Trade War: A US trade war with China officially began at 12:01 am today when the US placed tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese goods and China immediately retaliated.

  In a statement, China’s Ministry of Commerce said the United States “has launched the biggest trade war in economic history so far.”

The effects are expected to ripple through the global economy, raising costs for business and causing turbulence in stock markets. President Trump has indicated that he is prepared to crush China with tariffs unless they knuckle under. He has said he’s prepared to put tariffs on as much as $450 billion worth of Chinese goods.

Swamp Thing: Scott Pruitt, who was hired to direct and dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency and ended up dismantling himself, has resigned effective today, although really, he was fired.

Pruitt was the subject of a flurry of ethical questions and investigations involving his professional conduct and mixing in personal business. His resignation letter to President Trump reads as though he believes he was the target of an arbitrary hate campaign. He refers to “God’s providence,” and said,  “The unrelenting attacks on me personally, my family, are unprecedented and have taken a sizable toll on all of us.

Pruitt ordered up expensive first-class travel when it was not warranted, spent a fortune on personal security, and had a $43,000 soundproof phone booth built in his office for his most important calls. He spent $1500 of government money on a dozen custom-made pens.

He was done in by EPA staffers who fed the press with stories about their boss’s self-dealing and sneaky behavior. One of the last straws might have been a CNN story that Pruitt kept a secret calendar of phone calls and meetings he didn’t want the public to know about, a possible violation of federal law.

Columnist Frank Bruni wrote in The NY Times, “Gauche and greedy and dirty to the core, Scott Pruitt had no business being in what we still euphemistically call public service, and he was an embarrassment even in the context of the Trump administration, which is saying something.”

Pruitt’s departure is not a change of direction for the Trump Administration and EPA. Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, will take over as acting director.

Kids in Custody: Just five days before the first court-ordered deadline to re-unite immigrant children separated from their parents, the Department of Health and Human Services admits it is still holding 3,000 kids, about 1,000 more than they admitted to having just a week ago.

HHS has been ordered to re-unite children five and under by Tuesday.

Race Matters: In a matter over which there should be no doubt, just short of half the country believes President Donald Trump is a racist, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll. Forty-nine percent of Americans think he’s a racist, 47 percent think he’s not.

Opinions seem pretty closely aligned with party loyalty. Eighty-six percent of Republicans say Trump isn’t a racist and 86% of Democrats say he is. Fifty percent of Independents, who’ve been leaning away from Trump recently, say he’s a racist.

The Cave Boys: A former Thai navy SEAL has died while placing oxygen tanks along the route to where 12 boys and their soccer coach are trapped in a flooded cave. They are 2 ½ miles from the entrance. The death puts a big question mark on whether rescuers while try to teach the group to use scuba gear to get out.

Executed: Japanese cult leader Shoko Asahara, who was responsible for the deadly 1995 sarin gas in the Tokyo subway, has been executed along with six of his followers. The gas attack killed 13 people and injured thousands.

Asahara was one of 13 people sentenced to death in connection with the attack carried out by the group. He and his followers were hanged.

Japan doesn’t execute many people. The date of executions is not announced and the condemned are usually only told a few hours in advance.

The Obit Page: Former MSNBC host Ed Schultz, at the time a firebrand liberal who hosted “The Ed Show,” has died at age 64.

Schultz left MSNBC in a programming re-shuffle in 2015. After MSNBC, he went to work for RT, the Russian-funded network, and took a turn in his politics, dismissing the US intelligence finding that Russia had interfered with the 2016 election.

Happy 4^th: Donald Trump Jr. took his new squeeze, Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, to the White House for the 4^th to meet his father. We wonder if there were fireworks in the Lincoln bedroom.