8.12.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the reading of The New York Times for Tuesday,
August twelfth, twenty twenty five. As a reminder, RADIOI is
a reading service intended for people who are blind to
have other disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material.
The New York Times is donated to RADIOI by the
Lexington Herald Leader. Your reader for today is Dawn Flickinger.
We'll start today's reading with the Merriam Webster Word of

(00:22):
the Day ramshackle R A M S H A C
K L E ramshackle. It's an adjective. Ramshackle describes things
that are in very bad condition and need to be repaired,
or that are carelessly or loosely constructed. Toward the back

(00:44):
of the property stood a ramshackle old shed. The book
had a ramshackle plot that was confusing and unbelievable. Ramshackle
has nothing to do with rams, nor the act of
being rammed nor shackles. The word is an alteration of ransackled,
an obsolete form of the verb ransack, meaning to search

(01:06):
through or plunder. Ransack comes from Old Norse ransaca, which
combines ran house and socca, a relation of the Old
English word seekin to seek a home that has been ransacked,
has had its contents thrown into disarray, and that image
may be what inspired people to start using ramshackle in

(01:28):
the first half of the nineteenth century to describe something
that is poorly constructed or in a state of near collapse.
Ramshackle and modern use can also be figurative, as in
a ramshackle excuse for the error. Trump takes control of
DC police, citing bloodthirsty criminals, but crime is down. The

(01:51):
president has railed against crime in urban, largely liberal cities
for decades, but Monday's announcement was an extraordinary exertion of
federal power of over an American city by Katy Rogers.
President Trump on Monday took federal control of the police
force in the nation's capital for thirty days and mobilized
eight hundred National Guard troops to fight crime in a

(02:13):
city that he claimed was overrun with bloodthirsty criminals, even
though crime numbers in Washington are falling. During a seventy
eight minute news conference during which he was flanked by
several members of his cabinet, mister Trump took the lectern
in the White House briefing room and said he also
intended to clear out the capital's homeless population, without saying

(02:34):
how officials would do it or detailing where those people
would go. Armed with papers that showed crime statistics, mister
Trump decried murders in Washington compared with other global cities,
but ignored the fact that violent crime has fallen recently
in the nation's capital. While the violent crime rate surged
in twenty twenty three, it fell thirty five percent from

(02:56):
that year to twenty twenty four, according to the city's
metrop Politan Police Department. Instead, mister Trump painted Washington as
an urban hellscape, repurposing some of the incendiary language he
has used to describe conditions at the southern border. Mister
Trump has railed against crime in urban, largely liberal cities

(03:16):
for decades, but his announcement on Monday was an extraordinary
exertion of federal power over an American city. Warning of
caravans of mass youth rampaging the city streets and relaying
stories of children caught in shootings, mister Trump blamed Democrats
for allowing the crime. Our capital city has been overtaken

(03:37):
by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, Roving mobs of wild
youth drugged out maniacs and homeless people, mister Trump said,
and We're not going to let it happen any more.
Local officials immediately criticized the president's actions, and pockets of
protesters sprang up around the city. Shortly after mister Trump
declared a public safety emergency in Washington. Muriel Bowser, the

(04:01):
mayor of Washington, set in a news conference on Monday
afternoon that mister Trump's actions were unsettling and unprecedented, but
not surprising. I can't say that, given some of the
rhetoric of the past, that we are totally surprised, Miss
Bowser said, before adding that the police chief, Pamela Smith,
would remain in her position. Miss Bowser acknowledged that the

(04:23):
law gave mister Trump the authority to take over the
department temporarily, but she disputed the idea that her administration
had done little to curb violent crime in Washington. There's
nobody here, and certainly nobody who works for me, who
wants to tolerate any level of crime. Miss Bowser, a Democrat,
We work every day to stop crime. There are practical

(04:45):
questions about how mister Trump's plans could be implemented. The
Trump administration is relying on a provision of the d C.
Home Rule Act, a law passed by Congress in nineteen
seventy three establishing local control of Washington. The law gives
the president the power to temporarily take over the Metropolitan
Police Department. A White House official said the takeover would

(05:07):
last thirty days, a time limit outlined in the law.
Federal officials were still working out many of the operational
details of the President's plan on Monday afternoon, even though
small groups of agents had been conducting limited patrols over
the weekend. The effort envisions about five hundred federal law
enforcement officers drawn from a host of agencies that operate

(05:29):
in Washington, to be used for some version of patrol
or support roles of the local police. According to two
officials who spoke on the condition of animinity to describe
the still developing plan, the figure includes roughly one hundred
and twenty FBI agents and about fifty Deputy u S Marshals,
as well as agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration and

(05:51):
the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, among other agencies.
Some of those agents will be on foot or car
patrol duty, while others may be assigned to be visible
in high crime or high traffic areas. According to the officials,
one complicating factor of using federal agents for essentially street

(06:12):
based police work is that those agents do not have
the same authority as police officers to arrest people for
minor criminal offenses. So the current view among Trump administration
officials is that if federal agents see someone commit such
a crime, they can stop and detain them until a
local police officer arrives and makes an arrest. One of

(06:33):
those details were available during mister Trump's from a briefing
room appearance, during which he waxed on about his real
estate experience, the oceanfront property in Ukraine, and his coming
trip to Russia. He is actually going to Alaska to
meet with Vladimir V Putin, Russia's president. He did not

(06:54):
say where city police officers, federal police officers, and National
Guard members would be stationed throughout the city. Mister Trump
said Attorney General Pam Bondi would oversee the broad effort.
He said that Gadias's S. Seralta, who was sworn in
as the director of the U. S. Marshal Service, this month,
would oversee the Police Department, alongside Terry Cole, who was

(07:18):
sworn in as the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration
less than a month ago. I hope I don't have
to fire him in two weeks because he's too soft,
mister Trump said, after calling mister Serralta up to the
briefing room lectern to shake his hand. If you are soft, weak, empathetic,
like so many people, I will fire you so fast.

