What to Watch at the NATO Summit, and Platner’s Allies Rescind Endorsements

0:00Hey, it's Lauren Dragon from Wirecutter, the product recommendation service from the New York Times. And I test headphones. We basically make our own fake sweat and spray it over and over on these headphones to see what happens to them over time. We're going to put on some noise-canceling headphones and see how well they actually block out the sound. I have 3 ,136 entries in my database. Kids, workout, what version of Bluetooth? At Wirecutter, we do the work so you don't have to. For independent product reviews and recommendations for the real world, come visit us at nytimes.com slash Wirecutter.

0:32From the New York Times, it's the headline. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Tuesday, July 7th. Here's what we're covering.

0:43Today, the NATO summit kicks off in Turkey. Leaders from across Europe will be there, and President Trump is set to participate too. The meeting comes at a tense moment for the alliance. For more than 70 years, the countries have committed to coming to each other's defense. But that relationship is now under extraordinary pressure. You know, NATO is in a time right now where the allies are very concerned about the future. There are concerns about Russia sort of attacking elsewhere outside of Ukraine, concern that Donald Trump is going to follow through on his threats to either pull the United States out of the alliance or at least reduce American commitments to the alliance.

1:22And so it's led to a lot of sort of soul-searching inside of NATO. My colleague Ben Hubbard is covering the annual summit. He says one dynamic that's come out of this tense moment is that many NATO members have now developed a new appreciation for the country of Turkey, which is hosting the meeting. For years, the country was seen by some as causing rifts in NATO. For example, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has stayed close with Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite the invasion of Ukraine. And European and American officials have also worried about some of Erdogan's more strongman tendencies.

1:57But Ben says that many NATO countries are realizing now they may need what Turkey has to offer. Turkey, you know, it has relations all across the West, all across the East. It has diplomatic relations with Iran. It talks to Hamas. It has, you know, broad relations all the way across Africa. And so even though a few years ago everybody was complaining about Erdogan remaining friends with Putin, there's sort of been a new realization that this is actually quite valuable. There's been a bit more of an acceptance of Turkey's diplomatic role. Turkey also has the second largest military in the alliance after the United States.

2:33So amid this concern that the U.S. is going to pull back from NATO, Turkey looks very valuable and the size of its military is very valuable for any kind of reconfiguration of NATO. The flip side of this is that domestically, Turkey is also becoming more authoritarian. This used to be something that allies were very concerned about and would criticize publicly, and that is not happening now. Officials from NATO countries that I spoke with all basically said, yes, we know what's going on. Yes, we see the direction that this government is going. But at this moment, we're worried about Ukraine. We're worried about the security of Europe.

3:10We're worried about the United States leaving us high and dry. And so we just can't risk jeopardizing our relationship with Turkey by bringing up its domestic governance issues. For live updates on the NATO summit, go to the Times app or nytimes.com.

3:37So let me just be, and I apologize, let me be as direct as I can. Did Graham Planner rape you? By definition, yes. Absolutely. In Maine, support for the Democratic nominee for Senate, Graham Plattner, is evaporating after a woman accused him of rape. In an interview with The Times earlier this year, the woman, who dated Plattner casually about five years ago, said she'd had an unsettling experience with him where he was, quote, reckless. Now, in interviews with CNN and Politico, she's given new details about what she says was a non-consensual sexual encounter, and her allegations have shaken the race.

4:22The leadership of Maine's Democratic Party has urged Plattner to end his campaign, and some of his most prominent supporters, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, have also urged him to drop out. Regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful of the political reality it will inflict, We are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward for the state that I love. In a video statement released yesterday, Plattner said that, quote, any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically false. But it was not immediately clear whether he intends to continue his campaign in Maine, a race that both parties see as key in the battle for control of the Senate.

5:03Also, in another update on Congress, Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has now been hospitalized for more than three weeks, with almost no explanation from his staff. According to dispatcher calls, on the morning McConnell was hospitalized, emergency responders performed CPR on an individual undergoing cardiac arrest at McConnell's address. Staff for the longtime senator and former majority leader have not commented on those recordings. In a statement released last week, they said McConnell continues to improve and that he's, quote, working closely on Senate matters. The hospitalization is the latest in a series of health issues for McConnell, who is 84 years old and had recently been using a wheelchair to travel from his office to the Capitol.

