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I'm Tracy Mumford, today's Tuesday, August 18th, here's what we're covering.
I just landed in Texas, headed to Big Bend National Park. Last night, I put a pause on all activity in that park as far as construction goes, until I can get down there and do a personal evaluation talk.
“The head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection says that the Trump administration is temporarily”
stopping work on a controversial border security project that cuts through a national park in Texas. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. For months, environmentalists, local officials and lawmakers from both parties have criticized the administration's plans to cut through the pristine desert wilderness.
Several local sheriffs have opposed it, too, calling it unnecessary. Since in recent months, authorities have encountered fewer than six migrants a day in the whole area. Amid the backlash, the administration scaled back its plans for a 30-foot wall. But this month, bulldozers and excavators started tearing up the landscape for a new patrol
road and other security measures, setting off a fresh wave of anger. Now, the CBP says that work has been paused, too. The fight around Big Ben National Park comes as the administration has been trying to fill in the gaps of the border wall, which has been a signature priority for President Trump for years.
In his first term, work on the wall mostly involved replacing existing barriers.
But now efforts to extend the wall are accelerating, boosted by about $47 billion in
dedicated funding that Congress approved as part of last summer's One Big Beautiful Bill. Construction is underway in all four border states with some 1,200 miles of new barriers planned, even as illegal crossings at the southern border have fallen to historic lows. Now two other quick updates on the Trump administration.
Question for the Prime Minister, do you expect to speak with the U.S. President before
“Wednesday's tariff deadline and if so, what will your message be for President Trump?”
Short answer, yes. Canada is scrambling to try and avoid new 50% tariffs on hundreds of Canadian goods that the White House says will go into effect at midnight tonight. Canadian officials stayed in DC over the weekend to continue negotiations with the U.S. And Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has told them to try and offer targeted concessions.
He's hoping to both keep the new tariffs from kicking in and ease existing levies on Canadian products that President Trump has already put in place. If no deal is reached and the new U.S. surcharges kick in, that could push Canada to retaliate further escalating economic tensions between the U.S. and one of its largest trading partners. And President Trump has cast his vote ahead of Florida's Republican primary today using
a method that he has long railed against.
Never allow mail-in ballots because if you do, there'll be massive cheating on this.
Boting by mail. Any time you have mail-in ballots, you have cheating. People don't want mail-in ballots because you have crooked elections. It guarantees a crooked election. Trump has criticized mail-in voting for years, using it to bolster his baseless claims
of widespread voter fraud. But this is at least the third time he's used mail-in voting himself, casting ballots in Palm Beach County, home to Mara Logo. In response to questions, a White House spokeswoman downplayed Trump's choice, saying that "This is a non-story."
Across the country, the cyclospoor outbreak is now waning, after becoming the largest of its kind in U.S. history, with almost 25,000 confirmed or suspected cases. Some food safety experts, the time spoke with, said they feel comfortable eating salad again. But my colleagues have learned new details about how in the early days of the outbreak officials struggled to pinpoint the source of the contamination.
On July 1st, state health officials in Michigan, where there were a lot of ca...
honed in on a common thread.
“Many of the people who had gotten sick had eaten at Taco Bell.”
So they emailed the company asking for its supply chain records. They emailed, again, on July 3rd, and, again, on July 6th, according to emails the times of pain. That day, Taco Bell provided some records to the state, but it wasn't until July 13th once
the FDA was also involved, that the government finally got all the paperwork it needed
to identify lettuce from a facility in Mexico as a source of the outbreak. Notably, a federal rule that was supposed to take effect this year would have required companies like Taco Bell to send those records in 24 hours. But the Trump administration delayed implementation of that until 2028, saying companies needed more time to prepare.
Food safety experts say the postponement hindered the response to the Michigan outbreak, which was the largest cluster in the US. Public health experts also pointed to other recent cuts at the FDA that they say are generally making the country's food supply less safe.
That includes cutting a program focused on cyclospora tracking.
In response to questions from the times, the acting deputy commissioner for food at the FDA disputed that the 24-hour rule would have made a major impact in this outbreak. And Taco Bell said it responded to all requests from health officials in a timely manner. In Nevada, a criminal trial is now underway about one of pop culture's most notorious unsolved crimes, the murder of two poxicore.
It's been nearly 30 years since the hip hop artist was killed in a drive-by shooting, and there have been endless theories about who was responsible. Now, let's be clear, Dwayne Davis did not fool the truth. But what he did do was plan the retaliation for the DNA of his nephew. In opening remarks yesterday, prosecutors laid out their case against Dwayne Keith Davis, accusing
him of orchestrating the murder. And while cold cases are often revived after decades because of fresh leads or surprising new evidence, that's not the case this time. Davis has been talking about his role in the shooting for years. As far back as 2008, Davis told detectives that he and other gang members had chased after
Shakur, and that he was in the car when his nephew opened fire. Prosecutors didn't pursue charges at that point because he'd struck a deal in order to talk to them. But over the years, Davis continued to share his story on TV, podcasts, and in a memoir, some of which is now featuring in his trial.
Now, what the state has just told you, what they believe is the evidence in this case.
“But really, in the day, you have to ask yourself, if what their state is really true,”
perfection. Davis's lawyers, though, say that his memoir was fiction, and that he has a long history of embellishing the truth. They claimed he wasn't charged years ago because police quote, "new he was full of crap." The trial, which will likely dredge up a lot of hip hop history and infamous rivalries,
is expected to last about a month.
And finally, so this morning, I drove 100 miles north out of Las Vegas into a remote
part of southern Utah, I'm here in this spectacularly beautiful canyon, but I'm not here to hike. I'm here to see a show. It's one that I've seen a number of times before. My colleague Michael Palson covers theater for the times, and he's been looking at how
productions of Le Mis are popping up everywhere, even 40-plus years after the musical about a French rebellion, first hit the stage. There's the elaborate production that he went to see at the two-a-con center for the Arts in Utah, which even includes live goats. But productions are also opening in Arizona, California, Colorado, too in Georgia, Illinois
Kentucky, the list goes on.
“Michael says the lay mis surge is being driven by two key things.”
One, along running national tour of the show, just ended, which has freed up the license for regional theaters to perform it, and two theaters are really hungry for a hit. This production is coming in the middle of a pretty serious financial crisis, facing regional theaters in the U.S., and they're turning to this show, remembering how popular it was,
Knowing that there's a eagerness to see this title again, and hoping that by ...
it again, they're going to draw large crowds that will not only love the show, but will
also bolster the theater's finances.
“Michael says some theaters have seen their production costs go up 50% or more since the”
pandemic, so they're banking on a big flashy classic that some super fans might even
go see more than once, basically, the hope across the country is that they'll go see it,
and then go see it one day more. Those are the headlines.
“Today on the daily, he's just gotten more and more like exhausted, nobody enters his”
fly's expecting it to be fun, this is a whole other level.
A look at the deteriorating conditions on one of the U.S. Navy's aircraft carriers in
“the Middle East, which has now been deployed for months longer than planned.”
You can listen to that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts, and if you are not a Times subscriber yet, you can get a full month of free access to everything we publish when you download the Times app now. I'm Tracy Mumford, we'll be back tomorrow. [BLANK_AUDIO]
