Trump

Daily Mail Uk - Justices on the Supreme Court put a lawyer for Donald Trump on the spot with a series of piercing hypothetical questions Thursday to test his definition of the absolute immunity from prosecution he is claiming exists. These included whether his claims of immunity would extend to ordering a hit on a political rival, taking $1 million in exchange for an appointment, and even ordering the military to undertake a coup d'etat.  The queries were meant to test Trump's broad claims of protection for acts taken as president, while is facing criminal indictment over his election overturn effort.

Political Wire - “Michigan prosecutors consider former President Donald Trump and some of his top aides co-conspirators in the plot to submit a certificate falsely claiming he won Michigan’s 2020 election,” the Detroit News reports. “That means prosecutors believe they participated, to some extent, in an alleged scheme to commit forgery by creating a false document asserting Trump had won Michigan’s 16 electoral votes when Democrat Joe Biden had won them.”

Nick Anderson, GoComics

NPR -  A grand jury in Arizona has indicted 18 of former President Donald Trump's closest advisors — including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The defendants are accused of being involved in a "fake elector" scheme that sought to keep Trump in office despite his loss in the 2020 election. The indictment alleges that after President Biden won the 2020 election, Trump's allies conspired to give Arizona's 11 electoral votes to Trump anyway.

Health

Daily Mail UK - Using popular over-the-counter heartburn medications like TUMS or Prilosec raises your risk of suffering from migraines by up to 70 percent, a study from the University of Maryland suggests.

NPR - The FDA has found genetic material from the bird flu virus that infected dairy cows in tested samples of commercially available pasteurized milk. Federal officials say that the risk to the public remains low, as efforts to grow the virus from these samples indicated that the virus was inactive and no longer able to cause an infection. Further evaluation of the milk samples will be done. The FDA says those results will be released in the coming days or weeks. In the meantime, here's what consumers should know.

Workers

Thom Hartmann - The UAW’s successful unionization effort last week at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee — the first successful unionization effort at a car factory in the South since the 1940s — is breaking the brains of Republicans in that region. They’re truly astonished that workers might not trust their corporate overlords with their working conditions, pay, health, and retirement…. Southern autoworkers, though, aren’t listening to the GOP’s BS any more: a unionization vote is set for the week of May 13th at a Mercedes plant in Alabama and more than half the workers there have already signed a card indicating their desire for union representation. The problem for Republicans is that unions represent a form of democracy in the workplace, and the GOP hates democracy as a matter of principle. It’s why conservatives have opposed every effort to expand voting rights from the Jim Crow era, through fighting woman’s suffrage, to opposing voting rights legislation from 1965 to this day.

Newsweek - Companies are planning to lay off the Gen Z workers they just hired, according to a survey by Intelligent. The report found 78 percent of 800 U.S. hiring managers questioned said their company will lay off recent graduates due to artificial intelligence advances.  Only 22 percent of the hiring managers indicated recent graduates were safe from layoffs at their company due to AI. Granted, the layoffs might not necessarily be huge in nature. AI A two-armed robot called ADAM prepares coffee. Hiring managers believe artificial intelligence will mean Gen Z job losses, according to a new Intelligent report. But among the companies that said they plan to lay off recent graduates, 23 percent said less than 3 percent would be let go, and 27 percent said between 5 to 10 percent will lose their jobs. However, 11 percent of the companies are planning to cut 15 to 30 percent of their recent graduate employees. And the same number said a whopping 30 to 60 percent will be laid off in total.

Schools

Axios - Rigid school attendance zones allow districts to legally keep many students of color and low-income families out of coveted, elite K-12 public schools, a new study finds.  The U.S. will soon mark the 70th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that ended legal segregation in public schools. Yet, researchers found growing inequality in school access as the nation has become more diverse, according to the new study by nonpartisan education watchdog Available to All.

