A New Threat to Global Shipping, and a Huge Drop-Off in Food Stamps

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0:29From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Tuesday, July 21st. Here's what we're covering.

0:41In the Middle East, there are fears that a new front in the war could be opening. Yesterday, one of Iran's key proxy forces, the Houthi militia in Yemen, declared that it will choke off a key waterway in the region. It said it would stop all ships from Saudi Arabia, a major U.S. ally, from passing through a portion of the Red Sea, which has become a critical alternate path for oil shipments as the Strait of Hormuz has been under fire. The Houthis, which are part of the so-called axis of resistance led by Iran, have been fighting the Saudi-backed government in Yemen for years. They've largely stayed out of the U.S.-Iran war so far, but the new threat could bring them fully into the broader conflict in the region.

1:26It could also put more strain on global energy supplies. There is some precedent for what that could look like. During the height of the war in Gaza, the Houthis attacked and hijacked ships in the Red Sea in solidarity with Hamas. That forced shipping companies to divert their cargo thousands of miles south around the tip of Africa, sending shipping costs soaring. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill today, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the president's top military advisor, General Dan Cain, will appear before Congress to try and make the case for why lawmakers should approve tens of billions of dollars in new funding for the war.

2:06The greatest fighting force on the planet, the last great superpower, must be fully equipped, and that's the job of Congress to make sure it's done. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has already signaled he intends to try and push that request through, even though many other lawmakers, including a handful of Republicans, have raised concerns that President Trump is waging war without congressional authorization. Trump ignored recent votes by the House and Senate directing him to get their approval for the war. Democrats, for their part, are refusing to back the funding request, saying the administration needs to share more details about its strategy in the conflict, which has now stretched for almost five months and is deeply unpopular with the American public.

2:58Now, two other quick updates on the Trump administration. Yesterday, the president signed an order that will slap 50 percent tariffs on a wide range of goods from Canada starting next month, likely reigniting a clash with one of America's closest allies. Canada has been in the administration's crosshairs ever since it retaliated against Trump's first round of tariffs last year with tariffs of its own. And it's expected to be one of several countries to now face a new wave of surcharges from the White House. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court struck down Trump's sweeping use of tariffs, but the administration has been finding workarounds by turning to more obscure legal provisions.

3:39Also. As I understand it, in about a month or so, they're going to send it to have it be maxed out. The White House says that Trump's new Air Force One jet will be temporarily taken out of service this fall for what it called additional upgrades and enhancements. It's not clear exactly what those changes will be, but the Times has reported that the Secret Service raised security concerns about the Qatari-donated jet, which multiple officials say lacks the same anti-missile capabilities as the old Air Force One models. Trump, who was eager to get the luxury jet into service, has been furious about coverage of the plane's security issues, and the administration has been trying to unmask the confidential sources who spoke with the Times.

4:24Beyond issuing subpoenas to some of the reporters, the Justice Department has also been trying to get phone records from them and their relatives. That includes information about calls and messages on the phones of one of the reporter's mothers and two of the reporter's spouses. A Justice Department spokesman said in a statement that any subpoena issued by the department is done, quote, in full compliance with federal law.

4:52In the years since Congress passed the one big, beautiful bill, a growing number of Americans are no longer receiving federal food stamp benefits, commonly known as SNAP. The state with the highest drop-off is Arizona, where the number of people on SNAP has dropped by roughly half, meaning almost 500 ,000 people there now don't get federal food assistance. I've talked to a 47-year-old man who's disabled. I've talked to a 21-year-old college student. I've talked to women who have been to prison and are in a reentry program. I've talked to a family that was homeless and living in their car. I talked to a grandmother with breast cancer, and she's lost a lot of weight because she's skipping meals to feed her grandkids.

5:36My colleague Jason DeParle has covered poverty for more than three decades. He says that things began to change as soon as President Trump's signature legislation was signed into law. It introduced some work requirements for people getting benefits, which likely accounts for some of the drop-off. But Jason says the most significant change was the huge new penalties states can now face if they make mistakes when giving out food stamps. Because of that threat, Arizona started requiring way more paperwork from people seeking benefits, at exactly the same moment that there were statewide staffing cuts.

