Finance

'Liberation Day': Trump’s Bold Rhetoric on the Next Tariff Deadline

Donald Trump has embraced the term "liberation day" as a shorthand for his upcoming reciprocal tariff plans.

"April 2 is liberation day for our country because we're finally going to be bringing in money," he declared on Monday during a visit to the Kennedy Center.

He repeated the phrase on Friday in the Oval Office, asserting, "We’ve been ripped off by every country in the world, both friend and foe."

In total, Trump has used some variation of "liberation day" at least six times this week, reflecting how central tariffs have become to his vision for a second term, with the term encapsulating his approach to trade.

The phrase "liberation day" was first used by Trump in his inaugural address, referring to January 20, the day he was sworn into office. However, the April 2 deadline has now emerged as a significant date for potential tariff increases, according to Henrietta Treyz of Veda Partners, who highlighted that the date has become a key focus for both market risks and new duties for importers.

TECH

LibGen: The Pirated-Books Database Behind Meta’s AI Training

LibGen includes errors, such as books with incorrect author listings. This search tool is designed to reflect content that could be used for training AI programs, which means it may contain material with mistakes and inaccuracies.

CRYPTO

The 500 Behind $3.2 Trillion: The Small Group Driving Artificial Crypto Trading

Market manipulation is widespread in the cryptocurrency world, with fewer than 500 individuals reportedly generating up to $250 million annually in profits and contributing to over $3.2 trillion in artificial trading, according to a new study published on Cornell University’s preprint server, arXiv.

Honglin Fu and his team from University College London have created a tool designed to track the coordination of pump-and-dump schemes, where crypto holders artificially drive up the price of a cryptocurrency by spreading fake recommendations and generating false hype. This encourages ordinary investors to buy in, after which the coin holders pull their investment, causing the price to crash.

Telegram, a popular encrypted messaging app widely used by crypto investors, has emerged as a key platform for organizing these schemes. Fu and his team’s tool, Perseus, identified more than 400 “masterminds” behind the creation of fake hype for cryptocurrencies, based on millions of messages sent via Telegram. By monitoring Telegram chats where pump-and-dump activities are discussed and training Perseus on these patterns, the researchers uncovered nearly 750,000 messages orchestrating these scams.

“One type of bad actor, which we refer to as the mastermind in our paper, is the main distributor of the pump-and-dump scheme,” says Fu. “They send messages to others, who then spread the word further to attract as many investors as possible.” Fu explains that these accomplices play a crucial role in the scam, as they help persuade large numbers of people to invest in the manipulated cryptocurrency.