Tsunami Reaches U.S., and Trump’s Former Lawyer Confirmed as Judge

0:00I'm Jonathan Knight, and I'm the general manager of New York Times Games. Our puzzles are human-made every day with the standards you'd expect from the New York Times. And this matters because when you choose to spend time with our games, it should be time well spent solving puzzles handcrafted for you. We think that's something worth investing in and something worth paying for. If you think so too, download New York Times games from your favorite app store or go to nytimes.com slash playgames.

0:33From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today is Wednesday, July 30th. Here's what we're covering.

0:45An 8.8 magnitude earthquake that could be one of the largest on record struck off the coast of Russia last night.

0:57It triggered a tsunami in the Pacific. And there were widespread warnings and evacuations from Japan to Alaska. It can move cars. It will throw fences around if it hits. It can dislodge trees. That's why you just can't be out there. For now, Hawaii, where the governor declared a state of emergency, appears to have avoided any major damage. And on the West Coast, from Washington to California, the impact is still unclear. The first waves hit just after 1 a.m., and authorities have closed beaches, docks, and harbors and ordered people to higher ground. Tsunamis can travel more than 500 miles per hour in deep water, crossing the ocean in less than a day.

1:38People close to the epicenter have little warning, but most places in the path of these waves had hours to prepare. Experts warn that despite what they look like in cartoons or movies, tsunamis are not tall, curling waves. You can't compare the height of them to a regular wave that you'd surf. Instead, they're very deep. And the National Weather Service warned, quote, a one-foot wave can have an incredible amount of energy. For live coverage of the earthquake and the tsunami, go to nytimes.com.

2:11Now, two updates from Washington. Nomination to Judiciary, Emil J. Beauvais III of Pennsylvania to be United States Circuit Judge for the Third Circuit. The Senate has narrowly confirmed Emil Bove, the president's former personal lawyer, to a position on a federal appeals court, just one rung below the Supreme Court. Bove, who's 44 years old, was appointed to the lifetime position despite a storm of criticism and whistleblower complaints. He's been working as a top official at the Justice Department since Trump took office. One former DOJ lawyer claimed Bove explicitly told staffers there that he was willing to ignore court orders in order to carry out President Trump's aggressive deportation agenda.

2:56Two other DOJ whistleblowers also signaled that they had concerns, including an allegation that Bove misled Congress about one of his most controversial moves, in which he ordered prosecutors to drop bribery charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Senate Republicans largely dismissed the complaints, painting them as a Democrat-led effort to smear a Trump nominee. And Beauvais himself has denied many of the allegations, saying he's been unfairly portrayed as the president's, quote, henchman. And at the Food and Drug Administration, the agency's top vaccine and gene therapy official, Vinay Prasad, has resigned after just a few months on the job.

3:38Prasad is an oncologist and epidemiologist who was initially celebrated by conservatives. During the pandemic, he slammed public health measures like social distancing. And in his brief stint at the FDA, he overruled the recommendations of the agency's scientists and limited the use of COVID vaccines. But he's now stepping down amid a right-wing pressure campaign after he cracked down on a pharmaceutical company that makes gene therapy drugs. Several patients died after taking them. His crackdown angered former Republican Senator Rick Santorum, who has ties to the company. He called up top officials at the White House to complain, and the conservative influencer Laura Loomer also jumped in, accusing Prasad of blocking the approval of new drugs and undermining the president's agenda.

4:24She started surfacing old social media posts from Prasad where he praised Bernie Sanders and called himself a political liberal. Prasad is just the latest administration figure that Loomer has targeted. Earlier this year, the director and deputy director of the National Security Agency were removed after she accused them of being disloyal to Trump. Just last week, the NSA's top lawyer was also removed amid criticism from Loomer.

4:56Today at 2 p.m., the Federal Reserve will announce what it's going to do with interest rates. And for its fifth straight meeting in a row, it's expected to just hold, to keep rates where they are, around four and a quarter to four and a half percent, to try and keep the economy steady. That decision's expected to further enrage President Trump, who's berated the Fed and its chair, Jerome Powell, for not lowering borrowing costs. Powell, however, has said explicitly that Trump's own policies are what's driving the Fed's decisions. The president's tariffs, which have upended global trade agreements and sent corporations scrambling, have introduced a ton of uncertainty into the economic outlook.

5:37Powell said that if not for Trump's tariffs, which the president's expected to announce more of this Friday, the Fed would have cut interest rates by now.

5:52In New York, investigators are still piecing together details about the gunman who opened fire in a Manhattan skyscraper on Monday, killing four people and then himself. But one thing that immediately stood out is that his death followed a familiar grisly pattern in the world of football. The gunman, who was a running back in high school, shot himself in the chest and left a note pleading with authorities to, quote, study my brain. A number of high-profile NFL players have done the same thing, hoping to preserve their brains so they could be tested for CTE, a degenerative brain disease. CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, has been linked to repeated blows to the head, like what many football players experience, and it can only be diagnosed during an autopsy.

6:37Experts say the majority of people with CTE don't become violent, but it can often lead to changes in personality and erratic and aggressive behavior. It could take weeks for medical examiners to determine if the gunman had CTE, but police say that at least twice in the past few years he had been involuntarily held during mental health crises. Authorities believe the gunman targeted the Park Avenue skyscraper because the NFL had offices there. They say the shooter's note accused the league of covering up the dangers of football in order to preserve its profits. For years, the NFL downplayed research linking CTE to football, even as dozens of former players were diagnosed after their deaths and lawsuits piled up.

7:20The league has since reached a settlement, granting up to$4 million to the families of each player that had the disease.

7:31And finally, a lot of us out there use our cell phone cameras for selfies, for scanning QR codes, for taking copious pictures of our kids or our cats. But more and more people are using them for science. The app iNaturalist, where millions of users share photos or audio recordings of plants and animals they observe, is becoming a critical source of scientific data. A new study shows that observations shared on the app, which first launched in 2008, have now been incorporated into more than 5 ,000 peer-reviewed papers. For example, a nature photographer in the mountains of northern China snapped a photo of a kind of weird fly that looked like it was dressed up as a bumblebee.

8:12An entomologist later published a paper announcing it was a new species, the mountain ghost stiletto fly. Researchers have also used people's uploaded observations to track the spread of invasive shrubs in New York, analyze color variations in butterflies, and determined that a species of wildcat in Latin America, the jaguarundi, was changing its territory. Experts say the data is not a substitute for observations from professionally trained field biologists, but the sheer volume of information allows them to study things globally in a way that may not be possible otherwise. Machine learning is also making it more feasible for scientists to then sift through all of that data.

8:53So the next time you're out on a hike with your friends and they tell you, come on, stop taking that many pictures of a funny-looking lizard. It's getting dark. You can remind them. You're doing science. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, inside the Times investigation of the organ donation system and how it's putting some patients at risk. That's up next if you're listening in our New York Times app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.