Concerns Grow Over Conditions on Aircraft Carrier, and Trump Pushes New Hacking Effort

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Friday, August 14th, here's what we're covering. We make sure that every shift, every crew, every captain has everything we can provide them at every single moment. Some deployments are longer than others than I have. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is pushing back against reports of deteriorating conditions on one of the Navy's aircraft carriers stationed near Iran. The USS Abraham Lincoln, which has a crew of about 5,000 sailors, has been deployed now for almost nine months, and Democratic Senators have been sounding the alarm about reports of poor living conditions and the well-being of the crew. In a social media post this week, Senator Ruben Gallego wrote that the sailors have "moldy showers, sporadic hot water, rationed meals and soap, broken toilets, and grueling 12 to 16 hour shifts with no days off." In a letter addressed to Hegseth and the acting Navy Secretary this week, Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote that the crew's mental health was suffering. Echoing reports from the military focused publication Navy Times, which said that multiple sailors on the ship have tried to jump overboard. Naval experts say that extended deployments like the Lincoln's take their toll on people and equipment. Earlier this year, a different aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, faced food shortages and mechanical problems after being at sea for 326 days, supporting President Trump's campaigns in Venezuela and then in Iran. It was the longest carrier deployment since the Vietnam War. According to a U.S. official, the Navy is now sending another aircraft carrier to the Middle East to relieve the Lincoln. But a retired Navy Vice Admiral told the Times that the longer-than-scheduled deployments mean that it will take years for the Navy to get back to its full capabilities. He said that keeping warships out for extended periods can have knock-on effects, like throwing off carefully planned maintenance schedules. Adding quote, "I guarantee you that the first two years of the Trump administration will definitely affect the next two years of the Trump administration." Last night, President Trump signed a national security memo greenlighting a new strategy for the U.S. The President is encouraging private American companies to help fight hackers. Under the memo, vetted companies would partner with the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security to strike international cyber criminal groups. That could include surveilling them and trying to disrupt and bring down their systems. The new national security memorandum from the Trump administration is essentially, in some ways, mimicking the Chinese system of deputizing private sector hackers for national security goals here. My colleague Dustin Vols covers cybersecurity. He says the concept of the new memo, basically giving the private sector the OK to go on cyber offense, has echoes of China and Russia's approach to cyber attacks, but it's something no U.S. administration has ever publicly endorsed before. Instead, the U.S. approach has mostly been about trying to build up defenses and leaving any cyber attacks to military and intelligence agencies. So, there are a lot of questions about this new approach, how it will work, who might participate, but it is something that is coming after many, many years of a problem that has only gotten worse each and every year as cyber attacks continue to target American businesses, consumers, and critical infrastructure. Dustin says some experts he spoke with were interested to see the U.S. trying something new. Other years of policies that haven't always been able to keep up. Every year things like ransomware attacks cost American businesses and consumers tens of billions of dollars. But Dustin says there are also widespread concerns that this change could provoke more cyber conflict, and potentially have unforeseen consequences depending on who U.S. companies end up targeting. In Washington state this week, a judge ordered the prediction market CalShi to stop most of its operations there, the latest legal battle over how these markets operate. CalShi, along with similar platforms like Polymarket, lets users place bets on almost anything from football games to who will win an election. They've exploded in recent years to the point that people are betting billions of dollars a month on them. And with that rise has come a lot of scrutiny. In the Washington case, the judge ruled CalShi was violating the state's laws regulating gambling. Online sports betting is illegal there. A spokesperson for CalShi said it disagreed with the judge's decision and was considering its legal options. But challenges like this have also come up in Nevada, Minnesota, New York, and there have also been growing concerns about the risk of insider trading on the platforms. For example, earlier this year, a Google employee was accused of making more than a million dollars on bets about what people would search on Google. And critics say the federal agency that's in charge of regulating prediction markets, the commodity futures trading commission is not equipped to handle this fast growing industry and all the potential fraud that comes with it. Many of the laws on the books about insider trading were written decades ago long before prediction markets ever existed. And under the Trump administration, the CFTC staff has been cut to its lowest level in at least 20 years. Critics have also pointed to the potential for conflicts of interest under President Trump, whose oldest son is a paid advisor to CalShi and an investor in polymarket. The CFTC has sued states that have tried to block prediction markets, arguing that only it has the authority to police the industry. In response to questions from the times about the growing number of allegations of insider trading on these platforms, a spokeswoman for the CFTC said that it, quote, has the staff, expertise, and tools necessary to conduct effective oversight. The Eastern European country of Moldova is tiny, with a total population of just about 3 million people. But the times has been covering how, as the former Soviet state has embraced the West and made joining the European Union a top priority, it's become a major target for Russian president Vladimir Putin. Just this past year, as the country held critical elections, the Kremlin carried out a sweeping effort to put a pro-Russian party in power. My colleagues and I talked to dozens of law enforcement and intelligence officials across the West, and all of them said that this operation in Moldova was one of Putin's most extensive, far reaching and audacious operations to gain control of another government. Michael Schwartz covers global security issues for the times. He says that, according