G.O.P. Defectors Break With Trump Over War, and SpaceX Set for Largest I.P.O. Ever

0:00Every business is asking the same question. How do we make AI work for us? No more waiting. With NetSuite by Oracle, you can put AI to work today. NetSuite is the number one AI cloud ERP, trusted by over 43 ,000 businesses. It's the unified suite that brings your financials, inventory, commerce, HR, and CRM into a single source of truth. That connected data is what makes your AI smarter, helping you make fast decisions. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get our free business guide, Demystifying AI, at netsuite.com slash NYT. From The New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford.

0:40Today's Thursday, June 4th. Here's what we're covering.

0:47We're going to start with three developments on the war with Iran, including a major vote in Congress to end the conflict. Why doesn't Congress assert its authority here? It's constitutional authority. The rising tensions between President Trump and the Israeli prime minister. You know, at some point, we've got to stop this. We've got to stop it. And how the war could tangle up the World Cup. Uncertainty and controversy has clouded the Iranian soccer team for months now. First, in the House of Representatives yesterday. On this vote, the yeas are 215 and the nays are 208. A handful of Republicans joined with Democrats to push through a measure to rein in Trump's campaign in Iran.

1:31It calls for Trump to withdraw U.S. forces unless he can get approval from Congress. Now, it's unlikely this measure or a similar one passed by the Senate recently will ultimately have an effect on the ground, since there's a chance Trump himself could eventually veto any attempt to limit his war powers. But Times congressional correspondent Robert Jemison, says yesterday's vote sent a clear message to the White House. Frustration over the war, rising gas prices, it all boiled over. The Republicans who voted for it and the Democrats who've been pushing for this for months now repeated that their voters, their constituents, were unhappy with the results of the war.

2:10While many agree that Iran should not ever have a nuclear weapon, the way that this war has been carried out, which was initially promised to last just a few weeks and now we're past the 90-day mark has frustrated even some Republicans who vote with him more than 90 % of the time. Next. Now, Axios reported that you had a phone call with Bibi Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, in which you were angry with him. You said, are you effing crazy? What are you effing doing? In an interview with the New York Post yesterday, Trump was asked about reports that he had a heated phone call with Benjamin Netanyahu.

2:46Is that true? Did you speak to him in those terms? I did. I wouldn't say angry. I was a little bit perturbed at his constantly fighting with Lebanon. Trump confirmed that it happened, saying that while the two had a broadly positive relationship, he has been frustrated by Israel's ongoing campaign against Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon. Those attacks have complicated talks to end the war in Iran. The phone call is the latest sign of tension between Trump and Netanyahu. While the war began with joint U.S.-Israeli attacks, the White House has now excluded Israel from the negotiations to end the conflict.

3:28And last update, the World Cup is kicking off next week with teams from 48 countries, including Iran. That will make it the first World Cup to feature a host country at war with one of the competing nations. The games are going to be held in Canada, Mexico, and the U.S., but there are now doubts about whether Iran's team will get American visas in time to play their first game in L.A. The president of Iran's Soccer Federation told the Times this week they were still waiting. Adding to the uncertainty, the team just made a last-minute change about where they'll be staying for the tournament. The plan was for Arizona to be their home base, but now the Iranian team will be based in Mexico instead.

4:12Mexico's president said that happened after FIFA stepped in and asked her for help, saying the U.S., quote, does not want the Iranian team staying overnight in the country.

4:27As soon as next week, Elon Musk's rocket company SpaceX is set to hit the stock market and go public in what everyone has already been saying will be one of the biggest IPOs ever. And now we know just how big. SpaceX set its initial share price yesterday, and it would value the company, which has essentially remade the space race, at a record-breaking$1.77 trillion. As part of the lead-up to the IPO, the company recently revealed some details about its finances. They showed SpaceX has actually been losing a lot of money,$5 billion last year,$4 billion this year so far. But for the most part, market analysts say that's not what investors are looking at with SpaceX.

5:13The analysts say this IPO is mostly about vibes. One executive at a mutual fund said many investors are less scared of SpaceX flopping than they are on missing out on a potential windfall. And a former executive at Bank of America said, quote, There's a lot of enthusiasm for the deal, in part because people believe that there is enthusiasm. The huge IPO could help make Musk, already the world's richest man, the first ever trillionaire. And SpaceX is expected to use the money it raises to fund some wildly ambitious projects, including Musk's goals of putting data centers into orbit and eventually sending humans to Mars.

6:02For the past few months, I've been reporting on the deep-sea mining industry that uses extraordinary technology to extract metal from an environment that is as alien to us as the moon. My colleague Harry Stevens is covering the controversial push to start collecting valuable minerals from the depths of the ocean, a place that no light reaches and scientists have barely explored. There are potentially billions of tons of metals like nickel and cobalt down there, which are crucial for batteries and other technology. The metals have accumulated on bits of rock or shell or even shark teeth sitting on the seabed, creating so-called nodules that are about the size of a fist.

6:48And Harry says at least one company has already been pioneering a process for gathering them. So the way this works is this massive collector vehicle, roughly the size of a city bus, is lowered from the side of a ship. And it goes down two miles or more, where it then moves along and sort of suctions up these nodules that are just resting on the seafloor. And then they are pumped back up to the surface through this miles-long industrial straw. The industry and its supporters are really excited about this technology. For one thing, they stand to make incredible profits. And they also point out that the alternative to seabed mining, which is land-based mining, has a pretty terrible track record of environmental abuses and labor abuses.

7:42Meanwhile, environmentalists are strongly against this industry. They're concerned that it's going to be tampering with a part of the ocean that we hardly know anything about, where there's all sorts of amazing otherworldly sea life that can be dependent on these nodules for their survival. And that when the vehicle moves along and releases all this sediment, that it could be killing animals and having effects that propagate through the food chain. Harry says right now the Trump administration is on the verge of greenlighting this kind of mining in international waters. If the U.S. issues those permits, it will be the first country in the world to do so, potentially setting off a kind of race to the bottom of the sea.

8:33And finally, if you are someone who feels nothing short of attacked by nature every year when allergy season begins, I'm here to tell you that we humans may deserve some of that blame. Plant pollen, of course, is the main culprit behind itchy eyes and runny noses. But a new study has shown that light pollution from streetlights, car headlights, illuminated billboards might be making things worse. The research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, compared big bright cities like New York and Philadelphia to darker places in the same region. It found that trees in the cities start producing pollen earlier and finish later than they do in rural areas with less light.

9:17One of the authors of the study said that all that extra city light has basically, quote, tricked plants into making decisions they wouldn't ordinarily make. In all, the research found that light pollution could be adding as many as 130 days to allergy season in brighter areas, including more days where the pollen count ranks as severe. One scientist not involved in the study said there are things cities could do to address this. They could be more strategic about the kinds of trees they plant, opting for less light-sensitive species. They could also work to just turn down the brightness on streetlights and billboards.

9:57Those are the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow with the latest and the Friday News Quiz.

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