. In fact, the strategy that Beijing appeared to be following was to wait for Mr. Trump to feel the pain of his own actions. The expected phone call from President Xi Jinping never came. And Mr. Trump didn't want to be the first to call either, a sign of desperation. In private,” the story says later on, “some Trump officials concede that they did not accurately predict China's reaction. Mr. Trump seemed to expect China to be among the first to come begging for relief, given the size of its exports to the United States. Back in 2017, the first time Trump imposed tariffs on China, Beijing was caught by relative surprise. Nicholas Mulder, an economic historian at Cornell University, said on Wednesday, but they've been preparing for further escalation for many years, he said. Now, they have much more tolerance for economic pain, and a greater ability to weather this ratcheting up. 

And down at the bottom of page one, there is news I can use from my local newspaper, in the form of a critics notebook in which Michael Kimmelman reviews the restoration of the north end of Central Park, including the creation of a brand new swimming pool, skating rink complex, and thereby letting me know that the walk through the lochk up to the Harlem mirror, which was ruined by construction, soon after I'd figured out how nice and feasible it was, is now open again, or at least could be getting there. The overhead view of the project in the paper is a computer rendering, and actual photographs of the site still seem to have a lot of construction barriers running through them. But, Kimmelman uses the present tense for describing the walk, so maybe I'll get out there and see if he's telling the truth. Until now, I'd basically given up on even trying it. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity, and your tips. Keep sending those along if you are able. Have a pleasant and joyous weekend. And, if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again on Monday.