(07:39):
Mister Trump's remarks seemed largely aimed at rewriting history and
the reality of crime in Washington. Soon after he took office,
mister Trump pardoned hundreds of rioters, some of them violent,
who ransacked the Capitol on January sixth, twenty twenty one.
Many had already been convicted of their crimes and were
serving their sentences before being immediately released. In January and

(08:01):
in the summer of twenty twenty, mister Trump deployed more
more than five thousand National Guard troops to Washington to
crack down on mostly peaceful demonstrators pushing for racial justice.
That deployment was widely seen as a debacle. One by one,
mister Trump summoned members of his cabinet and others to
the elector and to discuss how they would carry out

(08:23):
his orders. Interior Secretary Doug Bergmann said US park Police
officers had been patrolling federal park land and traffic circles
in the city for months and had removed dozens of
encampments of homeless people, and Pete Hagseeth, the Defense Secretary,
said eight hundred National Guard officers would be flowing into

(08:43):
the city over the next week. Jeanine Pierrot, the U
S Attorney for the District of Columbia and a former
Fox News personality, delivered a cable ready monologue against laws
in the district that prevent charging miners as adults. I
see too much violent crying being committed by young punks
who think that they can get together and gangs and

(09:05):
crews and beat the hell out of you or anyone else,
Miss Piro said. We need to go after the DC
Council and their absurd laws. Mister Trump and miss Piro
both denounced the use of no cash bail in Chicago
and in Washington, where it has been effectively eliminated since
nineteen ninety two. The practice allows some defendants to be

(09:26):
released from jail without posting bail that would help insure
their return to court. As he threatened to get involved
with repealing no cash bail in Chicago, mister Trump suggested
that other cities would soon be subject to federal intervention,
thought it was unclear that unclear what legal grounds he
could use to exert federal control over them. I'm going

(09:49):
to look at New York in a little while, mister
Trump said, And if we need to, we're going to
do the same things in Chicago, which is a disaster.
Critics of the administration's effort said mister Trump deserved part
of the blame for crime in Washington. And Kit Jane,
a shadow senator for the District of Columbia who is
the capital's advocate in Congress and lieu of official Senators,

(10:12):
said the vacancy crisis in the U. S. Attorney's Office,
which prosecutes all adult crimes, had contributed to crime in
the city. He also said the city is down two
judges out of nine on its highest court, the DC
Court of Appeals. What happens when you don't have enough judges,
Trials get delayed, crimes go up. He said, why has

(10:33):
the president not made this a priority of nominating judges?
Several Washington residents said on Monday that the crime statistics
relayed by the President had unnerved them, though they did
not see the kind of violence he described. Others questioned
whether calling the National Guard to Washington was necessary. I'm
not a particularly pro police, pro law enforcement kind of person,

(10:55):
said Sarah Struble, thirty seven, who lives in the Capitol
Hill neighborhood. I would much rather resources go towards, you know,
community support and services and things like that, things that
our taxes support and things run by the community, rather
than bringing in the National Guard. Shanta Rigsby, forty three,
said crime had remained study for the past five years

(11:18):
in the Navy Yard neighborhood where she lives, with a
noticeable rise after the pandemic. She said mister Trump should
focus on addressing the root causes of crime before sending
in the National Guard. It's unfortunate that the new administration
has to take this reactionary approach, Miss Rigsby said, instead
of local government really focusing on bringing down crime and

(11:38):
making residents feel safe. Israel Katark tensions escalate after Israel
kills Al Jazeera journalists. Israel and Qatar, which backs Al
Jazeera and as hosted Hamas leaders have long had a
relationship marked by both public hostility and quiet collaboration by

(12:00):
Vivian Niram. An Israeli airstrike that deliberately killed several Al
Jazeera journalists has aggravated tensions between Israel and Qatar, which
funds the television network and is also a central mediator
in talks to end the war in Gaza. The Israeli
attack on Sunday near a hospital in Gaza City killed

(12:21):
five Al Jazeera journalists. A network reported the correspondents Annas
al Sharif and Mohammed Huarke, the photographers Ibrahim Zahir and
Mohman Aliwi, and an assistant Mohammed Nafal. The network had
previously said four of its people died in the attack.

(12:42):
Gaza officials said that in addition to the journalists, two
others were also killed. The Israeli military had accused mister
al Sharif of being a Hamas fighter, an allegation that
he and the network had rejected and pointedly identified Al
Jazeera as Katari. The government of Qatar responded with a
strong condemnation the deliberate targeting of journalists by Israel and

(13:06):
the Gaza strip reveals how these crimes are beyond imagination.
Sheikh Mohammad bin Abdul Rahman al Thani, the Prime Minister
of Qatar, set on Monday in criticizing the international community's
and ability to stop this tragedy. The attack underlined Israel's
complex relationship with Qatar, which is which Israeli leadership relies

(13:30):
on as a back channel to Hamas while simultaneously regarding
the country with suspicion. The rulers of Qatar, a Persian
Gulf peninsula with fewer than four hundred thousand citizens, have
used its fossil fuel wealth to achieve global prominence. Qatar
is home to a US military base, a major international airline,

