Hegseth Faces Impeachment Charges, and Why Dead Birds Are Washing Up in California

From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Traci Mumford. Today's Tuesday, November 10th. Here's what we're covering. We're going to start with three quick updates on big stories we've been following. First. When you went to China earlier this year in May, did you know about these alleged ties with the Chinese spy then? No, I didn't hear about it then. But a lot of people have heard about it, and Jensen totally denies that. I asked him today, because I did speak to him today, just to see if he's feeling all right, how you're doing. President Trump denied yesterday that he was briefed about U.S. Intel on a potential Chinese spy getting close to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. The Times has reported that roughly a year ago, Trump chose not to do anything with that information. The president has been wary of disrupting NVIDIA's chip sales, which have helped supercharge the stock market. Overall, news of Huang's romantic affair with the alleged spy continues to send shockwaves from Washington to Silicon Valley to Beijing, raising questions about national security and the future of one of the world's most valuable companies. NVIDIA's stock fell sharply on Monday, even as the broader market rallied. Next, on Capitol Hill yesterday. The form of the resolution is as follows. Republican Representative Thomas Massey of Kentucky introduced eight articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Among other alleged offenses, Massey accused Hegseth of waging war against Iran without congressional authorization, carrying out unlawful military strikes against suspected drug traffickers, and unlawfully capturing Venezuela's president, Nicolas Morales. According to House rules, lawmakers must consider any articles of impeachment within two legislative days, though congressional leaders could use procedural rules, like sending the charges to a committee, to try and head off a full House vote on the charges. Hegseth has rejected the allegations and called the impeachment effort a political sham. He's scheduled to hold a press conference this morning to respond to the charges. And last quick update. The verdict is in on the most high-profile attempt yet to tax the ultra-wealthy in the U.S. Last night, the Associated Press determined that voters in California narrowly rejected a controversial tax on billionaires that was on the ballot in the midterms. The measure, known as Prop 40, would have imposed a one-time 5% tax on billionaires' assets, using most of the money to pay for health care in the state. The tax was born out of a growing anger, over inequality in the U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders called it the most important ballot measure in the country. But it divided Democrats in California, some of whom said it would drive away entrepreneurs, lowering overall tax revenue and hurting the state budget in the long term. And some of the California billionaires who would have been hit by the tax poured money into defeating it, funding a wave of attack ads on TV ahead of the election. The co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin, spent more than $100 million of his own money to defeat the measure. Now, a new investigation from The Times about one of the Trump administration's deportation strategies. Since President Trump returned to office, the administration has struck a number of third-country deportation deals. It's been their solution for what to do with immigrants who can't be legally sent back to where they're from. The U.S. government has struck deals with the U.S. government with other countries willing to take them instead in exchange for money or foreign policy favors. But my colleagues have been tracking where some of those immigrants are actually ending up. We realized that a lot of the people that the Trump administration is deporting to third countries were being systematically repatriated, including some really against their will, people that were forced onto planes and threatened with imprisonment. Megha Rajagopalan is an investigative reporter at The Times. She says in more than 110 cases The Times identified, people with court-ordered protections were handed over to foreign governments only to then be passed on to their home countries where they risked torture, sexual abuse, or persecution. One story that really stood out to me was the story of Mustafa Kamara, who was a nurse back in Nebraska. He worked there for many years, even through the COVID pandemic. He overseed a visa. And was later ordered removed from the United States, although an immigration court said that he should not be removed to his home country of Gambia because he would be persecuted there. Instead, the Trump administration sent him to Ghana. And in Ghana, they told him immediately that he would be forced to return to his home country. And it happened really, really quickly. Megha says human rights groups she talked to say the Trump administration has basically developed a bank-shot way of evading court orders. And the U.S. Department of Justice is currently returning people to their home countries against a judge's orders is a crime under international law known as "refoulement." The State Department would not answer questions about whether its program amounts to refoulement by proxy. The U.S. government has said it does not track what happens to deportees. I recently visited a number of beaches along California's central coast, which is about halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. From far away, the beach looks normal. I mean, people were having picnics. But then as soon as you start walking on the beach, you have to navigate around carcasses of dead birds that have been washing up for the past several weeks. And the rangers on the central coast that I talked to said that they haven't seen anything like this before. Soumya Karlamangla covers California for The Times, where she says there's been a major die-off of birds. At one beach, rangers told her more than 2,500 sick and dead birds have washed up on shore in just the past few months. In the same period last year, they found only about 100. And that is just one beach. The situation has alarmed scientists, who say the animals are struggling to survive because the water in the Pacific is getting too warm. And this year, El Nino is making things even worse, with the weather pattern compounding the effects of climate change. In Monterey Bay, for example, scientists recently found that the water temperature was 13 degrees higher than average. Experts say as the water gets warmer, some birds' main food source, fish, appear to be diving deeper, trying to find cooler temperatures. And that's left some birds starving to death or washing up on shore emaciated. Everyone is really worried. The scientists I talked to were all saying that this is kind of the beginning of what they expect with El Nino, which is expected to only worsen in the coming months and warm the water even more. At one animal hospital, the CEO was saying, like, you know, there's a reason we use this phrase, the canary in the coal mine. Birds can tell us a lot about what's happening. And this is really a sign that something is not right in the ocean. Salmia says that the bird die-off this year has been so extreme, scientists are also looking at other factors beyond warming waters. One marine ecologist told her, we don't have all the answers right now because we're, quote, still in this event. And finally, last night, one of the biggest awards in the world of books went to a science fiction novel, a major coup for a genre that has a long history of being dismissed as pulpy or unserious. I really didn't expect to be up here this evening. I honestly didn't. But here I am. The writer M. John Harrison won the Booker Prize for his novel The End of Everything, which imagines a dystopian Britain mysteriously taken over by aliens. According to the head of the Booker Foundation, it's the first science fiction winner in the award's nearly 60-year history. She said while some previous winners, like Margaret Atwood or Kazuo Ishiguro, had facets of sci-fi in their work, The End of Everything is the first, quote, bona fide sci-fi winner. Brits call the genre SF, just for the record. In a BBC interview, Harrison himself said this kind of literary recognition was something he'd been talking about with his fellow genre writers for decades. I always tried to say to my associates in SF, you know, why shouldn't a well-written SF be considered to be literary fiction? And why can't we work on that? Though Harrison is not well-known in the U.S., some critics in the U.K. have praised him as the best writer you've never heard of. One of the judges for the Booker said she also came in cold, having never picked up his work, but that reading it felt like, quote, meeting the rest of your life. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, my colleague Trip Mikkel with more on the spying scandal swirling around the tech giant NVIDIA. It's hard to begin to wrap your head around how important Jensen Wong is to artificial intelligence and this company itself. geopolitical controversy in corporate history. You can listen to that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.