to some of his intelligence sources, the Kremlin's hierarchy of priorities goes like this. Number one, conquer Ukraine. Number two, take control of Moldova. Publicly, Russian officials have denied interfering in Moldova, but Michael says that in the case of last year's elections, he documented widespread Russian interference. On top of the normal tools in Putin's playbook, like hacking, like disinformation campaigns, the operation of Moldova went much, much further. There were training camps in Serbia, in Russia, in Bosnia, that were essentially meant to train up shock troops that would cause chaos inside Moldova on Election Day. They paid off hundreds of priests to preach pro-Kremlin messaging from the pulpit and on social media. There was an extensive and far reaching vote-buying scheme operated by an oligarch from Moscow that essentially put money into people's pockets to pay for their votes. In the end, the efforts didn't achieve their ultimate goal, which is to overthrow the pro-Western government of Moldova. But officials we talked to said the operation isn't at an end. The Kremlin is already gearing up for future rounds of elections to try and influence the result. And Moldova officials told us that they believed they had won the initial battle against the Kremlin by pushing back on all of these efforts to influence the elections, but that they hadn't won the war. And finally, for a long time, the company behind the legendary football video game franchise Madden had the tagline, "If it's in the game, it's in the game," essentially promising the most realistic NFL experience possible. You're sitting on your couch with a controller, but it feels like you're running towards the end zone. And the players on the screen aren't invincible. If you're a quarterback, twists his ankle, you have to decide if you want to sub-emount. But some people have been asking if it's so big on realism, where are the concussions? group that's trying to call attention to head injuries in football released a free modification that maddened players can install that simulates the consequences of those hard hits. We have it showing up where we're going into the 10 riot being evaluated for a concussion and now it pops up saying I have a concussion, I got my headphones on so I can actually hear the ringing. So say your running back gets tackled hard. The screen might shake or go fuzzy. There could be a ringing sound, all to simulate concussion symptoms like blurred vision, tenitis and dizziness. In some ways, this mod is a return to previous versions of the game. The maddened game franchise actually introduced its own concussion effects around 2010, but phased them out by the end of the decade. At the same time as the league was facing growing criticism about the toll the sport was taking on its players. When the effects were first added to the game, John maddened himself. The legendary coach the game is named after, told the times he thought it was important for young Americans to fully understand the risks of concussions. Saying quote, if we show players playing through them, then kids won't understand. Those are the headlines. If you'd like to play the Friday news quiz, stick around, it's just after these credits. This show is made by Will Jarvis, Margaret Kadefa, Jake Lucas, Yann Stewart and me, Tracy Mumford. Original theme by Dan Powell. Special thanks to Isabella Anderson, Sam Dullnick, Miles McKinley, Alyssa Moxley and Zoe Murphy. Now time for the quiz. Every week we ask you a few questions about stories the times has been covering. Can you get them all? Here we go. First up. Thank you very much for joining me. I wanted to take a moment to share with you a letter. This week, Senator Bernie Sanders said he wanted to sound the alarm about a specific pressing issue, which we've dinged out here. Almost every day there is a news story about how your companies are losing control of the you are developing. Sanders argued that the situation in this certain field is crossing into dangerous territory, that companies involved should just pause for a moment. There is a reason why the head of the CIA says that are almost like a doomsday device. Your question, what was the Senator talking about? The answer? Pause AI development. It is not too late to avoid disaster. Global intelligence, in a letter addressed to the heads of open AI and Thropic and Meta, Sanders called out recent examples of AI models going rogue during testing and starting to hack into other systems, among other things. With that in mind, he said that AI companies should pause development of their most advanced models. He's also co-sponsored a bill to halt the construction of all new data centers for AI until there are safeguards in place. And next question. This week, Nigel Farage, the most prominent far-right politician in the UK, swept to victory in a special parliamentary election. While he was facing off against over 30 other people, his win was not really a surprise. And a number of those competitors were satirical candidates, which British politics has a long tradition of. We are going to give you a list of candidates. See if you can guess which of them was not running against Farage. Nick the incredible flying brick, Count Binface, whose head is a trash can, Darth Vader, Baron von Thunderclap, or Howling Lod Hope of the official Monster Raving Looney Party. So again, Nick the incredible flying brick, Count Binface, Darth Vader, Baron von Thunderclap, or Howling Lod Hope of the official Monster Raving Looney Party. The answer? Darth Vader, the Star Wars villain, was not in the mix this time. But a candidate has used that name in Ukrainian elections. At one point he was actually prevented from casting a ballot for himself because he wouldn't take off the mask. And last one, movie critics often just cannot resist a pun. This week, a film adaptation of a famous bestselling memoir hit theaters. Now, I'm going to read you a few little snippets of these reviews, you guess who the movie is about. This coming-of-age story makes for Thin Soup, a delectable slice. This mini biopic avoids all the easy recipes, bland but digestible, an early nibble at a culinary giant. Who is this biopic about? The answer? Sorry, what is your name? It's the late chef and TV star, Anthony Bourdain. Filmmakers have turned just the first few chapters of his book Kitchen Confidential into the movie Tony, which introduces the world to Bourdain at 19, working one of his first kitchen jobs. For Bourdain's part, he actually thought Hollywood had a terrible track record of accurately capturing the world of food and restaurants. Though he did tell entertainment weekly at one point that, quote, "far and away the best in that genre" was the Pixar movie, Ratatouille. That's it for this week's news quiz. If you want to tell us how you did, our email is the headlines at nytimes.com. I'm Tracy Mumford. The show will be back on Monday.