Your Monday Briefing

Good evening. Here’s today’s briefing.

1. The Mueller probe‘s long-awaited release has had a minimal effect on President Trump’s ratings.
2. The Ukrainian presidential election is going into a runoff round; no candidate crossed the threshold required to become President. Now, the two top candidates will face off: a comedian who is currently in the lead and the incumbent president.
3. The two remaining matches in the “Elite Eight” or quarter-finals of the NCAA March Madness (College Basketball) were played yesterday (Auburn beat Kentucky and Michigan State beat Duke).
4. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has announced that the rapper Nipsey Hussle was shot and killed right outside his store.
5. Baseball player Giancarlo Stanton, who plays for the New York Yankees, is now injured as a result of a “strained bicep”, taking him out of the game for ten days.
6. US airlines Southwest, JetBlue, and Delta are experiencing outages in airports across the US.
7. British Prime Minister Theresa May has promised to resign if Parliament approves her Brexit plan.
8. As a result of Japan’s current emperor’s abdication, the next emperor will usher in a new imperial era, as all past emperors have done. Japan announced that the new imperial era to come, which will begin on May 1, 2019, will be called reiwa, meaning “a time of order and harmony”.
9. Venezuelan President and dictator Nicolás Maduro has ordered a national rationing of electricity.
10. President Trump has again expressed his intentions to cut foreign aid for Central America.
11. According to the Pew Research Center, 56% of Americans think President Trump has done too little to distance himself from white nationalists.
12. President Trump said the census would be meaningless without the question “are you a citizen of the United States of America”. Many experts disagree, saying that eliminating the question would cause less people to respond to census-takers and even lie, which would cost a loss of potentially invaluable data on the US population.
13. The Argentine government has expelled an Iranian couple who entered the country with false passports and whose story was caught by the news media.
14. After 800,000 protesters marched in Algeria, the incumbent Algerian President (Abdelaziz Bouteflika) who was going to run for a fifth term (he’s been president for the last two decades) has decided to resign.
15. After the US urged China to crack down on illegal fentanyl for months, China has finally complied and will add it to their list of controlled narcotic drugs, starting on May 1, 2019 (China is believed to be one of the largest producers of fentanyl, and has been nicknamed “the Colombia of fentanyl”).
16. Mayor of Baltimore Catherine Pugh will take a leave of absence as a result of a scandal regarding the selling of books to Kaiser Permanente.
17. Four people were killed in a homicide at a store in Mandan, North Dakota.
18. An emergency disaster relief bill has stalled in the Senate as Democrats demand more funding for Puerto Rico. Republican operatives and moderate Democrats are concerned that the bill won’t pass with more funding for Puerto Rico. As it stands, the current vote is 49-44.

This day is over. This briefing will no longer be updated.

It’s April Fools! today. Enjoy the day and make a joke or two.