6:12The result was chaos. All of a sudden, people just couldn't get through on the telephones. They couldn't get through to be seen. The state was losing their documents. People were getting notices in April saying, if you didn't meet a March deadline, you were going to get cut off. There were lines around the block at the food stamp office. People waited hours just to get in. A woman told me she waited three hours to get in to get the number to wait. Several mothers told me they kept their kids out of school because they knew the waits at the SNAP office were going to be so long that they wouldn't have time to leave in the middle and go pick up their kids from school.

6:48Republicans in Arizona have cheered the drop off in SNAP recipients, saying it's a sign that there's been, quote, massive fraud in the system. And some have said the new paperwork was a necessary response to the fact that mistaken overpayments to SNAP recipients had been rising in recent years. Overall, Jason says that while Arizona's huge drop-off in SNAP enrollment is something of an outlier, nationally it's only dropped by about 10%, it could be a preview of what's to come as other states try to figure out how to avoid the threat of new federal penalties.

7:27Across the U.S., there's been some relief in the last day or two from wildfire smoke that turned the air unhealthy. But that improvement could be fleeting, with fires burning in the Pacific Northwest and another shot of smoke forecast to spread south today from Canada. More than 900 wildfires are still burning there, and many Canadian fires are impossible to fight. Half of the country's blazes, which are often caused by lightning strikes, burn in areas that are incredibly remote. They may be dotted with small indigenous communities or completely unpopulated, accessible only by plane and with no roads for firefighters.

8:06Aircraft can drop water from above, but a fire management expert in Canada told the Times that's just intended to buy time until you can get boots on the ground. He added, quote, To be blunt, even if we spend a lot more money, I don't think we could stop these fires.

8:29And finally. So recently I was a speaker at a conference and one of the other speakers went to go try to buy my book on Amazon and ended up finding a book about me and sent me a text asking me why I hadn't told him I had a biography. And I clicked the link. I had no idea I had a biography and saw this very plain looking book with this brown cover called The Biography of Cashmere Hill. And in my mind, immediately, I thought, this is an AI slot biography. Cashmere Hill covers tech at the Times, meaning she had seen these kinds of books for sale before, biographies of public figures churned out by AI.

9:11She just never expected to be the subject or victim of one herself. Obviously, she got a copy,$26.99, and it had some generic facts about her that you could find on the internet. But the writer, using my air quotes here, also made up a lot of stuff, at one point claiming to have read her childhood diary. Kashmir tried to reach out to the person selling the book to understand why they were doing this, but she never got a response. So I went looking for someone else who uses AI to write books, and I found a man named Bill Johns, who is 70, he's retired, he lives in Maryland, And he has published more than 400 books to Amazon over just a year using ChatGPT to write them.

9:56And he told me, hey, everything that's ever been thought or said is on the internet. So ChatGPT can get it in the same way that an author could go out and interview people or find documents. He kind of felt like this was an equivalent process. I asked if I could see his Amazon sales reports. And he is selling a few hundred books per month. He makes about$7 per book. So for him, this experiment has been a success. I went to look at what people thought of the books, and the reviews were not great. He had a lot of one-star reviews, people saying it was the worst book they'd ever purchased. It was repetitious.

10:36It was full of mistakes. So it seems like customers don't love the books. And I don't think they realize when they're buying them that they've been written with AI. What was interesting to me, like this is a weird little thing that happened to me, but there are a lot of these AI slot biographies being written. Sometimes they sell really well. There was one of Charlie Kirk that became a bestseller on Amazon after his death, which means that it sold thousands and thousands of copies. Amazon is okay with AI-generated books as long as it's not what they call a poor customer experience. So if it gets a lot of one-star reviews, they will take it down.

11:14but they are generally open as a platform to having AI-generated content. Kashmir says that after she reached out to the author of her biography, it was taken down. In the meantime, Bill Johns has offered to whip up a new one for her, and she's declined. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, how the Pentagon has been disclosing less and less about the war in Iran as the conflict escalates. You can listen to that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.