(13:52):
one of the world's largest sports broadcasters, and the Al
Jazeera News network. It has also served as a media
between Hamas and governments like those of Israel and the
United States that do not deal directly with the Palestinian
Armed Group. Katar hosts the political office of Hamas, which
led the October seventh, twenty twenty three attack on Israel,

(14:15):
setting off the current war, and has contributed significant financial
aid to Gaza over the years, with the knowledge and
support of the Israeli government. Israel criticizes Katar, and on
the other hand quietly cooperates with Qatar on all kinds
of things, said Joel Gazanski, a senior fellow at the
Institute for National Security Studies in Israel. When Israeli's bash Katar,

(14:41):
I remind them, first look at what you did, and
then go and blame the Kataris. Qatar has been a
major mediator in failed talks to end the war in Gaza.
At the same time, the country has increasingly become a
punching bag for right wing Israeli politicians and commentators who
painted as an insidious enemy. Last week, ye Netanyahu, an

(15:03):
Israeli podcaster and son of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, accused
Katar of funding a rise in anti Semitism globally. Every
Jew around the world is in grave danger because of
the decades long vilification of Jews and the Jewish state
of Guitar, he said, without elaborating. Yakov Barduga, a far

(15:27):
right commentator considered close to the Israeli Prime Minister, has
called for killing all the senior Hamas figures in Qatar.
I don't think we should be afraid of harming Qatar physically.
Mister Barduga said last week on an Israeli radio station.
Peace talks have been possible because Katari and Israeli officials
have been able to compartmentalize to some extent, said Christian Ulrichan,

(15:53):
a fellow for the Middle East at Rice's University's Baker
Institute for Public Policy. With each provocation, it maybe becomes harder,
especially as the mediation continues to show no sign of
being able to address the continuing devastation of Gaza. Israel
has long had an antagonistic relationship with Al Jazeera that

(16:16):
is worsened during the war. Last year, it forced the
network to shut down its operations in the West Bank.
While other major media outlets have been blocked from entering Gaza,
Al Jazeera has had numerous journalists there, providing a steady
stream of stories and images of the heroin conditions for
civilians with Israel's bombardment and aid restrictions that have created

(16:39):
widespread hunger and desperation. The Israeli military had targeted other
Al Jazeera correspondents before mister al Sharif, claiming they were
members of amasa's military wing, accusations that the network and
its journalists denied. Last summer, it killed Ismail al Ghoul
and an airstrike that also took the life of another reporter.

(17:02):
In March, an Israeli strike killed another Al Jazeera journalist,
whossalm Shabab. The strike on mister al shah Reef came
after Israel's security cabinet on Friday voted to intensify its
military operations in the area and to take over Gaza City.
Al Jazeera called the strike a desperate attempt to silence

(17:23):
the voices exposing the impending seizure and occupation of Gaza.
Mourners buried the journalist on Monday. The United Nations Human
Rights Office condemned the killing as a brave breach of
international law, adding that at least two hundred and forty
two Palestinian journalists had been killed in Gaza since the

(17:43):
war began. Despite the rising tensions, Katars is expected to
continue mediating Israel Hamas talks. Mister Gazanski said that being
a mediator serves Katar's interests by highlighting the tiny countries
and poor portance to international allies, chief among them the
United States. Trump wields tariffs as a force and diplomacy

(18:10):
too questionable. Effect. The President has threatened more tariffs on
Russia and its trading partners, and has imposed harsh ones
on India and Brazil to try to sway matters of
war and politics by Edward Wong and Zolan Cano Youngs.
As President Trump pushes to end the war in Ukraine,
he is using tariffs to try to persuade Russia to

(18:32):
agree to a cease fire that would halt its invasion.
The economic tool is not often associated with war and peace.
Mister Trump said last month that Russia's trading partners could
face very severe tariffs in what would be a roundabout
way of trying to hurt Moscow to show that he
means business. Mister Trump raised tariffs on Wednesday on imports

(18:53):
from India to an extraordinary fifty percent, saying he was
punishing the country for buying Russian oil. The taxes would
be paid by American companies importing goods and would result
in higher costs for consumers in the United States. And
August eighth, the deadline for Russia to agree to a
cease fire came and went, and mister Trump did not

(19:14):
impose new tariffs on its trading partners. Instead, he announced
plans to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia
and Alaska on Friday. For mister Trump, tariffs are not
just about raising revenue for the government or protecting American
industries from foreign competition. They are cudgel to try to
get other countries to do as he wishes on matters

(19:37):
that are entirely separate from trade, and to punish them
when they do not. He has used or threaten them
on everything from armed conflict to deportations to legal proceedings
tied to his political grievances. Late last month, mister Trump
raised tariffs on Brazilian goods to fifty percent with a
few exceptions, largely because of a coup plot case in

(20:00):
in this country's Supreme Court against Jaire Bolsonero, the former
right wing president whom mister Trump sees as an ally.
Around that time, mister Trump threatened to impose thirty six
percent tariffs on Thailand and Campodia if they did not
halt their border war. American presidents have typically used financial

(20:20):
sanctions targeting specific foreign companies to end certain channels of
trade between countries in hopes that pain changes the government's behavior.
Sanctions have had mixed results. At best, tariffs used in
diplomacy are somewhat different. Their aim is to make some,
are all of the nation's goods less competitive in the
US market, also with the end goal of causing pain

(20:43):
to change a country's behavior, compelling India to stop buying
Russian oil, for instance. Previous American presidents have tried to
use the tariff threat in this manner, but not nearly
to the degree that mister Trump has a half year
into a second term. He is betting that other countries
care about access to the American market. He calls the

