Trump’s Major Retreat on Greenland, and Why Texas Hit Pause on New Data Centers

From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Traci Mumford. Today is Wednesday, September 23rd. Here's what we're covering. This morning in New York, the president of Iran, Massoud Pazeshkian, will address the United Nations General Assembly. He and a small group of other Iranian officials were given permission by the State Department to enter the U.S., even though the two countries are at war. It's the first time in the eight-decade history of the United Nations that the leader of a country at war with the U.S. has made the trip to the U.N.'s headquarters. Pazeshkian is being protected by the U.S. Secret Service as his standard protocol for visiting leaders, and he's been escorted through Manhattan in a convoy of SUVs as he's held a marathon of diplomatic meetings. His speech will come just one day after. President Trump addressed the General Assembly, renewing his scorched-earth threats against Iran. Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations? Overall, in his remarks, Trump laid out a vision for a winner-takes-all world order that was effectively a rejection of the founding principles of the U.N. We are reasserting American power, including American military power. We're necessary in our region and around the world. When the U.N. was established after World War II, its aim was to, quote, save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, as it said in its charter, which was written largely by the U.S. But from the stage yesterday, Trump took a strikingly aggressive tone. Beyond his threat to wipe out Iran, he also promised that Cuba's government would fall one way or another, and he justified his administration's sweeping claims, on Venezuelan oil, by saying, In response, other world leaders pushed back on Trump's vision of a dog-eat-dog survival of the fittest world, even if they didn't name Trump directly. The president of France warned against returning to the, quote, and the leader of Angola described the world as being in the midst of global anarchy, quote, in which the use of force prevails over the force of reason and law. Meanwhile, with world leaders gathered in New York for the U.N. General Assembly, President Trump signed a security agreement over Greenland. Over the last year and a half, Trump repeatedly demanded that the island become part of the U.S., even threatening to take it by force, saying it was crucial for national security for the U.S. to have a bigger foothold in the Arctic. The new agreement marks a major retreat from the height of those threats. It explicitly does not give any territory to the U.S. It does pave the way for the U.S. to expand its military presence on the island, including by opening new bases, though an existing treaty from the 1950s already allowed for that. We are stopping Obamacare enrollment for about 750,000 people. 750,000 people who we believe are hurt. We are fraudulently enrolled in the program. In Washington yesterday, Vice President J.D. Vance held a press conference to announce that the administration has ejected several hundred thousand people from the Affordable Care Act health insurance marketplaces. We're actually making sure that the people receiving Obamacare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them. Amazingly, we weren't doing that before. Vance estimated that the move will save the government over $2 billion. In total, the number of people cut off. from the marketplaces amounts to about 4% of the Americans who get health insurance that way. And Vance said they're investigating about a half a million other enrollees as well. The announcement was the latest initiative by an anti-fraud task force that Vance leads, which has been frequently focused on federal health programs. My colleague Margot Sanger-Katz, who covers public health, has started looking into who has lost their coverage. The Trump administration has been talking a lot. They've been talking a lot about fraud in the Obamacare marketplaces, and there is some evidence of some fishy enrollment, both brokers who may have signed people up without their knowledge in order to collect commissions, and some weird clustering of enrollments that look suspicious. But when we asked the Trump administration how they found this group of people who they were describing in a press conference as fraudsters, they said that these were people who had some. data mistakes on their application, and they asked insurers to contact them and give them 30 days to reply and sort it out. And the people that failed to do that have been disenrolled. So I think it's possible that some of these people were doing something wrong, but it's also possible that some of them just were a little sloppy in the way that they filled out their applications and they didn't respond quickly enough to outreach. Margot says the administration itself acknowledged there may be people who had their coverage. canceled who shouldn't have, and it has set up a system for them to get reinstated. Overall, enrollment in coverage sold in Obamacare marketplaces had already fallen by several million people this year, after Congress did not extend subsidies that had made coverage less expensive. Less than a year ago. Texas will be the centerpiece for AI data centers for Google. the governor of Texas. Greg Abbott said the state would be the epicenter of AI development, with dozens and dozens of large data center projects underway there. They will be net positive to the power grid, making sure we have the reliability and the supply that Texas needs to keep the lights on. But now, Abbott has ordered Texas regulators to pause that boom and halt their reviews of any new permit applications for data centers. until the state can evaluate how they affect the power grid and what they're doing. According to one study from the University of Texas at Austin, data centers could use up to 9% of the state's water by 2040. Texas is not the first state to pump the brakes on data centers, but Abbott's U-turn is notable given how enthusiastically Texas had embraced the projects. According to the Pew Research Center, the state has more than 400 data centers in operation or being planned. the second most in the country, just behind. Virginia. Abbott's sharp pivot now speaks to how intense the backlash to data centers has become, as Americans across the political spectrum raise concerns about rising electric bills and noise and air pollution. And finally, usually this time of year is the peak of hurricane season in the Atlantic. the busiest time for storms to spin up and barrel towards land. But this year, not a single hurricane has formed there, something that hasn't happened in more than eight decades. There have been a handful of named storms in the Atlantic, but none strong enough to reach hurricane status. At the same time. We have one, two, three hurricanes active right now in the Pacific. The hurricane season in the Pacific has been wild. Southern California now on high alert for impacts later in the week. We are already on the P storm in the East Pacific, Polo. It exploded. A supercharged hurricane named Polo off the coast of Mexico is now the second most intense Pacific hurricane on record. The good news is that while it's super powerful, it's expected to stay mostly over the ocean. The oddity of this year's storm count can be explained by El Nino. The weather pattern has stifled tropical activity in the Atlantic while fueling storms in the Pacific. Experts have described El Nino as basically the planet's naturally recurring chaos agent. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily. The app is tracking the baby's movements. It logs when they woke up, when they fell asleep. It can see when their eyes open and close. A look at the rise of health trends. A tracking technology focused on babies. And whether having all that data is useful, or if it just fuels parents' anxieties. You can find that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you are not a Times 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 Tracey Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow. I'm Tracey Mumford. Thank you.