Possible Terror Plot Thwarted at U.K. Base, and Amazon Drones Overwhelm a Texas Town

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Monday, September 28th, here's what we're covering. President Trump's war against Iran has depleted U.S. weapon stockpiles to troubling levels, according to senior officials. And the timeline for stocking back up on air defense missiles and other critical weaponry is long. A recent report from the Congressional Budget Office said it could take, quote, "at least five years." With those warnings in mind, the Times has been looking at some of the factors that make rebuilding the U.S. arsenal so difficult. One of them is a little piece of metal that honestly wouldn't look that out of place in a junk drawer. Ball screws are highly engineered components. They might not look that special, but they are incredibly precise. If it goes in a missile, they can easily be a thousand-dollar screws. And so it just changed my whole concept of what a screw is. Ferris Stockman covers manufacturing for the Times. She says precision ball screws, which contain tiny metal balls to reduce friction, are essential not just in missiles, but also planes and other modern technology. And they require incredible attention to detail at the factory level. The ones used in missiles, for example, must meet specs measured in units roughly 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair. And Ferris says only a handful of companies are capable of making the ball screws the U.S. military needs. I traveled to the epicenter of U.S. ball screw manufacturing, which is sagging on Michigan. It's where General Motors had a division that made ball screws for steering wheels in the 1930s, and some of these guys still use World War II era machines to make them. And a lot of them have gone bankrupt in recent years, or they've been bought up by bigger companies. And that's happening exactly at the same time that demand is increasing, because all of a sudden we need them for humanoid robots. We need them for submarines. We need them for missiles. You come across these bottlenecks in American manufacturing. There might be a component that no one's even heard of, and all of a sudden it's the thing that's preventing us from making what we really need to make. Ferris says precision ball screws are far from the only weapons component that can be hard to source, but the long lead time for these ball screws right now can add months or even years to how long it takes to make a missile. One executive of a logistics company that tracks supply chains for the U.S. military called it, quote, "an immediate single point failure for our national defense." Meanwhile, over the weekend President Trump told reporters that he's rejecting the proposal Iran put forward to end the war. It had laid out a seven-day timeline to reopen the straight-of-war moves and restart talks about Iran's nuclear program. It is a very reasonable plan on the table. If they rejected for nears with no reason, this is their fault. Despite Trump's comments, Iran's foreign minister said yesterday that given a history of contradictory messaging from the U.S., Iran was waiting to hear an official rejection from mediators. Also this weekend in the U.K. So at around 12.45 a.m. today, police received a call relating to three suspicious vehicles traveling towards Arya Fairford. Authorities said they thwarted a possible terror attack at an air base that the U.S. military has been using for its strikes on Iran. "A 400-metre cordon has been put in place around the vehicles by the Army's explosive, ordnance, disposal unit, examined them." Footage from the scene yesterday appeared to show a bomb disposal robot operating near three white vans. An official said they'd evacuated dozens of surrounding homes as a precaution. They said they'd arrested five men on suspicion of terrorism, and investigators are looking into whether there's any link to Iran. Earlier this year, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps delivered a warning to the British government that, quote, "any base used to launch attacks on Iranian territory is a legitimate target for our forces." Their runway, at the base in southern England, is one of the few in Europe that's long enough to be used by heavy American bombers. And while the UK initially declined to let the U.S. use it for the Iran conflict, the government later signed off on it. In the wake of the arrests, Britain's Prime Minister said an investigation into what happened is still ongoing, and he urged people not to speculate about any motive. Investigators are also looking into whether there's any link to Russia, which has been accused of orchestrating previous attacks on British soil. Now, two quick updates on the Trump administration. First, the White House says it plans to cancel more than $800 million in federal funding for education and health-related programs that Congress had approved. This is the second time the administration has tried to take advantage of a quirk in the fiscal calendar to cut money without input from lawmakers. The legally untested maneuver would pull back funding for, among other things, programs for health research and the support of migrant students. Last year, the administration used the same method to cut billions in foreign aid, putting in the request so close to September 30th, the end of the fiscal year, that Congress did not have time to reject it. The chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Republican Susan Collins, called the latest proposed cuts illegal, and the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, Patty Murray, described it as, quote, "fept from the American people, plain and simple." And, "This is the final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state." Since watching TV this weekend, Saturday Night Live, or some big college football or NFL games, we're shown in ad featuring President Trump vowing to take on communists, Marxists, and fascists. "We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country." The TV spot looked like a campaign ad featuring dramatic shots of Trump. But at the end, the screen flashed, paid for by the U.S. government. It's one of a series of pro-Trump ads the administration has put out recently. And while it's not clear how much they cost, one estimate puts the price of the airtime at more than a million dollars. The administration has said the ads are public service announcements, quote, "reminding Americans to love their country." But some ethics experts say the ads have crossed a line and violate federal rules against using taxpayer dollars for propaganda. And finally, in the town of Richardson, Texas. You could just be walking down the street, birds are flying on a Saturday morning, some cars are going by, it's pretty peaceful. And then you see this drone appear above you, buzzing like billions of bees at once in a five, and go over you really quickly. It's five feet tall by five feet wide, and it weighs 83 pounds. So this isn't like the little drones that people might have to take pictures or videos. And when you see it coming in for a delivery, it's sort of like the moon landing, right? It sort of goes down really slowly, and hovers about 12 feet above the ground. And its cargo door opens and it just spits out this box. My colleague Juliet McCurrer has been reporting on how a Dallas suburb has become a testing ground for delivery by drone. Richardson is one of the first cities in the country where Amazon has gotten permission to test what it's calling prime air. And every day, dozens of drones lift off from a nearby distribution center and buzz across the surrounding neighborhoods to drop off packages on people's property. That's the goal anyway. There is footage of Amazon drones accidentally dropping a package into a pool and crashing into an apartment building. For Amazon, Richardson is just the beginning. A spokeswoman said customer feedback had been, quote, "overwhelmingly positive." And the company's got plans to expand prime air to hundreds more towns and cities across the US in the next few months. But some residents who live under the drone's flight path told Juliet that their experience should be a cautionary tale. I ended up walking around several neighborhoods that were under what now residents are calling a drone highway. And overall, the general feeling was that everyone hated the drones. It's not like somebody came in, 20 minutes from other grass and leaves, it's all day long. They hated the sound, they hated the sight of it, and they hated the intrusion of something with cameras flying over their house every few minutes. Juliet says some residents have gone to city council meetings, complained to Amazon, and tried to escalate their concerns to the FAA, which controls the airspace. But they haven't gotten much traction, and are now turning to writing letters, warning officials in other cities where Amazon is about to expand that the primary program has been a, quote, "disaster." Still, the appeal of faster and faster delivery can be hard to resist, and Amazon's not the only one in the game. Walmart's trying it too, and one of the residents who has complained about the drones flying over her backyard acknowledged that her own daughter had been in a rush to make a sandwich at one point and ordered a package of ham from Walmart via drone. Those are the headlines. Today on the daily, "What are the officers? They came out. They goes, "Well, you and Africa. I said, what the hell am I doing in Africa, bro? I don't want to go to Africa." A first-person account of the Trump administration's third-country deportation policy, where migrants are being sent to countries they have no connections to. You can find that in the New York Times app, or wherever you get your podcasts, and if you are not a time subscriber yet, you can get a full month of free access to all of the journalism we publish when you download the Times app now. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.