(21:05):
United States a giant, beautiful store and the biggest department
store in history. I put these in a mental framework
that honestly has very little to do with trade and
a lot more to do with coerc of economic state craft,
said Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stemson Center
who studies US foreign policy. The tariffs that are used

(21:27):
as leverage on some other issues are more like sanctions,
and that they're leveraging US economic power to some other
policy end. You could even see the use of tariffs
this way as a continuation of the trend toward evermore
Drakronian coerc of economic measures. By the US in recent years,
she added, citing sanctions and export controls as two of

(21:51):
those measures. We keep using bigger and bigger economic guns
when it becomes apparent that the smaller ones aren't achieving
what we want. Mister Trump's threat of tariffs appears to
have influenced other governments a couple of times. One instance
involved Columbia, which accepted U S military flights with deportees
earlier this year. There was also the recent diplomacy between

(22:14):
Cambodia and Thailand. But on larger challenges, mister Trump's threats
have had no effect so far. Mister Putin has continued
to press his war against Ukraine despite the threats of
further economic pain on Russia, which was subjected to heavy
U S led sanctions after its invasions of Ukraine in
two thousand fourteen. In two thousand twenty two, and Indian

(22:38):
officials have been defiant in the face of mister Trump's tariffs,
saying they would continue to buy Russian oil. He doesn't
want to do anything against Putin directly, so imposing tariffs
on oil buying countries is his preferred option right now,
said Fiona Hill, a senior director for Europe and Russia
on the National Security Council during the first Trumpet administration.

(23:01):
Even mister Trump has acknowledged the questionable value of the tactic.
He told reporters on July twenty ninth that new financial
penalties on Russia may or may not affect them. Sanctions
are more effective at pushing a country to change its
behavior than tariffs, said Edward Fishman, a former State Department
official and current scholar at Columbia University who has written

(23:24):
a new book on economic warfare. One reason is that
tariffs aim to punish a country by hobbling its commercial
competitiveness in the US market. But the United States takes
in only thirteen percent of global imports, he said, so
some nations targeted with tariffs might decide they can weather
that pain. US sanctions, on the other hand, can cut

(23:45):
off entire channels of commerce because many companies cannot trade
without access to a global financial system that the US
dollar underpins. That said, many governments have weathered sanctions even
as the penalty's commel national economies and daily lives. I'm
personally skeptical of secondary tariffs as a weapon of economic warfare,

(24:07):
mister Fishman said. The United States as a destination for
imports is not a choke point the way the dollar is,
and it's a roundabout targeting action. In addition, tariffs raise
tensions between governments, as in the case of the United
States in India, whose relationship have been improving until mister
Trump's latest actions. And tariffs punish American companies and consumers

(24:31):
because US companies paying the taxes generally pass on the
cost to buyers, which can lead to inflation in the
United States. Some American diplomats say they worry that the
long term effects of the tariffs and how they will
affect US diplomacy and the global economy have been overlooked
in the State Department as a result of a recent

(24:52):
purge that has emptied its ranks of economic energy and
other such subject matter experts. The Trump administration is not
the first to impose tariffs on nations for reasons unrelated
to trade policy. During the Napoleonic Wars, the United States
wielded tariffs against Britain and France for geopolitical reasons, mister

(25:14):
Fishman said, and after Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine
in twenty twenty two, he added, the Biden administration imposed
tariffs on imports of Russian aluminum instead of sanctions on
Russian aluminum companies, because American officials feared that prices would
surge globally if those companies were forced out of the market.

(25:35):
A sanction is a full cut off. Mister Fishman said
tariffs are a relatively weak tool of economic warfare, but
mister Trump has continued to try to use tariffs as leverage,
perhaps because of his success with Columbia. Just days after
he took office, Columbia turned back two American military aircraft
carrying Colombian immigrants deported from the United States in late January.

(26:00):
Mister Trump responded by announcing new tariffs, sanctions in travel
restrictions against the country, which has long been an important
US partner. Then President Gustavo Petro of Columbia announced retaliatory tariffs.
You don't like our freedom, fine, mister Petro said at
the time, I do not shake hands with White enslavers.

(26:22):
By that night, they had reached an agreement. The White
House claimed victory and said mister Petrow would accept deportation flights.
Later that month, mister Trump threatened to impose the penalty
on Mexico and Canada unless they did more to stop
the flow of migrants and fentanyl into the United States.
He did not lay out exactly what the countries needed

(26:43):
to do. He often keeps his demands vague so he
can more easily declare a victory. When mister Trump postponed
those tariffs, the White House claimed it had secured a
series of concessions from both countries. Some of the actions, though,
including Canada's commitment to sit more security personnel and technology
to its southern border, had already been agreed to. President

(27:07):
Trump had leaned on tariff threats to pressure some countries
to take back more deportation flights, but oftentimes these threats
amount to no more than political theater, said Andreas Flores,
who directed border management for the National Security Council in
the Biden White House. Perhaps mister Trump's most overtly political

(27:27):
use of tariffs involves Brazil. Mister Bolsonaro is accused of
trying to carry out a plot to remain in power
after losing the presidential election in twenty twenty two. Mister
Trump has demanded that Brazil drop the charges that case
Echoes won the Justice Department brought against mister Trump on
charges that he had conspired to overturn the twenty twenty

(27:51):
US election, which he lost to Joseph R. Biden Junior.
The Department asked a court to dismiss the case after
mister Trump won the twenty twenty four election because of
a Justice Department policy saying it is unconstitutional to pursue
prosecutions against city and presidents. A Trump's secret weapon is

(28:11):
doing what other leaders neither expect or would do themselves,
said Ricardo Zuniga, a former senior State Department official and
US Council General in Sal Paulo, Brazil. Although although US
courts might eventually rule against mister Trump's use of emergency
authorities to impose tariffs, mister Zunyiga said many businesses around

