Tariffs Deadline, Texas Flood Hearing, Witkoff In Israel

The White House issued new tariff rates last night, just hours before President Trump's midnight trade deadline.

The taxes affect imports from nearly every country.

Which imported goods will face the highest rates, and when?

I'm a Martinez, that is Steve Inskeeb, and this is a first from NPR News.

Survivors of the floods in Texas had a chance to talk with state lawmakers.

Several of our dear friends and neighbors lost their lives that night.

People we've known for a a lifetime.

And lawmakers have opinions about local officials in the crisis.

When the time came to act,

they did not do so in a timely fashion.

And two American officials visited Gaza today to inspect an American-Israeli-backed food distribution site.

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President Trump last night signed executive orders imposing tariffs on imports from scores of countries, which is of course a big shift in U.S.

economic policy that has been months in the making.

But surprisingly, most of those tariffs do not take effect today, as the White House had earlier indicated.

It's yet another twist after a wave of other tariff news that happened this week.

NPR White House correspondent Danielle Kurtz-Laban is here to walk us through.

Danielle, good morning.

Hey, good morning.

Okay, so I heard about this executive order and immediately wondered what's up here and how does this compare to all the tariff news that's come before.

What did the president sign?

All right, last night we got two executive orders.

One imposes 35% tariffs on Canadian goods, and that's effective today.

Now, that's up from 25%.

And importantly, it doesn't apply to goods covered by the USMCA, which is a trade agreement negotiated in Trump's first term.

Last year, around 40% of Canadian imports fit that bill.

But still, that's a big deal.

Canada is a massive trading partner, and that means many of their goods would be now tariffed at 35%.

Then the other order imposed tariffs on 68 other countries plus the EU.

Those are a lot of the tariffs Trump has talked about.

These new tariffs range up to 41%.

So some are quite high, and they take effect in a week.

Just to be clear, you said the EU, they made an agreement with the European Union for 15% tariffs.

Does the executive order say that?

Yes, yeah.

Okay, so in some cases, these are deals that have already been made.

Others have been in process for months, right?

Right.

We heard about this round of tariffs on April 2nd.

That's the first time we heard about it.

When there was that big White House announcement, Trump famously held up that big table of tariffs.

Well, then markets got spooked, so Trump delayed the tariffs till July, then he delayed them again until today.

And during that period, he did announce some preliminary agreements.

Importantly, many of these, almost all of these, are not done deals.

And he also sent letters telling countries what rates he wanted to impose.

But all along, most of these were expected to take effect today, and now that's not the case.

Yeah, we were told there would absolutely be no further delays.

Now there are some delays, but also some tariffs in effect.

And we have even more wrinkles here because there have been other tariffs that have been posed along the way since April 2nd.

Right, yes, many, many.

And even this week, we got a 50% tariff on many Brazilian goods, 50% tariffs on copper goods.

Trump closed a tariff loophole that will heavily affect e-commerce.

But on top of all that, we got another delay this week.

He and Mexican President Claudia Schoenbaum said the U.S.

will delay tariffs on Mexican goods for 90 days.

There is one more bit of news that happened this week.

The administration announced, like you said, some broad tariff agreements with a handful of trading partners like the EU and South Korea.

But again, details on those are very sketchy.

We know very little, and some negotiations are still underway.

Announcing these has allowed the administration to tell the story that they're getting things done, but they're not done deals.

Okay, so a lot of this is still in the air and confusing, but a lot of countries have not necessarily retaliated against the United States, making a broader trade war.

Has the president vindicated to some extent?

Well, he's getting what he wants, but it's not clear that what he wants is good for the U.S.

economy.

As one economist told me yesterday, tariffs are modestly weakening the economy for no good reason.

It might not drag us into a recession, but it certainly seems like it might raise prices, slow things down.

One other big legal question also looms over all of this.

A federal court ruled earlier this year that many of these tariffs are illegal.

The administration appealed.

And so that appeals court heard the case this week.

So these tariffs may be in jeopardy depending on how that ruling goes.

Interest Danielle Kurtz Laban.

Thanks so much.

Thank you.

In Texas, lawmakers are hearing from survivors of last month's deadly floods that killed more than 130 people.

Some of those who survived appeared at a public hearing Thursday to share emotional stories of their experiences.

At the same hearing, lawmakers criticized local leaders who went to bed before the flooding started and slept through the rains and rising floodwaters.

Blaise Gainey from the Texas newsroom was at the hearing.

Blaze, people lined up for a chance to speak at this public hearing.

What do they have to say?

Yeah, mostly they talked about the lack of warning that floods were coming or that they would be this intense.

Some didn't know where to evacuate.

And for those that did, when they tried, those routes out to higher land were already flooded.

One woman who spoke was Nancy Zedunkowitz.

She and her parents tried to drive away in the middle of the storm, but it just didn't work.

We weathered many storms, but July 4th was completely different.

We climbed on top of our cars and then we climbed into cedar trees and I had to help my 66-year-old mom.

Several of our dear friends and neighbors lost their lives that night, people we've known for a lifetime.

So we're actually very, very lucky.

Yeah, and others weren't so lucky.

A woman named Alicia Jeffrey Baker spoke.

She lost her parents and her 11-year-old daughter in the flooding.

