Trump’s Approval Drops to New Low, and Condom Prices Rise Because of the War

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I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Friday, April 24th.

Here's what we're covering.

For decades out here, the old saying that everyone at every tech company used was learn to code. It was like this insurance policy almost.

“If you know how to write software, you're safe for good.”

And that is now very quickly going obsolete. My colleague, Mike Isaac, covers Silicon Valley, which this week has been rocked by major layoff plans as the rush to build AI upends the tech industry. The Times got access to an internal memo that was sent around yesterday at meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.

It announced it's going to cut 10% of its workforce, about 8,000 people. It's also going to leave another $6,000 open rolls unfilled. Part of this is specific to meta. They spent the past 10 years building virtual reality headsets for the metaverse and happened to miss the huge wave of artificial intelligence that hit the valley a few years ago.

They need to cut their spending in a big way in order to build better AI systems.

“But I think this is really also indicative of a broader trend across Silicon Valley right now.”

You have basically every big tech company working on building AI that could do coding

and software engineering on its own rather than requiring engineers necessarily to do that, which ultimately means it could be putting a lot of the people that are building these products out of the job. You also have every big tech company from Google to Amazon to Microsoft spending billions of dollars on data centers, the stuff that essentially powers AI and makes it work. That stuff costs a lot of money and all of these companies are trying to reduce the number of employees that work

for them in order to continue affording to pay for what they think will be the future. Meta's internal memo acknowledged that the need for new investments is driving these cuts with an executive writing quote, "This is not an easy trade-off." Yesterday, Microsoft also signaled it's trying to lower its head count as it goes all in on AI. It said it was offering buyouts to 7% of its U.S. workforce.

And in the last few months, Amazon trimmed roughly 30,000 corporate jobs. At the White House yesterday, President Trump announced a three-week extension of the ceasefire intended to stop the fighting between Israel and Hisbola, the Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon. They've agreed to an additional three weeks of, I guess, no firing ceasefire, no more firing, let's see. Trump was flanked by diplomats from Israel and Lebanon,

but the success of any truce will also depend on the cooperation of Hezbollah, which was not part of the talks. After the original ceasefire began a week ago, Israeli air strikes and Hezbollah attacks largely dropped off, though they did not stop completely. In one deadly incident, Israeli strikes killed a reporter and injured a photographer in southern Lebanon.

According to Lebanese officials, Israeli forces targeted the journalists, first striking a car right in front of them,

then hitting a nearby house they took shelter in. First responders said their rescue teams had to retreat after they came under fire when they tried to reach the injured journalists. A spokeswoman for the Israeli military said it hadn't prevented rescuers from reaching them, and said that the car that was hit in the initial strike had emerged from a building used by Hezbollah. Now, two other quick updates on the war in the Middle East.

First, with the conflict driving up gas prices and rattling the economy, polling shows that Americans are growing more dissatisfied with President Trump. The Times analyzed recent polling from dozens of organizations and found that 58% of Americans now disapprove of Trump's job performance. His worst results this term. Despite that, Trump still largely has the backing of his party, with another poll showing that the vast majority of Republicans approve of his performance.

And last update on the war. It sounds random, but it's not.

Carrex, which is based in Malaysia produces about 5 billion condoms a year, supplying huge brands like Trojan and Derex.

“The companies chief executive told the Times that higher freight costs due to surging fuel prices are hitting them hard.”

And the conflict has also driven up the cost of some raw materials, like synthetic rubber and foil for packaging. As a result, Carrex is raising prices by up to 30%. And the executive warned that if the war continues, a shortage of even a single material could ripple through the company's factories and stop production altogether. Back in January, people taking a look at the online betting platform Polymarket notice something they said seemed a little suspicious. Just before U.S. forces swept into Venezuela and seized the country's president, Nicholas Maduro.

Someone had placed a big bet. The Maduro would soon be, quote, "out." That person made more than $400,000, setting off widespread speculation that they'd had insider information about the military's plans. Now, federal authorities have charged an army special forces soldier involved in the Maduro operation with using classified information to wage your on it.

“And the details in the indictment suggest it's related to that January bet.”

The authorities alleged that the soldier tried to hide his proceeds by moving them through various cryptocurrency vaults, and tried to delete his Polymarket account after all the chatter about the very well timed bet. The indictment underscores the potential national security risk of government employees using sensitive information to try and make money on online prediction markets, which have exploded in recent years and let people bet on just about anything. People suspected that there's insider trading happening on these friction markets around the core.

Well, you know, the whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino. The White House even issued a recent warning to its staff about not using inside info about the war in Iran to place wages.

“And more broadly, across the country, there continued to be a lot of eyebrow-raising incidents connected to this kind of betting.”

Earlier this week, the platform Kalshi announced that it suspended the accounts of three political candidates in Virginia, Texas and Minnesota, who tried to gamble on their own elections. One of them said he'd actually placed the bet as a kind of stunt hoping to be caught, so he could draw attention to the markets, because he says they're "dangerous to our democracy." Late last month, legislation was filed in both houses of Congress to limit how government officials can use the sites.

