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headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Friday, August 21st. Here's what we're
covering. With the war in Iran almost at the six month mark, President Trump is issuing new threats. This time aimed at Iran's economy. This week, he promised what he called an economic "d-day" and quote, "the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country." Though his administration has not specified what that will look like. What can we
expect here? Yeah, I'll be holding your press conference on Monday to talk
“about exactly what we're going to do. Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Scott”
Bessant, whose department oversees things like sanctions, said a plan will be rolled out next week, but his comments also made something else clear. We're now
for now. And it is at the President's discretion if we are doing the
maximum economic pressure, then that means that likely there will not be a large-scale kinetic restart. Essentially, by going all in on economic warfare, the US is stepping back from its threats of military action. An experts say Iran is listening closely. One former Middle East negotiator who worked for President of both parties said Iran's leaders are likely reading Trump's
pivot as a clear sign he does not want to go back to full-scale war. The question now, though, is how effective any new economic pressure on Iran can be. The US is already blockating its ports and the country has faced years of crippling sanctions. Still, the regime has remained resilient. This week, Trump expanded his threats to target any country that does business with Iran
trying to isolate it further. But experts say following through on that will
“be very difficult. Iran's most important financial lifeline is China,”
which buys most of Iran's oil. And one expert on economics at the Council on Foreign Relations told the Times, quote, "I'm skeptical, Trump is willing to risk instigating an economic war with China right now." And one
other quick update on the war. The USS Lincoln is finally leaving the
Middle East. In recent weeks, there had been a growing number of reports about deteriorating conditions on the aircraft carrier and how the crew had been pushed to its limits as the ship stayed at sea for months longer than expected, supporting President Trump's military campaign in Iran. Earlier this month, hundreds of family members of the sailors flooded a town hall
meeting with Navy officials demanding an update about conditions on board. Now, the Lincoln has started its 13,000 mile journey back to its home port of San Diego, which could take a month or longer. Last year, right after getting back into the White House, President Trump continued his flurry of executive move. President Trump went on a firing spree. The President fired the
inspectors' general from a number of federal agencies. He dismissed around 20 inspectors' general. There, essentially, watched dogs who were supposed to provide independent oversight of federal agencies, looking for things like waste and fraud. Many of those positions are still unfilled. But Trump has now started to put in some of his own replacements. You know, traditionally, you
would appoint accountants or law enforcement or previous internal investigators, people from non-political backgrounds. But what we're seeing is that Donald Trump is appointing people from overtly political backgrounds to these roles. Luke Broadwater covers the White House for the times. He says Trump's picks for the roles have included a former Republican congressman,
a lawyer who worked for Republicans on Capitol Hill. And most recently, one of the authors of Project 2025, the well-known conservative policy initiative, in their new roles. Some of the IGs have started investigating or attacking the President's frequent targets, like California Governor Gavin Newsom and New York Attorney General Latisha James. Typically, what an Inspector General does is
they scrutinize their own agency. So, if you're the Inspector General for let's say Homeland Security, you're looking at how the Homeland Security
Secretary is running the office, are they spending dollars wisely, are
contracts going out to lowest bidder, things like that. You're not typically
“going around the country looking for Donald Trump's enemies and attempting”
to investigate them. And so, the criticism is, as some of these inspectors General turn their gaze outside of their own agencies, are they actually scrutinizing the agency they're supposed to? In all, after Trump's firings, as well as big funding cuts for Inspector General's offices, Luke says there's evidence that the oversight work itself has slowed, according to a
nonprofit research group. In the first half of this year, the number of investigative reports from IGs assigned to cabinet level agencies dropped 25 percent compared to previous years. In response to questions from the times, a White House spokeswoman said Trump had hired "highly qualified and accomplished individuals" and that they would carry out his mission of
targeting fraud. In California about a decade ago, a group of gunmen attacked an electrical substation in the Bay Area, firing on it over a hundred times and causing so much damage that it was shut down for nearly
a month. While the gunmen were never caught or identified, it was considered
“a carefully planned attack with the snipers aiming directly at one key piece”
of the power facility. It's transformers. Around that time, experts warned about what might happen if that kind of coordinated strike was more widespread. According to an analysis from a federal commission, if just nine carefully chosen substations out of the roughly 50,000 in the U.S., were knocked out simultaneously. It could cause a cascading grid failure and plunged the entire
country into a blackout. In the times this learned that since then, the potential for that kind of devastating electrical outage could be higher than ever, in part, because of a nationwide shortage of transformers. Transformers come in
all shapes and sizes, but the really crucial ones are usually sitting behind
barbed wire fences in substations. They're those huge, truck-sized boxes with knobby cones and thick wires coming out of them. And it turns out, transformers are actually incredibly hard to make. They're built to speck, assembled by hand. And there's only one facility in the entire country that manufactures the specialized ultra-thin steel that goes into them. Recently, the wait time for
new transformers has jumped to more than two years, in part because of surging demand for new grid infrastructure due to the rise of data centers. One energy analyst told the times that the shortage is "hair on fire, biting my nails, losing sleep, levels of bad." By one estimate, if this kind of nationwide blackout did play out, it could last for months and months until the infrastructure
could be replaced. The federal government actually co-authored a report for what that could look like, and it sounds like something out of a disaster movie. It predicted there would be widespread shortages of fuel, water, and food. Cellphones would be useless, credit cards wouldn't work, and within several days, quote, "wide spread social unrest and confusion would ensue." Worst case scenarios aside, some
experts say there are things in the works that could bring down the risk of a devastating nationwide blackout. The same data center boom that's been helping to cause the shortage of transformers also means that huge amounts of money are flowing into potential fixes for the problem. For example, with all of that investment, transformer production is ramping up. In the last few years, one
company in Virginia that builds them has grown from 1,800 employees to 6,000, and researchers are also developing new types of transformers that are easier to repair if they ever get damaged.