(28:35):
the world have already felt the economic toll. I've seen
it in Brazil, where the tariffs and the tariff exemptions
are disrupting trade in everything from coffee to beef to
Brazilian built transformers critical to US data centers, he said.
And the fact is that President Trump himself will decide
whether to tie the outcome of the trade negotiations to

(28:57):
Balsonario's trial. So companies and sections are struggling to make
their case with US officials. To study Viking seafarers, he
took twenty six voyages and traditional boats and archaeologists in
Sweden spent three years traveling in vessels built like those
from one thousand years ago. He discovered lost sea routes,

(29:19):
hidden trade harbors, and new respect for Viking seamanship by
France lids. Late in the summer of twenty twenty one,
Greer Jarrett set out on the first of twenty six
voyages to retrace the maritime paths taken by Norse sailors
during the Viking Age, which lasted from roughly a d

(29:39):
eight hundred to one thy fifty. The Vikings, beyond their
reputation as medieval bad boys pillage people, if you will,
were accomplished traders who established commercial routes that stretched all
the way to Baghdad. Their primacy relied on mastery of
the seas. Mister Jarrett, a doctor candidate in archaeology at

(30:01):
Lund University in Sweden, was intrigued not only by where
these ancient mariners started and wound up, but also the
past they took to get there. The details of Viking
Age trade are often limited to its origins and destinations,
he said, so over the next three years, and in
the spirit of experimental archaeology, mister Jarrett piloted nine different

(30:23):
modern vessels built in the styles of those used in
millennium ago. Most of the journeys were undertaken in thirty
foot fyringer, square rigged open clinker boats built in the
tradition of after and a small Norwegian municipality where viking
erab boat building techniques endured until the twentieth century. Feiringer,

(30:48):
the smallest boats in mister Jarrett's fleet, were favored by
both fishermen and farmers. Most scholarship has focused on the large,
impressive longships, which were not designed and for long range sailing,
and did not represent the realities of everyday life in
the period, mister Jarrett said. Long ships, he reasoned, give

(31:09):
a skewed image of what sorts of sailing trips would
have been possible. For much of those three years, mister
Jarrett led student and volunteer crews on sailing expeditions along
the west coast of the Scandinavian Pennsylvania or Peninsula, the
historical core of Norse seafaring. Even without traversing oceans, they

(31:30):
encountered perils that sometimes rivaled those of Leif Ericsson and
his father, Eric the Red, who is believed to have
been the first European to reach North America. Turbulent tidal currents,
broken yards, the horizontal spars on a ship's mast to
which the mainsail is attached, encounters with fourteen foot waves,

(31:51):
a surfacing submarine, and an amorous mink whale. The most challenging,
if not the most terrifying, of the hazards, were powerful
frigid winds that swept down mountain slopes. The Norwegians have
a term for these surprising gusts fall vender, because they
seem to fall off hillsides and onto the water without warning,

(32:12):
and can reach speeds comparable to that of a tornado.
It was all in the name of science, providing mister
Jarrett with practical insights into Norse navigation. Scholars of seafaring,
he contends, have overemphasized terrestrial and textual sources at the
expense of understanding the actual, lived realities of sailors. To

(32:33):
counter his own academic bias on what he calls mainland myopia,
mister Jarrett spends as much time as possible at sea,
working as part of a crew on board a traditional
wooden boat with few modern aids for navigation, comfort and
food processing. He has now published his findings in the
Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. His analysis spanning the

(32:56):
first seventeen voyages in one thousand, four hundred ninety four
nautical miles logged. During this investigation, Wedd's first hand observations
with digital modeling of the ancient Norwegian shoreline to uncover
lost sea routes and hidden harbors once used by Vaking seafarers.
By Beecki Bishkoff, a ship constructor at the Viking Ship

(33:21):
Museum in ross Killed, Denmark, said mister Jarrett's study, which
encompassed several extended sea journeys, upended the notion that Viking
traders were confined to coastal travel. Instead, it suggests they
were capable of lengthy trips across stretches of open ocean.
Jarrett has demonstrated that the use of experimental archaeological approaches

(33:43):
that marry theory and practice can uncover new subjects for
investigation that haven't been thought of before, quite simply because
they haven't been physically experienced, she said, beyond the Fords.
Born in Scotland and raised in Spain, mister Jarrett thirty
time two descends from a long line of seamen dating
back to at least the sixteenth century, when an ancestor

(34:06):
helped build the Great Michael, the largest ship built under
the reign of King James the Fourth of Scotland. Mister
Jarrett's father sailed him at eighteen months old through the
cory Vekren, the third largest whirlpool in the world, as
a form of baptism. Mister Jarrett became interested in the
North Atlantic's Viking Age maritime links while pursuing an undergraduate

(34:30):
degree in archaeology at the University of Glasgow. He sought
to understand the Viking world view by seeing it through
the eyes of seasoned sailors. In twenty twenty, mister Jarrett
began his pH d studies at Lund University, focusing on
Viking Age seafaring. He began exploring the North Atlantic in

(34:50):
firinger assembled at a Norwegian vocational center. The construction followed
the clinker or lap strake method, meaning the hulls were
formed by overlapping spruce planks secured with metal rivets originally
iron nails with rows and Viking times. Mister Jarrett's firinger

(35:12):
featured one major upgrade. Rather than the traditional steering oar
or steerboard mounted on the right side, his boats were
controlled by a stern rudder. The premise of mister Jarrett's
new study is that Viking expeditions, despite lacking navigational tools
like sextents, maps or compasses, journeyed farther out into high

