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From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford.
Today's Friday, July 10th, here's what we're covering.
$47 for five cans of vegetables, a roast, and one onion. Across the country, Americans are feeling the pain at the grocery store. You see what I say? $1.25 for corn. Each rising food prices aren't new, but they've been exacerbated the last few months by
higher fuel costs from the war with Iran. It's feeding into a situation where prices are going up and how much people buy is going down. Recent polling shows that 61% of Americans say they've had to cut back on what goes in the cart.
That's left grocery stores scrambling after what's already been a pretty rough year
and a half, but not just higher prices, but also the reduction in food stamp programs under the Trump administration and the rise of weight loss medications. People are just buying less.
“In response, stores are now racing to lower prices on some key products, as they compete”
for cash-strapped customers. Walmart, the biggest retailer in the country, said this week it's lowering price tax for ground beef, corn, potato chips, and Coca-Cola. It's the latest retailer to try this. Costco said recently it was dropping prices on eggs and beef, and croaker, which owns chains
like Fred Meyer and King Super's, told investors it was experimenting to see which products
it could lower prices on to attract customers.
Despite the discounts, people's overall grocery bills are still unlikely to go down. Beef prices continue to hit record levels, and the USDA predicts prices for pork, poultry, fresh vegetables, and fresh fruit will all increase this year. The midterm elections are about four months away, and my colleagues and I have been looking at all of the ways that agencies across the Trump administration have been trying to
change or influence how American elections are run. Nick Korsen eD covers politics for the times. He says his team has traced dozens of Trump administration actions that seem to be designed to tip the scales of the midterm elections in favor of Republicans. One of the most significant has been Trump's push to have the federal government, "take
over the election's process."
“No, it's important to remember the Constitution grants no authority to the executive branch”
over elections. But that hasn't stopped the Trump administration from leaning on their agencies. To try and enact policies that would change the way we vote by getting private voter data through the Department of Justice or investigating the specter of non-citizens voting through the Department of Homeland Security when there is little to no evidence of widespread
non-citizens voting. They've also sought to change congressional maps, and this is perhaps the most direct way they're looking to influence the midterm elections in their favor. Depending on Republicans in state legislatures, they've redrawn congressional maps in a host of states, creating newly-safe Republican districts intended to give them an advantage
heading into a midterm election that, based on polling, looks to be fairly difficult for Republicans. Nick says that beyond the push to nationalize elections and change voting maps, Trump has also tried to tighten voting restrictions, cut back on election security efforts, and continued to actively spread election-related conspiracy theories.
While some of the administration's actions have been blocked by the courts, taken together, all the efforts could impact how people vote and who can vote on election day. And experts say they could also help so widespread doubt about the results of the midterms, and lay the groundwork for potential legal challenges, if Republican candidates lose. A photo has been going around on social media recently, showing a blindfolded man lying
on a cot with his hands zipped hide behind his back. He's only in his underwear, and he is lashed to the cot, face down.
The caption says, "Good morning, and he grew.
Not clear who the man is, but the image was shared by a Palestinian activist, who said
“it was first posted by an Israeli soldier, who since deleted his account.”
Human rights groups say it's evidence of a war crime. The Israeli military has now confirmed the authenticity of the photo and said it is investigating. It did not say where the prisoner was from, where the photo was taken, or how many Israeli soldiers were believed to be involved. In the past few years, Israel has detained thousands of Palestinians, often without bringing
any charges, and has denied the international red cross access to visit them. Many of the prisoners have described being stripped or otherwise humiliated, beaten, and deprived of adequate food or medical care. The times extensively documented the abuse of prisoners at one military base in southern Israel, where most gozons detained during the war were brought for interrogation.
Israeli soldiers have frequently posted what appear to be incriminating photographs or videos of themselves during the war.
“Rights groups say the fact that they feel comfortable doing that reflects a cultural shift”
in the military, even as military officials insist such incidents are against its rules. In a statement, issued last night, these really military said it continues to identify cases that "deviate from what is expected of IDF soldiers, and that actions would be taken against those involved."
And finally, I got my first try at flying, just pure flying by my Superman cape off my
daddy's barn, when I was about five years old. Wally Funk, who once broke the record for the oldest person to go to space, died this week at age 87, born Mary Wallace Funk. As a kid, she wanted to be an astronaut. And in the early 1960s, it seemed like maybe there was a chance.
