A Times Investigation Into Epstein’s Death, and Why Gas Prices Might Stay High

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0:34Steve Eder:From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Tuesday, June 16th. Here's what we're covering.

0:45Jan Ransom:I think there's still a lot of confusion about what exactly is in this deal. Can you lay out the terms for us?

0:52Benjamin Mullin:First of all, good morning, everybody. Thanks for having us. So, first of all, I think it's a great day for the American people because what this deal does fundamentally is two things. It immediately reopens the Straits of Hormuz.

1:02Richard Pérez-Peña:A day after the U.S. and Iran announced they'd agreed to a framework to end the war, the specific language of what's in the short-term truce has not been released, and the exact terms remain a secret.

1:14Benjamin Mullin:On a number of issues, we are going to have to figure this stuff out during the technical negotiation phase.

1:20Richard Pérez-Peña:That's led to confusion and conflicting statements from both sides about what is included. So we're going to quickly run through some of the big outstanding questions that my colleagues have been working to answer. To start, what will happen to Iran's nuclear program? President Trump has said the main reason he went to war with Iran in February was to prevent the country from acquiring a nuclear weapon. With this deal, both sides have indicated they did not settle the topic of Iran's nuclear program. So they have put off those discussions for a later round of talks. Next question. Will the Western sanctions on Iran end?

1:58Richard Pérez-Peña:This is another big unknown and has also been left to later negotiations. It's a central demand for Iran, where the crippling economic penalties have taken a huge toll on the country.

2:11Emmett Lindner:Iran also wants to recover billions of dollars of its frozen assets, money that's been locked up in foreign financial institutions. institutions. But Vice President J.D. Vance said the U.S. has not promised any financial benefits to Iran as part of this truce. Next question. What does all of this mean for the Strait of Hormuz?

2:32Steve Eder:Now, both countries have said they're going to lift their blockades, but how fast the waterway gets back up to full traffic remains unclear. Trump said things will be back to normal by Friday.

2:43Emmett Lindner:Other U.S. officials say it will take weeks, and the U.S. military wants to ensure there are no mines along the passage. There's also confusion around whether it's going to cost ships carrying oil and other goods money to go through the strait. It was free before the war, but an Iranian official said his country will now assess fees on passing ships, which legal experts say could violate international law. And one more question to follow up on the strait. What about gas prices? Drivers in the U.S. will probably have to wait weeks to see meaningful improvement at the gas station. And there may be long-term effects, given how much oil infrastructure was damaged or destroyed during the war.

3:28Emmett Lindner:Also, energy analysts have a saying about gas prices in general.

3:32Michael Rothfeld:Up like a rocket, down like a feather. They go up quick, and they really take their time coming down.

3:41Emmett Lindner:Now, beyond the many unanswered questions swirling around the deal, there is also the issue of whether the ongoing fighting in Lebanon could derail the whole framework. Iran claims the ceasefire includes Lebanon, where Israel and the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah have been fighting. But Trump hasn't publicly commented on that.

4:07Emmett Lindner:Yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to distance himself from the deal, which he wasn't involved in negotiating, suggesting he did not feel bound by it. That's his decision, Netanyahu said, referring to President Trump.

4:25Maggie Haberman:Jeffrey Epstein's death in jail in 2019 was ruled a suicide, but that hasn't stopped countless conspiracy theories. So my colleagues and I went through tens of thousands of pages of evidence, and we interviewed people who had never spoken to reporters before.

4:39Steve Eder:A new investigation from my colleague Steve Eder and a team of Times reporters offers the most complete look yet into the death of Jeffrey Epstein.

4:49Emmett Lindner:Nearly seven years after he was found hanging from a noose in his jail cell, where he was being held on charges of sex-trafficking minors, many people think Epstein was murdered by someone with an interest in keeping him quiet. In the past few months, though, the release of the Epstein files,

5:05Steve Eder:with scores of previously confidential documents, opened up a new opportunity to dig into the circumstances of his death.

5:12Emmett Lindner:And there are a few key takeaways from my colleagues reporting. First, lots of new evidence suggests that Epstein was determined to end his life. Leading up to his death, he had written about and discussed the idea of suicide in documents the Times got access to, saying he felt he couldn't bear life in jail. And beyond a suicide attempt that had previously been reported, his cellmate told the Times that he caught Epstein preparing to kill himself two other times. Another takeaway? Warnings about Epstein's risk of suicide were routinely ignored. In his final hours, he was left alone and unobserved, in violation of specific orders that had been given about his supervision.