(35:33):
seas than previously assumed. It is probable that Viking traders
did not exclusively use large, established towns and harbors. He said, instead,
they relied on a network of smaller, decentralized havens. Mister
Jarrett has identified four such havens, all previously unknown. He

(35:54):
said that the anchorages dispersed on remote islands and peninsulas
like likely served as crucial informal staging areas, providing pit
stops for sailors traveling between well known hubs such as
Ribe in Denmark, virgin in Norway, and Dublin in Ireland.
He speculated that these were more than mere stopovers, often

(36:18):
situated on what he calls transition zones between open water
and fjords. The havens often offered temporary refuge from harsh
conditions and opportunities to resupply and interact with other sailors.
When he reached a potential haven, mister Jarrett surveyed the
area and gathered information from local sailors and fishermen about

(36:40):
traditional Norwegian sailing routes used in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. At that time, boats lacked engines, and navigation
relied on visual observation and local knowledge. Following each voyage,
mister Jarrett consulted marine charts and historical documents, making references

(37:00):
to havens and old sailing accounts and their archaeological features.
The islands of torget Hestmona and Scrova held significance for
some mariners as a source of cautionary tales and coastal
landmarks conveyed through shared memories and myths. By integrating the
sailing logs of the twenty six voyages with advanced digital models,

(37:24):
mister Jarrett reconstructed sea levels spanning twelve hundred years of
geological shifts. I took modern elevation values from a digital
grid and subtracted the difference in sea level from the
Viking Age for each square in the grid, he said,
after plotting out where low and high tide would have been,
he estimated how much dry land might have been available

(37:46):
and the navigability of some of the shallower sailing channels.
Mister Jarrett found that islands along the outer coast are
easier to access than sheltered havens deep in the Fiords
because they can be approached and departed from under a
wider range of conditions. None of the havens that he
identified were in narrow fiords, which are hard to access

(38:09):
with a square rigged boat. Each one had to be
a safe space between different areas of risk that can
be easily found and can fit multiple boats. Mister Jared
said they also had to offer fresh water, shelter from swells,
tidal currents, tempts, a vantage point from which to scout
for incoming storms, were hostile fleets, a fall then strikes.

(38:36):
It was not long after the first leg of this
project that mister Jared experienced the terrifying perils of the
North Sea. One day, a collision with another vessel snapped
his ship's yard, and the crew, two men and two women,
made emergency repairs by hammering the two halves back. Together
with a bunt of an axe, mister Jared and a
shipmates cautiously hoisted the sail on the braced yardum and departed,

(39:00):
propelled by a gentle easterly breeze. As they neared Breddingsnet,
a headland under a steep hill, they had to turn
into the wind. With darkness descending, they strained to see
the iron poles indicating treacherous reefs and rocks rounding the promontory.
They were suddenly struck by fall vender. In that moment,

(39:22):
I was sure the yard would break and the boat
would be turned sideways by the waves and capsized, mister
Jarrett said. Fortunately, mister Jarrett had undergone capsized training a
month earlier. He knew that exposure to thirty nine degree
sea water causes moderate hypothermiam. I was therefore very aware
of what it would be like to be thrown into

(39:43):
the sea at dusk, with slowly numbing limbs and a
brain clouded by icy water. He said. Panic rose inside him,
and he feared that he would lose control. Instead, I
managed to greet the fear and hold in a bay
while the rest of my mind and body took care
of the situation at hand, he said. He hauled down
the sails stiff with ice and used his oars to

(40:04):
stabilize the boat against the roaring wind. The boat remained
steady on the tumultuous waves, effortless, effortlessly twisting as it
rowed over them. Although firinger are sensitive to fall vender,
they are actually more capable of dealing with them than
boats with other rigs, Mister Jarrett said, staying composed, he

(40:26):
and his crew quickly lowered the sail and prepared to
win to weather the wind. They then resumed their course safely,
arriving at port within a few hours. From then on,
mister Jarrett said, I knew we could handle ourselves in
even the most dreadful conditions. A bridge of experience. Mister
Jared's conclusions highlight the impact of an isostatic rebound which

(40:49):
offers which occurs when land rises. After Glacier's retreat from
the coast, some of the havens that exist today and
which we have long believed were active in the Viking Age,
were actually underwater at the time. Mister Jarrett said the
sea level had changed by as much as twenty feet,
and so low lying islands had been entirely submerged back then.

(41:13):
Of the four havens, only the island of Storfosna had
yielded archaeological evidence of human habitation, a ship burial from
the period just before the Viking Age. Mister Jarrett is
hopeful that excavations will be carried out in the havens
to potentially unearth remains of jetties, mooring posts, balastones, cooking pits,

(41:36):
temporary shelters, and the detritus of boat building such as
rivets and bent nails. Morton Raven, a researcher at the
Viking Ship Museum, said that mister Jarrett's study illustrated that
sailing in the Viking Age was a negotiation among ship shipmates,
seascape and weather that required constant adaptation. Sailing back then

(42:00):
was never about just taking one route from A to B,
but having several routes to choose from, he said. In
mister Jarrett's view, the success of Viking voyages hinged on
both robust vessels in unified crews who could withstand harsh
environments in each other. He asserts that mastering traditional sailing
techniques and experiencing the bond of shipmates during difficult passages

(42:24):
creates a tangible link or bridge of experience with the
sailors of antiquity. Why AI should make parents rethink posting
photos of their children online. Artificial intelligence apps generating fake
nudes amid other privacy concerns make charanteing far riskier than