5:49He's set to retire from the Senate at the end of his term in early January.

6:02President Trump has been clear on this from day one. The Second Amendment is not negotiable. It is part of the foundation of this great country. In Washington, the Times has been covering a sweeping effort by the Trump administration to scrap gun regulations and roll back rules that were put in place after a series of deadly shootings during the Biden administration. We're repealing rules that went beyond what the law allows. We are cutting unnecessary red tape and we are replacing confusion with clear, straightforward language. In announcing the new effort earlier this year, officials said they're targeting more than 30 firearms regulations.

6:39That includes abandoning a crackdown on illegal gun sales, restoring gun rights to some people with mental illness, and loosening oversight of some accessories known as gun braces that have been used in mass shootings. Beyond that, the administration has already done away with other major policies, including a zero-tolerance approach toward gun dealers who repeatedly broke the law. And it's not stopping at the federal level. It's suing over state and local gun regulations to try and overturn those, too. The White House has argued that the changes reflect Trump's commitment to Second Amendment rights.

7:15But critics, including some Justice Department veterans, say that the changes mirror the demands of the gun industry and that public safety is being jeopardized. One former federal official who now advises the gun control group Every Town for Gun Safety told The Times, quote, these guns are going to start to percolate back out into the community over the next couple of years, adding, I sadly expect that we will see an increase in violent crime.

7:51In Estonia, officials spent about 15 years desperately fighting a fentanyl crisis. The drug tore through the country like a plague. It actually hit there before it really hit the U.S. At one point, overdoses in the tiny Baltic nation rose to the highest levels in all of Europe. To fight it, Estonia passed new laws, tracked down illegal labs, and expanded help for addicts. And it seemed to work. By 2018, fentanyl deaths there had plummeted more than 70%. But it turned out it was only the start. New synthetic drugs started circulating on Estonian streets, many of them much deadlier. They've sent mortality rates skyrocketing and proven to be even more addictive and harder to treat.

8:36Plus, more and more varieties keep popping up, some 40 times stronger than fentanyl. Estonia has essentially become a prime example of what the modern drug war looks like. Fringe chemists can churn out exceedingly powerful new substances faster than the authorities or public health organizations can keep up. One prosecutor in Estonia told the Times he almost missed the simpler days of the past, saying, quote, We wish we still had a fentanyl problem.

9:11And finally. So most museums around the world have like a cardinal rule, which is you can't touch the items on display. Often you can't even go near them. They're always kept behind glass. But the V &A East Storehouse is trying to do something completely different. It's trying to give visitors radical access. Alex Marshall covers culture for the Times, and he's been spending time at a new London museum that's letting visitors order up items from its vast collection and book an appointment to see and even touch them, with gloves and a museum chaperone, of course. The V &A East storehouse holds hundreds of thousands of pieces when they're not on display at London's famous Victoria and Albert Museum.

9:53And now visitors can request a date with a vintage designer dress, a rare print, or even one of David Bowie's guitars. I went recently and spent a whole day there to talk to people who had ordered objects to find out just why they had selected certain items. I met a woman called Amanda who turned out to be an amateur novelist. And she was writing her first book and she'd ordered all these old clothes so she could write about her protagonists better. But then one of the storehouse employees brought out this hat she'd ordered that had a big ostrich feather sticking out of the top. And they warned her not to touch the feather because it had been treated with arsenic to preserve it.

10:37And suddenly a man's face lit up and she shouted out loud, My God, I've got a new murder weapon! Because she could suddenly visualise a way that in the late 1800s, someone might have been able to have committed a crime and gone undetected. Alex says that the V &A's effort to open up its archives has been so successful that other museums, including MoMA and the Getty, have reached out to see how they could try and do something similar, too. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, why the people behind The Onion are now turning the infamous conspiracy site Infowars into a parody of itself. You can listen to that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts.

11:22I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.