She was among a group of women known as the Mercury 13, who were put through rigorous tests to determine how women might fare in space. They were testing us to our extremes to how much can we take of tenderly water being injected into our ears, and how fast as our eye got a stare at a particular object. Funk passed all the tests, but NASA continued to only send men into space until the 1980s.
Instead, Funk leaned into her love of flying. She worked as a commercial pilot, owned a flying school, and became the first woman to work as an inspector for the FAA, overseeing investigations into plane crashes.
But she never gave up on her dream.
And in 2021, at age 82, she boarded a rocket built by Jeff Bezos's company, Blue Origin, that earned her the record for oldest person to go to space, a title she held for a few months, until a then 90-year-old William Shatter of Star Trek fame unceded her. "Wally, what was it like? I can't tell!"
At a news conference after her big flight, Funk said the only problem with her trip to space was that it was too short. "I loved it! We had a great time! It was wonderful!
I want to go again! Fash!" "Those of the headlines, if you'd like to play the Friday news quiz, stick around, it's just after these credits. The show is made by Will Jarvis, Margaret Kadifa, Jake Lucas, John Stewart, and me, Tracey
Mumford, original theme by Dan Powell, special thanks to Isabel Anderson, Sam Dolnik, Miles McKinley, Zoe Murphy, and Chris Wood." "Now, time for the quiz! Every week, we ask you a few questions about stories the time has been covering. Can you get them all?"
"First question!" "Yeah, this is the cause of a one-bed one-bath apartment in San Francisco, $5,000."
“The housing market in San Francisco is wild, so now we are paying just under 8k, I think”
it's like 70, a little over $7,800, fueled by tech money. The city's average rent has recently passed New York City's to become the most expensive in the country. Buying is not any better, and thanks to the AI boom, it seems to be getting much, much worse, and much more are you kidding me.
Now, some sellers are not just asking for cash, but also for what? The answer? Stock.
Basically, with AI giants like Anthropic and Open AI about to go public, sellers are trying
to get those companies employees who want to buy their house to hand over some of their stock, which will likely go up, up, up, and value when those IPOs happen.
On top of the stock requests, houses in the Bay Area are now regularly going ...
over asking, and that might just be the start of things, since, according to one estimate,
“the flurry of new AI-related IPOs could create more than 16,000 new millionaires.”
All right, next question. A new national poll from Gallup published this week found that more Americans than ever are taking weight loss drugs. Last two years ago, three percent of people in the U.S. said they were taking one of the obesity drugs like Gosempic or Regovie.
Since then, that number has surged, as prices for the medications have dropped, and they've been cleared to treat other conditions like liver disease and sleep apnea. Your question?
“What percent of Americans now say they are currently on one of these drugs?”
The answer?
The number of people who say they use them has almost quadrupled to 11 percent.
Data also shows that the obesity rate in the U.S. is falling, dropping to just over 36 percent of adults from a peak of almost 40 percent a few years ago. Beyond that, rates of diabetes diagnoses, which had been climbing for over a decade, are now holding steady. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the 78th Emmy Awards nominations
announcement.
“The Emmy nominations are now out the Oscars of television, and there are a lot of power”
houses in the mix who have won before, like the medical drama The Pit, which has the most nods this year at a whopping 25.
But I'm going to ask you about some nominees who have never won.
This year, there are two people up for Best Actor in a Comedy Series who have been in the industry for decades, but have never won this prize. Let's see if you can name them. First, people say I am the best boss. An actor best known for playing the manager you do not want to have.
They go, "God, we've never worked in a place like this before. You're hilarious." The answer?
Steve Correll, and despite his huge run on the office, he has never gotten an acting
Emmy, but he is up for it now for the College Campus Comedy Rooster. And next one? You know, I spent all day looking for some cash to make this podcast special. You would not call him tall. No one wants a murder pod cast about real estate.
At his martin short, SNL helped launch him to fame all the way back in the 80s, but it is his role on only murders in the building that could get him his first acting Emmy. The winners will be announced in September. That's it for the news quiz, but one little bonus question for you. Do you know why they're called the Emmy Awards?
If you think you know the answers, send us an email at the headlines at NYTimeS.com. I'm Tracy Mumpford, the show will be back on Monday.
