"Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Ryland Barton.
President Trump says the U.S. will stop helping guide ships through the straight of
“Hormuz just a day after beginning what he called a project freedom.”
Trump says the pause was needed to finalize a settlement with Iran to end the war. Yesterday the U.S. military sank six small Iranian boats that it says threatened commercial ships. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the move was aimed at helping stranded civilian sailors. "This is not an offensive operation.
This is a defensive operation. What that means is very simple.
There's no shooting unless we're shot at first.
We're not attacking them, we're not, but if they are attacking us, so they're attacking a ship, you need to respond to that. You're not going to let some fast boat come up on a ship and shoot it up." There are about 1500 ships stuck in the Persian Gulf, about 1,000 of them are large ocean-going vessels like oil tankers.
The tone is ratcheting up again between the U.S. and European allies, NPR's Eleanor Beardsley
“reports EU leaders say they reject President Trump's latest threat to raise tariffs on”
European car imports. "Analysts say Trump was likely reacting out of peak after the German Chancellor's comments that Iran is humiliating the United States, but EU chief Ursula von der Leyen says a deal is a deal talking about the trade deal already negotiated between the U.S. and EU.
French President Emmanuel Macron says given the current state of the world the last thing
allies should be doing is threatening to destabilize each other. "He says Europe wants free and fair trade, but if Trump insists the EU will activate certain new instruments, he's talking about the EU's anti-coversion measure, also known as the trade bazooka, which could be used to levy billions of dollars of tariffs on American imports to Europe.
Eleanor Beardsley and Pair News, Paris." A video posted by FBI Director Cash Patel appears to be using AI to rip off an iconic music video by the Beastie Boys, and Pair's Jeff Brumfield has more. "The two-minute video about fraud was posted by Patel Abundin. "We really have."
“It features an instrumental version of the Beastie Boys 1994 hit song sabotage, but that's”
not all. The video also contains sequences that appear to be frame-by-frame recreations of the original sabotage music video, which was directed by Spike Jones, and Pair found six such clips. Experts say the most likely explanation is that AI was used to create near identical versions
of the original shots, neither the FBI or the Beastie Boys immediately responded to and PR's request for comment. Jeff Brumfield and Pair News. "A majority of Republican state senators in Indiana, whose opponents were endorsed by President Trump, have lost their primary elections, Trump targeted seven state senators who voted
against mid-decade redistricting, Trump has been pushing Republican-led states to redraw congressional maps to boost his party's chances in the mid-term elections." This is NPR. One of the top art museums in Paris has opened a new gallery dedicated to orphaned masterpieces plundered by the Nazis.
The exhibit at the Musei d'Orsay is part of France's reckoning with Nazi era looting. The paintings are hung so visitors can read the backs, that's because the inventory marks map how the pieces move from private homes into Nazi hands. The Department of Education is investigating Smith College over alleged Title IX violations for admitting transgender and non-binary students, and Pair's Caden Mills reports Smith
is one of the largest women's colleges in the US. Smith College, since 2015, has admitted transgender and gender non-conforming students. According to the school's website, quote, "sis, trans, and non-binary women are eligible to apply to Smith." Now the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights will determine if Smith's admissions
policy constitutes discrimination on the basis of sex. The agency said in a press release, quote, "allowing biological males into spaces designed for women raises serious concerns about privacy, fairness, and compliance under federal law." The investigation originates from a complaint filed last year by conservative legal group defending education.
In a statement Smith College said, "It is committed to complying with civil rights laws, but that it does not comment on pending government investigations." Caden Mills and PR News drivers in the self-proclaimed pizza capital of the United States will soon be able to get pizza state license plates, Connecticut State Dits claim is the pizza capital on welcome signs in 2024, the plates bear the image of a pepperoni pizza slice.
It's NPR News.
This week on up first, gas prices just jumped 30 cents per gallon in a single week.
With the state of Hormuz still closed, the global energy shock is only getting deeper. Listen, for overnight developments on Iran, plus, primaries in Ohio and Indiana as mid-term election season heats up. We'll have the very latest every morning. Now first, listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
