An Alarming New Study About Brain Injuries in Football, and How States Are Paying Millions for Rain

From The New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford, today's Tuesday, August 25th. Here's what we're covering. A new study about head injuries in football has revealed a staggering statistic. At least one in four NFL players gets the brain disease known as CTE. The new research, published this morning in the journal The BMJ, was based on examinations of the brains of hundreds of players. CTE is caused by repeated hits to the head, and symptoms can include mood swings, erratic behavior, and memory loss. It's hard to remember what I did yesterday, like I can't tell you what I ate for dinner last night. For years, players and their family members have been sounding the alarm about the condition. He was getting increasingly paranoid. He was having increasing difficulties with his memory, especially amid a series of suicides by players. He told me he loved me very much, and that he felt there was something wrong with his brain. And for me to please get it to the NFL. CTE can only be definitively diagnosed after death, and because of that, some players have been donating their brains to science. For the new study, researchers considered every NFL player who died between 2016 and 2021, about 900, some old, some young. The scientists were able to examine the brains of more than 200 of them and found that almost every single one had signs of CTE. The researcher said that if they'd been able to examine all of the player's brains, the number could be far higher, meaning that the one in four estimate is potentially a significant undercount. The figure is haunting because we can look at the NFL rosters, we can look at the teams that are playing on Sunday, and if we extrapolate this to today's NFL, that tells us that hundreds of current players will end up with this disease. John Branch covers sports for the time, and is reported on CTE extensively. He says that while the NFL downplayed the risks of repeated head trauma for years, the new data might be hard to ignore for both the multi-billion dollar league and for its fans. Football is part of American culture. Millions of people watch games every weekend, it brings people together. There's a lot of good about football, and these researchers will say the same thing. What I think is interesting and what I think it's caused me and a lot of people I know to do is really to start having these conversations about what can we do to limit the numbers? Should football be banned? That's one end of the spectrum. Should we do nothing? That's the other. What can we do in the middle to make football safer so that fewer families are going through the repercussions of CTE as their loved ones get older? John says, according to the lead author of the study, there are ways to make football less dangerous that wouldn't change the game, like keeping young kids from playing tackle football and reducing hits during practice at all levels since the risks of CTE build up over a lifetime. In a statement in response to the study, the NFL, which has paid more than $1.5 billion in claims related to brain injuries, said that a quote, "Continuously strives to make the game a football safer," including by implementing strategies to reduce concussions and head impacts. Now, two quick updates from my colleagues covering the Trump Administration. First, in an emergency opinion yesterday, the Supreme Court said the administration can move forward with its efforts to restrict mail-in voting, including a plan to let the United States Postal Service limit which voters it will deliver ballots to. The justices said this was not a final decision about whether President Trump's efforts quote "will necessarily be lawful," but it means that plans for the new restrictions can move forward while a lower court considers the case. At this point, more legal challenges are likely, and when you consider that there's barely two months to go until the midterms, Times' political reporter Nick Korsaniti says the Supreme Court has left a lot up in the air. The decision comes as the administration of elections, the very minutia of how votes are cast and counted, has become exceptionally polarized, a core of the political debate right now, and so, injecting more uncertainty or even potential confusion or chaos will only add to that doubt and that swirling distrust. And, today, at present Trump's direction, the United States Treasury has begun Operation Economic Outcast. Treasury Secretary Scott Besent gave a fiery speech yesterday, laying out what the administration is calling its most punishing economic attack yet against Iran. The plan, which includes dozens of sanctions with the potential for more, comes as military strikes and negotiations have failed to achieve the goals the US originally set out of curbing Iran's nuclear program and taking down its government. But Times' economic policy reporter Alan Rappaport says that the administration's escalating economic threats are short on details and may end up being more bark than bite. Iran has been under strict western sanctions for many years and even decades, and President Trump's first term, he instituted a maximum pressure campaign on Iran's economy. Just earlier this year, Treasury Secretary Besent unveiled a program called Operation Economic Fury, which was intended to strangle the Iranian economy. Through all that, Iran has still been able to continue fighting back against the US and continue to fund its economy. And it's not clear how this new initiative is going to be any different from what the US has tried before. In one last update on the Trump administration, the State Department has announced plans to revoke the visas of people who came to the US temporarily for tourism or business and are now trying to stay by applying for asylum. The Department has already started reviewing those cases and the cancellations are expected in waves. It could affect as many as 200,000 people. A department spokesman said in a statement that quote, "These types of visas are issued with the clear understanding that they are for those who intend to return home." Meanwhile, the administration has halted the processing and adjudication of asylum applications, even though a federal judge has said it must review them. In Utah, out in a remote desert spot at the foot of a mountain range, there's a 25-foot tall metal structure, kind of looks like tricked out, wired up, metal goalposts. And the company behind it is pitching it as one solution to the state's brutal drought. It says the device sends strong electrical pulses into the sky to help squeeze more water out of clouds. The practice is known as "cloud seating," which has been around for decades in several different forms. The most well-known involves using airplanes to spray particles of silver iodide into the atmosphere to help rain, form, and fall. And now, as drought in the West gets more and more common, a lot of new experimental technology is being rolled out. For example, the company behind that tower in Utah claims that last winter, it brought 15% more snow to the nearby mountains. It's a bold claim, but local water officials are thinking about chipping in tens of thousands of dollars for more of the devices, and they're not alone. States across the West are now spending millions each year on various cloud seating efforts. When it comes to the tower, one of the Utah officials the Times talked with said that even without definitive evidence that the new technology is effective, it may be a gamble they can't afford to pass up, saying the water situation is so dire that, quote, "perhaps we need to take some risk." And finally, it has been a summer of gastrointestinal distress. Put that on the tote bag. Between the cyclospora outbreak and some other food contamination issues, a lot of Americans have been thinking about how to manage a bad stomach bug. For a lot of people, they immediately think of the Brake diet, bananas, rice, applesauce, toast. Doctors once swore by it, the idea being that all those bland foods were the way to go if you were hit with nausea or diarrhea, basically they were easy to keep down. But experts have been moving away from Brake for decades. By the '90s, the American Academy of Pediatrics no longer endorsed it. Researchers said it didn't seem to benefit patients' recovery, and that following it for multiple days meant people weren't getting the nutrients they needed to get better. Doctors, the time spoke with say there's no problem with going toast only for say a day, but what's important is getting back to a normal diet as quickly as possible, one with protein, fat, vitamins, and minerals, all of which are lacking in the Brake lineup. The body needs all of that to repair cells that can be damaged by stomach bug infections. Experts say there are a range of other foods that can pack a nutritional punch while still being easy on the stomach. Chicken, oatmeal, potatoes, eggs. So, "Cope", I guess, or "Opec", is that taken? Stay healthy, everybody. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, the behind-the-scenes story of how high-stakes terrorist negotiations between the U.S. and Canada collapsed and what the escalating trade war between the two countries could look like now. You can listen to that in the New York Times app or review your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.