Wildfire Smoke Turns Skies Orange Across the U.S., and Democrats Make a Big Shift on Israel

0:00Gun injuries are the leading cause of death for children and teens in the United States. Some people avoid talking about gun violence because they don't think they can make a difference. But every conversation matters. When it comes to gun violence, we agree on more than we think. And having productive conversations about gun violence can help protect children and teens. Learn how to have the conversation at AgreedToAgree.org. Brought to you by the Ad Council.

0:29From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Thursday, July 16th. Here's what we're covering.

0:42Holy macaroni. It is smoky and you can feel the smoke as you're breathing it in. Across the upper Midwest and the Great Lakes. It is thick. It really smells like smoke here. It was way more yellow this morning. This is spooky. Into New England and down to New York. This is some of that thick haze now settling in across the area. Dense smoke from hundreds of wildfires in Canada has been smothering cities this week, turning skies orange and hazy. Several wildfires are also burning in Minnesota. For those of you at home today, I would probably recommend keeping the windows shut. As it moves, the smoke has been dropping the air quality in some places to dangerous levels.

1:24Yesterday, Toronto's Air Quality Index, or AQI, was among the worst in the world. and the smoke's continuing to spread. New York's AQI is likely to reach unhealthy levels today and the smoke could dip as far down as Maryland. Health officials have warned that people with conditions that make them sensitive to polluted air, like asthma or other respiratory concerns, should take caution. Smoke is spreading so widely this week because the same heat dome that's led to brutally high temperatures in the Midwest and Northeast is keeping the smoke close to the ground. One meteorologist told The Times, quote, we're really being fumigated.

2:06I'm just asking a really simple question. Who won the 2020 election? As I said to you, we went through our processes and Joe Biden became the president of the United States. And that's not an answer to the question of who... In a contentious hearing in the Senate yesterday, lawmakers grilled Jay Clayton, President Trump's pick to be the director of national intelligence. It's a simple question, Mr. Clayton. Who won the 2020 presidential election? I've answered it. Several Democrats pushed him repeatedly on the question of the 2020 election. Clayton's answer, saying simply that President Biden was certified, has become the standard response for Trump administration nominees, who won't say outright that Biden won.

2:52You refuse to answer a basic question about who won a presidential election, but you ask to lead America's intelligence community? Democrats claimed Clayton's response was a sign that he wouldn't be willing to disagree with or challenge the president in high-pressure situations involving national intelligence. The 2020 election is top of mind for Democrats because tonight, Trump is giving a primetime speech which he said will be about election security and voting machines. and many lawmakers expect him to revive his long-standing false and debunked claims about voter fraud. In the past few months, the president has ratcheted up those claims, and under Trump, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has increased its focus on election issues, as the president uses multiple federal agencies to try and tip the midterms in Republicans' favor.

3:51Meanwhile, over in the House yesterday... Prime Minister Netanyahu has taken Israel down an ugly path. The tragedy of October 7th has become a justification for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Nearly half of Democrats voted to cut off U.S. aid to Israel, reflecting a dramatic shift in the party. If there are no consequences, why in the world would Benjamin Netanyahu change what he's doing? If we hope to change Israel's behavior, we must use our leverage. Representative Joaquin Castro of Texas was one of 103 Democrats who supported the measure, which proposed axing$3.3 billion in military and humanitarian funding.

4:34And while the bill ultimately failed, getting almost no Republican support, the vote was a sign of how decades of unequivocal backing of Israel by the Democratic Party is crumbling, largely because of the country's aggressive military campaign in Gaza. For weeks leading up to yesterday's vote, many Democrats in Congress had struggled with what they would do, as some in the party expressed deep concern about the turn away from Israel. In an interview with the Times, Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey called it a shockingly seismic shift against, quote, one of our closest Democratic allies.

5:10But the House vote reflects sweeping disapproval of Israel among lawmakers' constituents. A recent Times-Stanapole found that 74 % of Democrats now oppose giving Israel more economic and military support.

5:31I'm a Gen Z, a blue-collar worker, and let me tell you why I love working in the church. Across the U.S. This is where our wire has been prepped and cleaned, and I was currently under testing. A growing number of young Americans are heading to trade school. I was doing an outlet on the bottom, a GFCI, but I think the wires were switched, so I just had to fix that. From 2020 to 2025, the number of students enrolled in public two-year trade school programs grew by almost 20 percent, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. Apprenticeships are going up, too. In interviews with The Times, many young people working in the trades said they'd grown up on a kind of college autopilot, being told to go to college by guidance counselors or well-meaning family members.

6:14But that clashed with what they were seeing firsthand, watching as older siblings or friends had trouble getting jobs after graduating with four-year degrees, and they worried about going into debt with what can seem like the skyrocketing costs of college. Trade schools can often be significantly cheaper and shorter. While data shows that college degrees are still one of the best ways to increase potential earnings over your lifetime, Several young people said they felt like trade school might help them dodge all the disruption that's coming with artificial intelligence because their jobs are so physical.

6:48One 18-year-old wind turbine technician in Houston who makes about$90 ,000 a year after doing a seven-month training program told the Times a lot of people are scared their jobs are going to get taken away by a robot. And for now, he's not.

7:08And finally. In recent years, I started to notice that every store that I walked into had a big pile of strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, whether it was January or September, any time of the year. So I started to look into really how that was possible, and the answers just kept leading me back to this one company, Driscoll's. My colleague Julia Moskin covers food for the Times. She's been digging into exactly how berries have gone from being a fragile seasonal crop to a year-round refrigerator staple. She says that transformation can actually be traced back to the fact that fruit juggernaut Driscoll's set out an ambitious goal back in 1989.

7:51It decided it would try to make four types of berries, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries, available in every season in every part of the world. It seemed preposterous at the time, but the company spent decades investing in research and technology to make it happen. What has also really changed is that those berries are not only available, but that they have made them better. And as anyone who has ever bought a carton of raspberries knows, they can be very disappointing and they can look really beautiful, but quite often they're sour, they're dry, they're stiff. And Driscoll's developed the most coordinated private effort to hybridize berries that are sweeter, juicier, redder, but also working toward making them heartier, higher yield, easier to pick.

8:41The raspberry bushes that they grow have fewer thorns, things like that. Julia says Driscoll's efforts have paid off in a huge, huge way. Since 2000, global berry production has tripled. And according to one market research firm, Driscoll's is now the second most profitable company in U.S. grocery stores, just behind Coca-Cola. Along the way, the company has come under fire for pesticide use, labor practices, water consumption. And environmental activists have criticized the carbon footprint that comes with flying berries around the world to get them on store shelves. But Driscoll's has helped fuel such a massive global demand for berries that supply simply cannot keep up.

9:25And around the world, some farmers who never used to plant berries are now in some cases tearing up their existing crops to go all in on the berry boom.

9:38Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, Times immigration reporter Hamad Ali Aziz explains how the Trump administration's deportation efforts have ramped up dramatically this summer. 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 with the latest and the Friday News Quiz.