(42:46):
it was just a few years ago. By Brian Exchin.
Last summer, my wife and I beat the odds of
middle age and gave birth to a beautiful baby girl.
Thousands of people who follow me on Instagram and others
have yet to notice. That's not because I've ghosted everyone.
I have just opted against posting photos of my child

(43:07):
on social media, a parenting move that is becoming increasingly
popular because of artificial intelligence. Parents have debated the risks
and benefits of publishing pictures of their children online for decades,
about as long as photo sharing sites have been around,
but when social networks were woven into the fabric of society,

(43:28):
sharanting became the norm. Only a quarter of parents do
not share photos of their children online because of concerns
that online predators and companies may harvest their personal data,
according to studies, but parents like me have joined the
never post camp because of a more recent threat apps
that can automatically generate deep fake nudes with anyone's face

(43:51):
using generative artificial intelligence, the technology powering popular chatbots. The
so called new toifier apps are simple and cheap for
anyone to use, with some even offering free trials. I
took a look at some of them. Those apps are
being widely used by students in schools and for victims

(44:12):
have artificially generated nudes of them out in the wild.
Has been as traumatizing as it would be if the
photos were real. Though a new federal law makes it
a crime to post non consensual fake nudes online, there's
nothing stopping people from using the new toifier apps, which
have proliferated on the web. Dozens of the new toifier

(44:33):
sites are raking in millions of dollars a year. It's everywhere,
set Alexios Monzalaris, a founder of the tech publication Indicator,
which investigated eighty five new tofier web sites. Any kid
with access to the Internet can both be a victim
or a perpetrator. In addition to aid fakes, they are

(44:55):
more risks to photo posting, like potentially exposing young people's
sensitive of personal information to bad actors that may discourage
parents to be clear, whether or not to publish family
photos is a personal choice, So this column isn't a
condemnation of parents who do post I like seeing photos
of other people's children on social media. Instead, let this

(45:19):
be an explainer on what to consider when posting children's
pictures online. Here's what to know. The rise of deep
fakes fake nuds of real people are nothing new. For
many years, photo editing apps like Adobe Photoshop could doctor
photos into realistic looking images. Yet, because of the amount
of time and skill required to create convincing spoofs, the

(45:42):
victims tended to be celebrities. The AI new toifier apps
have changed the game. Abusers need to visit only one
of the websites and upload an image of their victim.
The newdifiers often accept credit card payments or cryptocurrency in
exchange for virtual tokens for producing fake miness. The publication
of deep fakes was recently deemed a federal crime when

(46:05):
President Trump signed the Take It Down Act, a bipartisan
bill combating revenge porn that included non consensual nude imagery
and AI generated fakes. Though the legislation requires social media
sites to remove offending images. It does not prohibit businesses
from offering the image generating apps themselves. Social media companies

(46:29):
like snap, TikTok, and Meta prohibit advertising of new toifiers
on their apps. In some states are beginning to discuss
legislation that would ban companies from offering new to fire apps,
but if that happens, enforcement would be difficult because many
of the app creators are overseas. To put it in
another way, anyone can still easily use a new to

(46:52):
Fire app on a child and keep the photos and
no one would know. One site I examined offered a
free trial to digitally stress of someone in one photo.
From there, users could pay a subscription of forty nine
dollars a month for six hundred credits or eight cents
per fake nude. The app also allowed users to create
pornographic animations. Lots of people are uploading photos into those

(47:16):
new tofier apps, which rake in roughly thirty six million
dollars a year in revenue for the company's offering the software,
said mister Metzarlis, who based the estimate on the traffic
data for a set of websites. The AI porn apps
have been such a nuisance that Meta took action. In June,
the company filed a lawsuit in Hong Kong against a

(47:39):
developer there of various AI new toifier apps that had
managed to circumvent Meta's ad detection technologies to promote its
software on Instagram and Facebook. A Meta spokeswoman said the
company also shared information about offending apps and websites with
the Tech Coalition's Lantern Program, a group of companies including

(48:00):
Google and Microsoft working to protect children from online sexual abuse. Yet,
perpetrators need to know only the name of a new
to fier site to reach it through a web browser,
and in schools, students are aware of the popular ones,
said Josh Golan, the executive director of fair Play for Kids,
a nonprofit that focuses on protecting children from harmful media.

(48:23):
The teachers and the school administrators I talk to will
say it happens all the time in our schools where
kids create fake nudes, he said. Though new laws could
make it harder for abusers to share deep fakes with others,
for many victims, the damage has already been done. Last spring,
students at a high school in Northeast Iowa reported to

(48:44):
school officials that other students had used nudifiers to digitally
fabricate nude images of them. Around the same time, lawmakers
in Minnesota, amid similar incidents there, introduced legislation targeting companies
that offer new tofier apps or wayes. What this all
means for parents is abusers could copy a photo of

(49:06):
a child posted on your social media account and uploaded
into a new tofier app, or if they are physically nearby,
they could use a camera to snap a photo of
the child and then upload it into the tool. There's
no way to stop someone from doing the latter, but
the former situation can be avoided by opting not to
publish photos of your children online. Private social media accounts

(49:29):
are an imperfect solution. Parents who do want to share
pictures of their children on social networks can significantly reduce
risk by posting the photos only on an account that
close friends and family members are allowed to see, but
that still has limitations. Perpetrators of child sexual abuse usually
know the victim, so an Instagram follower with access to

(49:52):
your profile could be a culprit, said Sarah Gardner, the
founder of the Heat Initiative. A child's safety advocacy group.
Just because you have a private account doesn't mean someone
you know isn't going to take your photos and do
something malicious with them, she said. In one such incident,
about a decade ago, long before the arrival of AI