• School segregation between Black and white students has returned to 1968 levels.
• Researchers found that legal discrimination and non-neutral enrollment policies — rules that allow districts to use addresses or selective criteria for admission — are common and enshrined in state laws.
• School officials exploit loopholes to cherry-pick students and even criminally prosecute low-income families that try to send their children to elite public schools outside of their assigned boundaries, the report said.

The report found examples of loopholes involving parents forced to pay "tuition" for their child to attend a public school outside their district of residence.

• Individual public schools also can be captured by interest groups or small groups of parents.
• The report found that a top-ranked Tampa, Florida, school remained extremely exclusive, operating an attendance zone that mirrors the racist redlining map from 1936 and excluding many low-income kids who live nearby.

School districts set boundaries and assign schools generally connected to families' neighborhoods.

• All 50 states and the District of Columbia allow or require school assignments to be based on students' residential addresses.
• Because wealthier families have privileged access to the best public schools via "educational redlining" according to the report, it is often difficult for other schools to attract these families, creating a vast inequality of resources.

To enforce boundaries, the report said some school districts hire private detectives to find parents who are trying to send their children to elite schools outside of their assigned zone. MORE

Chalkbeat - New rules that protect students from discrimination based on their sexual orientation and gender identity will take effect in August. On Friday, the Biden administration announced long awaited rule changes to Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools. Already, state superintendents in Louisiana and South Carolina have told schools to disregard the changes, settling the stage for potential legal battles and leaving many LGBTQ students unsure of their rights.

Polling update

Political Wire - A new NBC News poll finds “26% of registered voters say there is a chance they could vote for a different presidential candidate come November, while 66% of those surveyed say they have made up their minds. Almost the same share of voters currently backing Biden (81%) or Trump (78%) also say they do not plan to change their vote. But many voters who support third-party candidates right now are open to picking a different contender.”

Jess Bidgood, NY Times - This month, The New York Times/Siena College poll asked voters how much they think former President Trump respects women: a lot, some, not much or not at all? You’ll never guess what happened next! A majority of men — 54 percent — said that Trump respects women either “a lot” or “some.” Just 31 percent of women saw things that way.

Trump, a man known for bragging about grabbing women’s private parts — and on trial in connection with the cover-up of a sex scandal involving a porn star — has long symbolized a kind of machismo that to many people reads as misogyny.

But that disparity is important to understand in an election that already seems primed to turn on the question of just how big the gender gap between Trump, who draws more support from men, and President Biden, who leads among women, is going to be. Our poll found that Trump had a 20-percentage-point lead among men, while Biden had a 16-percentage-point lead among women.

 

Immigration

 Axios - Half of Americans — including 42% of Democrats — say they'd support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, according to a new Axios Vibes survey by The Harris Poll. 30% of Democrats — as well as 46% of Republicans — now say they'd end Americans are open to former President Trump's harshest immigration plans — amid a record surge of illegal border crossings, and persistent rhetoric from the right.  MORE

Money

Time -About one-quarter of U.S. adults over age 50 say they expect to never retire and 70% are concerned about prices rising faster than their income, an AARP survey finds. About 1 in 4 have no retirement savings, according to research released Wednesday by the organization that shows how a graying America is worrying more and more about how to make ends meet even as economists and policymakers say the U.S. economy has all but achieved a soft landing after two years of record inflation. Everyday expenses and housing costs, including rent and mortgage payments, are the biggest reasons why people are unable to save for retirement.The data will matter this election year as Democratic President Joe Biden and Republican rival Donald Trump are trying to win support from older Americans, who traditionally turn out in high numbers.

TikTok

 What a TikTok Ban in the U.S. Could Mean for You

Population

A new interactive map of the U.S. shows which states are growing in population the fastest and which are shrinking the quickest.

CNN - 3.6 million - That's around how many babies were born in the US last year — the lowest fertility rate in more than a century — according to provisional data from the CDC. The birth rate was the highest among women ages 30 to 34 while the teen birth rate reached a record low.