And finally, this week marked a major milestone in treating deafness.

The Food and Drug Administration has now approved the first ever therapy that can restore hearing in some children who were born deaf. There are about 150 known causes of congenital hearing loss. This treatment, zeros in on a condition, were the tiny hairs that transmit sound from the ear to the brain are defective. It's caused by a single mutated gene. Until now, the only treatment for people with that kind of deafness was a cochlear implant, an electronic device placed in the inner ear that had major limitations.

For example, people with those implants have difficulty in noisy environments, and things can sound tinny or robotic.

With the new therapy, doctors basically inject a functioning copy of the critical gene into the inner ear, and the results can be profound.

One of the patients, the gene therapy was tested on, was a 13-month-old named Miles, whose hearing loss was so intense he couldn't hear a jet engine if it were next to him. Less than a year after getting the treatment, his hearing was normal. Now, those results didn't happen across the board. Many of the kids who got the therapy still need some kind of hearing aid, but a significant number had outcomes like Miles. And doctors say, "We're entering a new era for using specialized gene therapy to tackle hearing loss."

Researchers hope this FDA approval will open the door for more breakthroughs in the future. Those are the headlines. If you'd like to play the Friday news quiz, stick around it's just after these credits. This show is made by Will Jarvis, Margaret Kadifa, Jake Lucas, John Stewart, and me, Tracy Mumpford, original theme by Dan Powell. Special thanks to Isabella Anderson, Larissa Anderson, Sam Dolnik, Angelie Liston, Miles McKinley, Zoe Murphy, and Ted Tay.

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 up.

I want to present to you, Mr. President, the letter I sent to the normal prize committee.

We present this old proud to you on this lawyer's location.

“It is not at all a secret that during President Trump's second term, countries around the world have been trying all kinds of things to curry favor with him.”

Fantastic. We'll put it up in a place of honor. Recently, officials in one country have even been floating naming part of their territory after him, calling it Donnie Land. Your question, what country is it? I hint to get you started. The area they have in mind for Donnie Land is not that easy to visit right now. The answer? You crane. The times has learned that Ukrainian officials have been specifically floating Donnie Land as a name for part of the Donbass,

a region that Russia has been trying to seize. It started in part as a joke, but also as a way to get the Trump administration more invested and encourage the U.S. to push back on Russia's demands. Apparently, one Ukrainian official winners far as creating a flag for Donnie Land, gold was one of the colors naturally, and a national anthem using chat GPT. It's not clear though if those were ever shared with the U.S. Next one.

“I was actually in the car with my friend, and I looked at her and I was like, did you see that?”

Lately, there has been a surge of sightings of a certain phenomena in the sky. And scientists don't totally agree on why this is happening. Your question, what are people seeing more of?

The answer? Fireballs. The American Meteor Society says that the number of sightings in the first few months of this year was double what people usually report in that time period.

An amateur astronomer with the society told the Times quote, "It's a shooting gallery. There's stuff flying all over the place." NASA was a little more measured though. They put up a post saying that while it may seem like sightings have been more frequent recently, it's not out of the ordinary. One of the reasons there's been an uptick in sightings in general in the last few years could be because of the rise of cameras everywhere. Now you've got dash cams and video doorbells catching phenomena 24/7.

And last one. In Britain, researchers are trying to document some of the most unique parts of the language there. Especially the insults and curse words. That one expert said is where the real character and creativity of a language can come out. So they've been asking people to send them their favorite spicy local phrases so they can document them all. For the quiz, let's see if you can spot the real British insult mixed in with some fake ones. We're going to go a few rounds here and I've recruited a 100% very British, very insulting person to read the options for us, though full disclaimer, even he hadn't heard of most of these regional jobs.

“Scenario one, you might say, "I've had it up to hear with this insufferable." "Golfter, Wazak, Welk, Bell Sprouts." "It's Wazak. That is the real insult. That's what someone around Yorkshire might call a foolish or annoying person."”

Scenario two, you might find yourself saying, "Cheer up, there's no need to be a." "Modigate. Blunderbus. Comba batch. Mogwai." "Mardi get. Get is a dig on its own. You add the Mardi part. That means you're so geek or moody."

Scenario three, Stuart is always tattling on people. He's the village's worst crumpets. Climb. Spoony Bard. What'll snipe?

The answer? Stuart's a clipe. That's a Scottish term for a snitch. And last scenario, your cousin was talking absolute blank at the pub last night. Crumble boar. Splink. Bobbins. Glowing. It's bobbins. That is slaying around Manchester for nonsense. Okay, you crumble boarings. Spoony Barding. Bell Sprouting. Gaffter. Glowing. Rampling. Sour logs. That is it for the news quiz. I'm Tracy Mumford. The show will be back on Monday.

For a little bonus, I did ask my British colleague Alex Marshall. What his favorite insult was. Some of my personal favorite childhood insults are Spanner and Plank and Jonny Nomates.