--:-- Tracy Mumford: From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Friday, September 19th. Here's what we're covering. Take a look.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: All they do is they're licensed. They're not allowed to do that. They're an arm of the Democrat Party. President Trump has ratcheted up his efforts to silence his critics, telling reporters last night on Air Force One, that federal regulators should consider revoking the licenses of broadcasters that air negative coverage of him. They give me wholly bad publicity or press. I mean, if they're getting a license, I would think maybe their license should be taken away. It would be up to Brendan Carr.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Trump's remarks came as Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, and others in the administration, have been seizing on the killing of Charlie Kirk to target liberal groups and media outlets, claiming they've spread dangerous rhetoric.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Earlier this week, under pressure from Carr, some ABC affiliates dropped Jimmy Kimmel's late-night show over his comments about the MAGA movement and the suspect in Kirk's assassination. ABC then announced it was pausing Kimmel's program indefinitely.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: You suggested this could be the start. Can you tell me more?
--:-- Guest: Yeah, I don't think this is the last shoe to drop. This is a massive shift that's taking place in the media ecosystem, And I think the consequences are going to continue to flow.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Moving forward, Carr has said that he's ready to invoke a rarely used FCC standard known as public interest to potentially strip licenses from networks which, in the administration's view, have a liberal bias that does not serve the public. If the FCC does do that, it would almost certainly face First Amendment challenges.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The escalating effort by Trump and his team to go after critics is a stark 180 from his campaign promises to wipe out so-called cancel culture. Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents. In his inaugural address, Trump said he would, quote, stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.
--:-- Stephen Colbert: Welcome one and all to The Late Show. I'm your host, Stephen Colbert. But tonight, we are all Jimmy Kimmel. Last night, the other big names in late night weighed in for the first time since Kimmel's suspension and accused ABC of bowing to government pressure.
--:-- Stephen Colbert: We have another fun, hilarious administration-compliant show. Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and David Letterman all said they see the country sliding towards autocracy. Echoing widespread warnings from Democratic lawmakers and even some on the right.
--:-- Stephen Colbert: And you can't go around firing somebody because you're fearful or trying to suck up to an authoritarian criminal administration in the Oval Office. That's just not how this works.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: For the moment, Kimmel's show is only paused, not canceled. And The Times has learned that network executives are trying to find a path for him to return to the air.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention yesterday, a meeting of an advisory panel on vaccines devolved into confusion. All the former panel experts were fired this summer by Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr who replaced them with a group that largely shares his skeptical stance on vaccines
--:-- Tracy Mumford: A handful of them were only announced this week and in a sign of how hastily everything's been put together, many of them needed explanations on how the meetings go and the design of scientific studies.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: A key issue up for discussion was the hepatitis B vaccine, which Kennedy has claimed incorrectly was not tested properly. Secretary Kennedy and his allies have been saying that the hepatitis B vaccine is unsafe, but the experts I've been talking to say that that's not really the case and there's no data to indicate that it's unsafe.
--:-- Apoorva Mondavilli: Right now, the shot is given at birth to make sure that every single child is protected from hepatitis B. And that's because it's not always possible to tell whether the mother is infected already.
--:-- Apoorva Mondavilli: You know, you can get a false negative test result. It may be that the mother has not been seeking prenatal care and there just isn't enough time at that point to test her while she's giving birth.
--:-- Apoorva Mondavilli: So there are a lot of reasons that you want to vaccinate the child at birth, according to the experts I've talked to.
--:-- Apoorva Mondavilli: Aporva says the hepatitis B shot is credited with nearly eliminating the transmission of the disease from mother to baby in the U.S., slashing it from 20,000 cases a year in the early 90s to 20.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: At the CDC, the vaccine panel discussed the topic for hours yesterday, and Apoorva says they seem inclined to restrict who gets it, limiting it to just newborns whose mothers are known to be infected with hepatitis B or waiting until babies are a month old.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Public health experts say that will likely lead to new cases in infants. The panel will vote on it today. They already voted against vaccinating children under four with a combination shot that protects against measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: That's unlikely to have widespread consequences, though, because it's more common for kids to get those vaccines separately, and those recommendations didn't change.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In Silicon Valley, the Times has been looking into what Elon Musk has been doing since he's stepped back from his role in the federal government.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And my colleagues have found that in the past few months, Musk has gone all in on his artificial intelligence startup XAI, working in frenzied all-day spurts at the company's offices in Palo Alto, sometimes even sleeping there.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: He's leading an aggressive push to try and get XAI to catch up with its competitors. The company says its chatbot, Grok, has about 64 million monthly users, compared to the roughly 700 million people who use ChatGPT every week.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: But according to people the Times talked with who are familiar with the company's work recently, things have been a little chaotic, with a flurry of staff turnover and some embarrassing public stumbles.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: For example, after Musk criticized the chatbot for being too woke, an engineer scrambled to change the code, which caused Grok to start randomly bringing up claims about genocide in South Africa.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The company fixed that, but later Musk installed new deputies who pushed to make Grok's responses edgier, hoping that would make its answers go viral. That also ended in a PR crisis after Grok started spewing anti-Semitic remarks and referring to itself as Mecca Hitler.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In a rare company meeting this week Musk told his employees that he wants them to keep pushing forward on the chatbot technology while also previewing plans to build a Microsoft competitor he calling macro hard Musk intense focus on XAI has raised questions about how much time he spending on his other companies, including Tesla, where investors have been concerned that his lack of focus is hurting the company.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: This week, he tried to reassure anyone nervous about that, writing on X, quote, Daddy is very much home.