(50:12):
generated deep fakes, a mother in Riverton, Utah, discovered that
photos of her children that had that she had shared
only with friends and family on Facebook had ended up
on pornography websites. Even a birthday party is exposing. Other
than AI deep fakes, there are still old school threats
to consider, like identity theft. A child's birthday party may

(50:36):
feel like a milestone worth broadcasting on social media, but
even that type of seemingly innocuous sharing could expose children
to future harm. Pictures of the birthday party can reveal
the exact day and year the child was born, which
is information that can be stitched together with other data
that hackers have collected through cybersecurity breaches to commit identity theft,

(50:58):
said Lea Plunkett, the author of Sharenthood, a book about
sharing information about children online. As unlikely as that may sound,
identity theft involving miners searched forty percent from twenty twenty
one to twenty twenty four, with roughly one point one
million children having their identity stolen each year according to

(51:19):
the Federal Trade Commission. This is a good reminder for
all parents to freeze their children's credit. Why do we
do this? Sharing some data is part of the social
contract of the digital era. We share our location, for instance,
to get helpful directions from maps apps. For many parents
contemplating whether to post photos of their children, it's a

(51:41):
useful exercise to ask what are the benefits? Social media
apps like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok are convenient tools to
efficiently share nice photos and videos with a broad swath
of people we care about. But the real benefactors are
the social media companies themselves, which collect data to improve
their products so that they can get people, including our children,

(52:04):
to keep using their products. Among younger people, frequent social
media use has been associated with mental health issues, including anxiety, depression,
and feelings of loneliness. According to dozens of studies. Their
goal is not to help develop a well rounded, healthy child.
It's to make money off keeping your kids on as

(52:25):
long as possible, said Nikki Reisberg, a former marketer who
hosts a podcast about parenting in the digital age. If
they have tens of thousands of pieces of data before
your child goes online, they can do that more effectively.
There are lower risk ways to share photos of our children.
My preferred method is sending photos of my daughter to

(52:46):
a few friends and relatives through text messages, which are encrypted.
Some parents share photo albums of family pictures with a
small group of people using online services like Apple's iCloud
and Google Photos. In the end, I'm aware that this
may all be a losing battle. Many schools post children

(53:06):
on social media to show that their students are having
a good time. I'll probably be the unpleasant parent demanding
that photos of my daughter be taken down. And eventually,
when my daughter grows up, she will have her own
phone and decide whether to post your photos. But until
that day comes, I'll do what I can by keeping
her photos off the web. Over sixty thousand are an

(53:29):
immigration detention, a modern high record show. The numbers reflect
the significant effort that Trump administration is put into is
escalating immigration crackdown by Chris Cameron and Hahmed Alizis. The
number of people in immigration detention reached a new high
of more than sixty thousand on Monday, breaking a modern

(53:51):
record set during the first Trump administration. According to internal
records from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the number of detained
people has jumped since January, when about thirty nine thousand
people were in immigration detention, reflecting efforts by the Trump
administration to quickly ramp up arrests and deportations. According to

(54:12):
ICE records detained or obtained by The New York Times,
more than one thousand, one hundred people have been detained
since Friday, about three hundred and eighty people a day.
The capacity for immigration officers to detain people has grown
rapidly since ICE was formed in two thousand three, twenty
years ago, the average daily population of detained immigrants was

(54:34):
approximately seven thousand, according to the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
The previous peak since the government's current method of counting
began was fifty five thousand, six hundred and fifty four
in August twenty nineteen, during the first Trump administration. The
latest figures reflect the shifting focus of immigration policy or policing.

(54:58):
Most of the people detained in in January have been
arrested by Customs and Border Protection, the agency that patrols
the nation's land border, seaports, and airports. ICE, which conducts
immigration raids in the nation's interior, is now making the
overwhelming majority of arrests. Six months into President Trump's second term,

(55:18):
Mister Trump has made his escalating immigration crackdown a focus
of his second term. His administration and his allies and
Republican led states have devoted considerable effort to expanding the
government's ability to arrest, detain, and to port immigrants. Mister Trump,
who was re elected on a promise of mass deportations,

(55:39):
has often expressed frustration that arrests and deportations are not
rising more quickly. Immigration arrests require extensive resources, including ample
time for surveillance, and the Trump administration has laid out
ambitious long term plans to expand ICE after Congress more
than triple the agency's budget from about eight billion dollars

(56:01):
to roughly twenty eight billion dollars. The military has also
become increasingly involved in the escalating immigration crackdown. Days after
mister Trump returned to the White House, the Pentagon authorized
using a military base in Colorado to hold immigrants, and
the administration has sent some migrants to the American military
base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Last week, the Defense Department

(56:24):
announced that it was building another detention facility at a
military base in Texas, with capacity for five thousand. Late
last month, the Trump administration authorized the deployment of National
Guard units at immigration facilities, the most direct effort yet
to meld military operations with domestic immigration enforcement. Immigrant advocates

(56:47):
expressed outrage at the growth of ice detention during the
Trump administration. The Trump administration is building an unprecedented detention
system of extraordinary size and cruelty to terrorize immigrant community, Kikametos,
the president of the National Immigration Law Center set in
a statement. Kathleen Bush Joseph, an analyst at the Migration

(57:10):
Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, said that detention had
grown rapidly under mister Trump compared with past administrations. This
concludes the reading of The New York Times for today.
Your reader for today has been Don Flickinger. If you
have any questions, comments, or suggestions concerning this program, please

(57:31):
feel free to call us at area code eight five
nine four two two sixty three nine zero. Thank you
for listening, and now please stay tuned for continued programming
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