5:55Emmett Lindner:And his cell was filled with heaps of linens he wasn't supposed to have, along with multiple nooses and other strips of fabric. And my colleagues also found that the handling of the scene of his death helped feed the lasting suspicions about what caused it. The guard who found his body and moved it as he tried to resuscitate him did not cooperate with the initial investigation and wasn't interviewed under oath until two years later. There was no DNA evidence collected, and the noose that investigators took from the scene was later determined to be the wrong one.

6:29Maggie Haberman:There are many questions from Epstein's death that remain unanswered and are likely unanswerable. But what we learned from our investigation was that Epstein's death probably wasn't the result of a grand conspiracy. More likely, it was the institutional failures, the chance events, and the human errors that gave Epstein the opportunity to do something that he'd been thinking about.

6:52Michael Rothfeld:You can find the full investigation in the NY Times app or at nytimes.com.

7:05Steve Eder:In California.

7:07Devlin Barrett:In recent days, federal agents have knocked on the doors of family, friends and former employees, not because they found a crime, because they're simply trying to find one.

7:17Steve Eder:Governor Gavin Newsom has announced that the Justice Department is actively investigating him and his wife, and he accused President Trump of launching the probe for political reasons.

7:27Devlin Barrett:Mr. President, come after me. I'm not going anywhere. And the country is watching.

7:33Emmett Lindner:In a video posted online, Newsom, who is expected to run for president in 2028, described the investigation as a fishing expedition and an attempt to smear him. He added, quote, we have nothing to hide. The full scope of any investigation is unclear, but Newsom's aides say part of the focus seems to be on the governor's wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, and her non-profits. For years, critics have raised the possibility of self-dealing. One of her non-profits has a contract with a for-profit production company she owns, though no evidence of wrongdoing has ever surfaced. A person familiar with the matter confirmed that federal investigations are underway, including one looking at Siebel Newsom's finances.

8:17Emmett Lindner:But the person disputed the governor's claims that it was politically motivated and said the efforts had been launched by authorities in California, not in D.C.

8:26Michael Rothfeld:A White House official referred all questions to the Justice Department, which declined to comment.

8:35Steve Eder:In the streaming war's battle for your living room, a legacy media company has just announced a major new move. Fox Corp, the parent company of Fox News and the Fox Broadcast Network, is spending$22 billion to buy Roku, the streaming company behind those little black and purple remotes.

8:53Emmett Lindner:If the acquisition is approved, it would give Fox a foothold in the more than 100 million households who stream content using Roku devices, plus access to Roku's own catalog of shows and its big advertising business. This acquisition would be the biggest bet so far by Lachlan Murdoch, who took over Fox from his father Rupert in a dramatic high-stakes succession drama that had pitted him against his siblings. For Lachlan, this is a crucial step in his push to help Fox catch up to competitors like Netflix and Amazon as he tries to reach customers that are abandoning broadcast, the medium that built the Fox empire.

9:32Emmett Lindner:Beyond Roku, Fox also recently acquired the streaming service Tubi and launched one of its own called Fox One. As one analyst told The Times, Fox, quote, needs to future-proof itself.

9:51Steve Eder:And finally, a few years ago, a researcher who was studying how much space people leave between each other when they're walking around noticed something strange. Not about what he'd set out to study, the personal space question, but about where everyone kept going. Across 40 experiments, most of his participants spontaneously veered to the left. He and his colleagues assumed there had to be an explanation, and they went down the rabbit hole.

10:18Emmett Lindner:Maybe it was the layout of the room. Or no, they tried bigger than that. Maybe it's something we learn to do as adults.

10:24Richard Pérez-Peña:Maybe people in different countries choose different directions. Now, after years of research and multiple experiments with hundreds of participants, they don't have an answer, just a bigger mystery, because they found that it's widespread. People across demographics, cultures, conditions seem to just have a striking innate tendency to go left, veering in a counterclockwise direction. In one experiment, for example, the researchers instructed participants to roam at will across a schoolyard while a drone flew overhead and recorded their movements. Within seconds, 80 % of people were going counterclockwise.

11:05Richard Pérez-Peña:One of the co-authors of the study told The Times, quote, in principle, there is no reason for the fact that people prefer rotating counterclockwise.

11:14Michael Rothfeld:And yet it's clear we do. Those are the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.

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