She spoke through tears as a family member kept an arm around her.

My parents bought a cabin out here in 2008, so this was our regular happy place.

The river that we've loved so much killed them.

Yeah, these people have been telling these stories before in the media, but for many, it was the first time in a public setting and in front of state lawmakers where they could let them know what occurred.

Yeah, that was difficult to hear there.

Now, I know the details of that night are still being kind of pieced together.

It seems like some legislators, though, drilled down on whether local officials could have done more.

Right.

Pretty much everyone agrees that this level of flooding was not expected or predicted, but lawmakers zeroed in on three Kerr County officials: the sheriff and the emergency management coordinator, who were asleep as the waters rose.

The local judge, who also oversees emergency management, was a couple of hours away out of town.

Republican State Representative Drew Darby was among one of the few lawmakers who picked up on that.

We have a lot of folks

who have titles,

but when the time came to act,

they did not do so in a timely fashion.

But the local leader said no one knew the floods were going to be this bad and didn't realize it until people needed rescues.

And they said poor local sales service and broadband just made things tougher once they were out.

So what do legislators say they're going to do next?

Well, they're in a special session all month, and these hearings are supposed to help them craft new laws.

One of the things brought up in the hearing was that some of the youth camps in the flood area, where a lot of people died, didn't have evacuation plans, so they might require that moving forward.

Then they're looking at money for sensors, sirens, alert systems, and financial assistance for areas that get hit by flooding pretty often.

All right, that is Blaise Gainey of the Texas Newsroom.

Blaise, thank you very much.

Thanks.

Steve Witcoff, who is President Trump's Middle East envoy, and Mike Huckabee, who is the U.S.

Ambassador to Israel, are in Gaza today, both of them, visiting a U.S.-Israeli-backed food distribution site as international outrage over starvation grows.

The Israeli government says claims of starvation are exaggerated.

Negotiations to release hostages and pause the war continue.

SBR's Eleanor Beardsley is following all of this from Tel Aviv.

Hi, Eleanor.

Hello, Steve.

Okay, where are the diplomats going?

Well, we've received a picture of the GHF, the Gaza Humanitarian Facility.

These are the food distribution sites run by the Israeli Army and U.S.

contractors.

We've got a photo and a video being distributed by the Army.

It's taken from a ways back, and it shows a site set up amidst sand dunes.

You can see soldiers, barriers, and a line of Palestinians waiting, including women.

Now, we've been told by our reporter on the ground there, Anas Baba, that the number of people in the photo is about a tenth of the number of people who usually crowd the site.

The picture looks orderly, but we've seen other videos and reporting from such sites that show chaos.

And as we know, a number of Palestinians have been shot at these sites trying to get food.

And critics are calling this a propaganda visit by the army.

Oh, this is very, very interesting.

But in any case, the envoys are going.

The envoy and the ambassador are going.

They're representing President Trump, who himself has said he believes the reports of starvation out of Gaza, believes the pictures, the images that he has seen.

All of this is happening during an ongoing military operation, military conflict.

People had been talking in terms of looking for a ceasefire in that conflict.

Where did negotiations stand?

Well, Hamas says people are starving and they'll fully negotiate when aid gets in.

They're clearly using this for their purposes, the international outrage, but aid groups do say that the aid is not getting in.

It's a drop in the bucket of what needs to come in.

We're hearing something different, Steve, from the Israeli side.

Israeli media is reporting.

Senior officials say there's no longer time for, quote, partial deals.

And an anonymous senior Israeli official told NPR that an understanding is emerging between Israel and the U.S.

that the approach must shift from a framework for the release of some hostages to a release of all of them.

So there's sort of a change in language.

Israeli media is reporting that the government is laying the diplomatic and information groundwork, not for a ceasefire, but for a renewed offensive in the Gaza Strip.

Okay.

How are Israelis reacting to all of this news?

Well, the government, as you say, continues to deny their starvation, calling it an international propaganda campaign against Israel.

And the Israeli population, the majority, doesn't really think there's real famine either.

People still talk about Hamas stealing the aid.

I spoke with columnist Gideon Levy at Ha'aretz newspaper yesterday.

His columns are widely read in English.

He told me Ha'aretz is the only media outlet in Israel reporting on the starvation and what's really going on.

Here he is.

You know, the last American in Omaha, Nebraska saw more of Gaza than an average Israeli in Tel Aviv.

We are one hour drive from Gaza and Israelis have no clue what's going on there and they don't want to know what's going on there.

Now, Steve, last night I was at a large demonstration in Tel Aviv specifically to end the war and the starvation.

One of the first like this where the hostages weren't the main focus.

Protesters held signs of starving children.

But people admitted we're the minority.

Most people don't know what's going on and here's 62 year old Julia Resnick explaining why.

Because they don't want to be the bad guys.

They were raised believing we are good, we are moral, the most moral army in the world.

And then you shoot people waiting for food.

So they prefer not to know.

If I don't see it, it's not happening.

And Steve, I'm going to add that NPR saw passersby spitting at these protesters and a mother recoiling and snatching her children back from it.

NPR's Eleanor Beardsley, thanks for your reporting, as always.

You're welcome.

She's in Tel Aviv.

And that's Up First for Friday, August 1st.

Stummy Martinez.

And I'm Steve Inskeep.

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