10 things you need to know today: April 15, 2019

Pete Buttigieg announces his presidential run

(Image credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

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1. Tiger Woods wins first major championship since 2008
2. Buttigieg formally launches 2020 presidential campaign
3. Pelosi asks Capitol Police to 'safeguard' Omar following Trump tweet
4. Ecuador's president says Assange tried to spy from embassy
5. South's death toll from tornadoes, severe storms reaches 8
6. Trump campaign raises $30 million in 1st quarter
7. Social Democrat leader declares victory in Finland election
8. Trump to tout tax cuts in Tax Day trip to Minnesota
9. Lyft sidelines electric bikes in 3 cities due to brake problem
10. Shazam! leads box office for second weekend

published 15 April 2019

1. Tiger Woods wins first major championship since 2008

Tiger Woods won his first major golf tournament since 2008 on Sunday, taking the 2019 Masters title with a 2-under-par final round that put him one stroke ahead of Dustin Johnson, Xander Schauffele, and Brooks Koepka. Four more players finished two strikes behind. It was Woods' fifth Masters victory. He now trails only Jack Nicklaus, who has six green jackets, in career Masters wins. Woods started the day two strokes off leader Francesco Molinari, who led much of the day before giving Woods an opening with double-bogeys on No. 12 and No. 15. Woods sealed his years-long comeback — following injuries and off-course scandal — with birdies on the par-5 13th hole and par-5 15th, and another on the par-3 16th that was nearly a hole-in-one.

Pete Buttigieg officially announced the start of his 2020 presidential campaign on Sunday. If elected, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, would be the youngest and first openly gay president in U.S. history. Buttigieg, a Rhodes Scholar and war veteran, launched the bid for the Democratic nomination before a crowd packed into a long-closed former Studebaker car factory that is now a tech hub in his native South Bend, showcasing the innovation he has backed as mayor. He took some swipes at President Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan by saying what the country needs is to embrace change. "The horror show in Washington is mesmerizing, all-consuming," he added. "But starting today, we are going to change the channel."

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Sunday said that after President Trump tweeted an inflammatory video against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) on Friday, she ordered Capitol Police to conduct "a security assessment to safeguard" Omar, her family, and staff. In the edited video, Omar is superimposed over scenes of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks; Trump added the caption, "We will never forget." In a speech last month, Omar, one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, said the Council on American-Islamic Relations was founded "because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties." Conservatives have since jumped on the remarks, accusing Omar of trivializing the attacks.

WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange tried to use Ecuador's London embassy as a "center for spying," the country's president, Lenin Moreno, told Britain's The Guardian newspaper. Assange entered the embassy in 2012 to avoid being sent to Sweden for questioning on rape allegations, and ultimately to the U.S. to face charges related to revealing government secrets. Ecuador last week rescinded Assange's permission to continue hiding out in the embassy, and British police arrested him. Assange now is vowing to fight extradition to the U.S., where he is accused of conspiring with former army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to hack into a classified government computer.

The death toll from storms that swept across the South over the weekend climbed to eight on Sunday. The storms spawned tornadoes and flooding. Three children were among the dead. Two of them were killed in East Texas when a pine tree fell on a car they were riding in. The tree "flattened the car like a pancake," said Capt. Alton Lenderman of the Angelina County Sheriff's Office. Tornado warnings were issued for parts of Georgia and North Carolina on Sunday after twisters damaged some areas in Mississippi and Alabama earlier in the day. Tornadoes destroyed dozens of homes in East Texas on Saturday.

President Trump's re-election campaign said Sunday that it had raised $30 million in the first quarter of 2019, NBC News reported. The haul added to the more than $40 million the campaign already had on hand. Trump is the only president to file re-election paperwork on Inauguration Day. He has been collecting donations ever since, giving him an advantage over the Democratic candidates in 2020. Trump's total exceeds the first quarter hauls of the top two Democratic candidates combined — Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders raised $18.2 million for the quarter and California Sen. Kamala Harris brought in $12 million. On top of the Trump campaign's haul, the Republican National Committee has raised $46 million.

Antti Rinne, leader of Finland's leftist Social Democrat party, declared victory in the country's Sunday general election. Partial results showed his party leading by a narrow margin with 17.8 percent of the vote. The nationalist Finns Party trailed right behind with 17.6 percent of the vote after more than 97 percent of the ballots were counted. "For the first time since 1999 we are the largest party in Finland," Rinne said. The co-ruling Center Party of Prime Minister Juha Sipila and the center-right National Coalition took 13.8 percent and 17.0 percent of the vote, respectively. The election marked the first in a century in which no party won more than 20 percent in the Nordic nation, which is seized by rising concerns about immigration, welfare, and climate change.

President Trump is using Tax Day on Monday to tout the 2017 GOP tax cuts during a visit to Minnesota, a longtime Democratic stronghold he nearly won in 2016 and hopes to flip in 2020. Ahead of Trump's trip, Kevin Hassett, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said the tax cuts provide "sustained, long-term nourishment for our economy." Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic presidential candidate, said Trump's tax cuts were a "missed opportunity" because they added trillions of dollars to the national debt and disproportionately helped the wealthy. Minnesota has not given a Republican its 10 electoral votes since Richard Nixon in 1972. Republicans in the state insist it's in play, but Minnesota Democrats got a boost in the anti-Trump backlash of 2018.

Lyft said Sunday it was pulling electric bikes from service in bike-share programs it owns in New York, Washington, and San Francisco due to a braking problem. "We recently received a small number of reports from riders who experienced stronger than expected braking force on the front wheel," the ride-hailing company said in a blog post emailed to customers. The move affects about 3,000 pedal-assist bikes. Lyft is working on replacing them with traditional bikes to keep the services operating in the cities, where it already has 17,000 traditional bikes available. The Lyft-owned bike-share brands involved include Citi Bike in New York, Capital Bikeshare in Washington, D.C., and Ford GoBike in the Bay Area.

Warner Bros.'s Shazam! held its top spot at the box office for the second weekend, bringing in another $25.1 million domestically. The DC Comics film — about a teenager who transforms into a superhero in a grown-up body by saying "Shazam!" — also made $35.9 million more outside North America in its second weekend. That brought the movie's worldwide gross to $258.8 million, more than twice what it cost to make. Universal's Little was second for the weekend with $15.5 million, according to Comscore. Lionsgate's Hellboy, financed by Millennium Media, launched in third place with $12 million.

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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.