And finally, a while back, a researcher visiting a zoo in Shanghai noticed a
“surprising and honestly kind of adorable seeing playing out in the ape enclosure. A”
female given had managed to pick up a little mouse and was gently caressing it with her hand, and the mouse seemed to be okay with it. Videos of this kind of heartwarming interspecies friendship are of course all over social media, but the researcher had deeper questions. What was the root of this behavior and how common was it? He's a biological anthropologist and this summer he co-authored a report in the
journal primates that laid out some potential answers. It said that every single one
Of the nearly 100 primate species the team analyzed displayed behavior kind of
like keeping a pet. There was the macaque monkey that bonded with a chicken, a
“troop of capuchin monkeys that adopted a little baby marmusette, and other”
interactions between primates and all kinds of animals, lizards, birds, dogs, the new research suggests that the roots of humans craving animal companionship may stretch deep into our primate past. Still, experts say that the behavior of keeping a pet at all continues to be something of a mystery from an evolutionary perspective. When it's all about survival, why would any species develop a habit of spending time
in resources caring for another species? There are a lot of theories floating out there that pets were useful for things like hunting and protection, or even
that they could be a status symbol, the researcher who first spotted the given in the
mouse suspects part of the motivation might be about loneliness, basically scratching
“an inch for intimacy by scooping up another little warm body.”
Those are the headlines. If you'd like to play the Friday news quiz, stick around it's just after these credits. And if you are not a time subscriber yet, you can get a full month of free access to everything the time's publishes when you download the time's app now. This show is made by Will Jarvis, Margaret Katifa, Jake Lucas, John Stewart, and me, Tracy Mumford, original theme by Dan Powell, special thanks
to Isabella Anderson, Sam Dolnik, Miles McKinley, and Zoe Murphy. 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, for years, New York City was widely considered the most notoriously expensive place
to live in the entire country. Like New York is such a scam, bro. Over the years, though, it has been surpassed by other metro areas. And now, according to federal data, it's no longer even in the top three. According to a new report from the Department of Commerce, what three places in the U.S. have the highest living expenses taken into account housing, utilities, etc.
The answer. Coming in at number three, Los Angeles, number two, Miami, and at number one, San Francisco. On the flip side, if you're looking for affordable places to live, the bottom three on the list are Doath and Alabama, Eagle Pass, Texas, and Monroe, Louisiana. Next question. This past weekend, the celebrated Proathlete Tommy John died at age 83. John got the nickname "Bionic Man" after undergoing a pioneering surgery that saved his career.
The procedure, which has now become common, is named after him. Your question. What sport did Tommy John play? The answer? Baseball.
“So whenever I try to get the little extra pop on the ball that you need to get guys out,”
I just couldn't do it. And I couldn't throw a good curveball. Tommy John was a pitcher and after years of wear and tear from hurling the ball, he tore a ligament on the inside of his elbow. Doctors grafted in a bit of tendon from his wrist,
basically giving him a new elbow. And after that, he went on to win more than a hundred
and sixty major league games, only retiring at age 46. In the years since, hundreds of other baseball players, including stars like Shohai Otani, have gotten Tommy John surgery. And surgeons say it's actually become increasingly common at the youth level. At one point, a study found that the majority of players who got the procedure were 15 to 19 years old. As kids specialize in sports from a younger and younger age.
And last one, what an earth has happened? It's the biggest world story for years, isn't it? This week, the British public and Anglo files everywhere got a bit of a shock when it came out that Prince Harry plans to move back to the UK with his wife and children. The couple famously stepped down from their status as working royals and moved to the US six years ago after struggling with intense tablet attention and clashes within the
royal family. In some ways, that tension only increased once they left, especially when Harry published a tell-all memoir sharing family details and describing his brother William
As his "arch nemesis.
1.5 million copies on the very first day it was published.
“Hint for you, the title comes from the rhyming phrase, "the air and the air being air”
to the throne." The answer? His memoir is called "spare," as in William's "the air." Harry's "the spare." A little bonus for you here. Can you name who these other famous
“memoirs were written by? I'll give you the title. Becoming.”
That's Michelle Obama. How about "friends, lovers and the big terrible thing" emphasis on "friends." That one was from Matthew Perry. Next one, "bossy pants."
“Rossy pants is Tina Fey's memoir. And last one, "who wrote just kids?"”
That is by the singer-songwriter Patty Smith. Her memoir was so acclaimed it won the National
Book Award. Of course, not every big figure always gets creative with their title. Both
Katherine Hepburn and Elton John titled their memoirs "Me." That's it for this week's
news quiz. You can always tell us how you did at the headlines at nytimes.com.
I'm Tracy Munkford. We'll see you on Monday.
