--:-- Host: Tracy Mumford: From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today is Wednesday, July 30th. Here's what we're covering.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: An 8.8 magnitude earthquake that could be one of the largest on record struck off the coast of Russia last night. It triggered a tsunami in the Pacific. And there were widespread warnings and evacuations from Japan to Alaska.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: That means 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The first waves hit just after 1 a.m., and authorities have closed beaches, docks, and harbors and ordered people to higher ground.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Tsunamis can travel more than 500 miles per hour in deep water, crossing the ocean in less than a day. People close to the epicenter have little warning, but most places in the path of these waves had hours to prepare.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And the National Weather Service warned, quote, a one-foot wave can have an incredible amount of energy.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: For live coverage of the earthquake and the tsunami, go to nytimes.com.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Now, two updates from Washington.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Nomination to Judiciary, Emil J. Beauvais III of Pennsylvania to be United States Circuit Judge for the Third Circuit.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Bove, who's 44 years old, was appointed to the lifetime position despite a storm of criticism and whistleblower complaints.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Two other DOJ whistleblowers also signaled that they had concerns, including an allegation that Beauvais 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Senate Republicans largely dismissed the complaints, painting them as a Democrat-led effort to smear a Trump nominee.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And Beauvais himself has denied many of the allegations, saying he's been unfairly portrayed as the president's, quote, henchman.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Prasad is an oncologist and epidemiologist who was initially celebrated by conservatives. During the pandemic, he slammed public health measures like social distancing.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And in his brief stint at the FDA, he overruled the recommendations of the agency's scientists and limited the use of COVID vaccines.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Several patients died after taking them. His crackdown angered former Republican Senator Rick Santorum, who has ties to the company.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: She started surfacing old social media posts from Prasad where he praised Bernie Sanders and called himself a political liberal.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And just last week, the NSA's top lawyer was also removed amid criticism from Loomer.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Today at 2 p.m., the Federal Reserve will announce what it's going to do with interest rates.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And for its fifth straight meeting in a row, it's expected to just hold to keep rates where they are, around 4.25 to 4.5 percent, to try and keep the economy steady.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: That decision's expected to further enrage President Trump, who's berated the Fed and its chair, Jerome Powell, for not lowering borrowing costs.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Powell, however, has said explicitly that Trump's own policies are what's driving the Fed's decisions.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The president's tariffs, which have upended global trade agreements and sent corporations scrambling, have introduced a ton of uncertainty into the economic outlook.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Powell 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: But one thing that immediately stood out is that his death followed a familiar grisly pattern in the world of football.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Experts 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Authorities believe the gunman targeted the Park Avenue skyscraper because the NFL had offices there.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: They say the shooter's note accused the league of covering up the dangers of football in order to preserve its profits.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The league has since reached a settlement, granting up to $4 million to the families of each player that had the disease.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: But more and more people are using them for science.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: An entomologist later published a paper announcing it was a new species, the mountain ghost stiletto fly.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Machine learning is also making it more feasible for scientists to then sift through all of that data.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: So, 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.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Those are the headlines.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Today on The Daily, inside the Times investigation of the organ donation system and how it's putting some patients at risk.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: That's up next if you're listening in our New York Times app or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.