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Three homesick nuns are on the run in Austria tonight. Nuns on the run, making a confession. In Austria, three nuns, all in their 80s, have become the story to watch. Sister Bernadette, Sister Rita, and Sister Regina have become heroines.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: It's been billed as a great escape and a daring plot. It starts at an abbey, tucked in the Alps in a castle from the Middle Ages. The three women are the last surviving members of the order there.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: They expected to take their last breaths in the abbey and have their names carved on the wall like all the sisters before them. But more than a year ago, they were moved out after the convent got a new manager.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: He says the old building was no longer safe and that the nuns went willingly. The nuns do not agree. They landed at a retirement home in a nearby town, and they were miserable.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The rooms were small, they missed their garden, and for the first time since they took their vows 60-plus years ago, they were asked to eat regularly with men. Their distress was clear, people noticed, including a group of former students the nuns used to teach at the abbey.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: They came together to hatch a plan to free the nuns. This month, with the help of a locksmith, the sisters got back into the abbey.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: There was some confusion with the police, the question of whether or not they broke in, and the fact that the retirement home reported them missing. But the nuns are still there, and their supporters have been documenting their homecoming online as they try to make the Abbey livable again.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: They've got the power back on, they're cleaning things up, and people are bringing food by. There's even an Instagram account with updates on all of this with tens of thousands of followers.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The nuns, for their part, told The Times that they're enjoying all the attention, but that they mostly just want to get back to normal life in their old home.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Those are the headlines. But if you want to play the Friday News Quiz, stick around. It's just after these credits.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: This show is made by Will Jarvis, Jessica Metzger, Jan Stewart, and me, Tracy Mumford. Original theme by Dan Powell. Special thanks to Isabella Anderson, Larissa Anderson, Jake Lucas, Zoe Murphy, Katie O'Brien, and Paula Schumann.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Now, time for the quiz. Every week, we ask you a few questions about stories The Times has been covering. Can you answer them all?
--:-- Tracy Mumford: First up, the Trump administration has announced that it's making the U.S. citizenship test harder, part of the president's efforts to restrict immigration.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The test is one of the final hurdles for the hundreds of thousands of people who become American citizens every year. The updated version will contain more complex questions and more of them.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: We're gonna ask you a few of the questions from the current online study guide, speed round style. Let's see how you do. Here we go.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: How many senators does each state have? Two.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: How long is a term for a senator? Six years.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: How many amendments does the Constitution have? Twenty-seven.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The words life liberty and the pursuit of happiness are from what founding document Declaration of Independence
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And what territory did the U.S. buy from France in 1803? That is the Louisiana Territory.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: So, nice, or I guess, depending on how you did there. At the moment, the vast majority of applicants who take the test do make it through. There's a pass rate of 91%.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Okay, next question. This week, one of the co-founders of an iconic American brand resigned, saying he was being silenced by the brand's parent company.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: He's walking away now after almost 50 years, even though his name is on the packaging. Who am I talking about?
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Hint, it's not Ben. The half-baked chunky monkey cherry garcia duo have been known for their social activism ever since the company was founded in the 70s and they've spoken out about everything from criminal justice reform to support for Palestinians.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Ben, why are you getting arrested? Congress kills poor kids in Gaza by buying bombs.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Ben was even handcuffed earlier this year for protesting at a Senate hearing. He and Jerry have had growing tension with the corporate giant Unilever since it bought the ice cream brand more than two decades ago.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Recently, they accused the company of trying to prevent Ben and Jerry's from calling for a ceasefire in the war in Gaza, which Unilever denies.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And the last question. Recently, a scandal with accusations of cheating rocked an annual sporting event. I'm using sporting loosely here. No offense to the competitors.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: It is pretty niche. We're going to play you some tips and tricks from experts in this obscure field. See if you can guess what it is.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Weather's beautiful today. There's not much wind. So let's see what we can do. Got a really good spot to hold on right here.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: You can put a lot of spit on it. I'm going to stand sideways and sling it down low so my release is low and spinning.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The rough, bumpy side, that'll be facing up. What is this competition?
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The answer? Each gentleman choose one stone. Rock skimming. One stone each. Very simple. Furthest wins.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: This year, hundreds of contestants gathered for the annual World Stone Skimming Championships. But several people were disqualified after allegedly doctoring their rocks to make them rounder.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The rules say only stones that were naturally formed can be used, and you have to find them yourself on the Scottish island where the competition takes place.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: One quick clarification that I just had to learn. Do not call this event rock skipping. That is an entirely different sport, where you go for the most possible skips across the water.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Rock skimming is all about distance, seeing how far you can get the rock to go. A frequent winner of the competition told The Times, quote, It's a really useless life skill, but I seem to have it.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: That's it for the news quiz. Our email, as always, is theheadlines at nytimes.com if you want to send us your score. Or challenge a friend, share the quiz with them, see how they do.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: I'm Tracy Mumford. The headlines will be back on Monday.
