U.S.S. Lincoln Begins 13,000-Mile Journey Home, and the Shortage That Could Take Down the Grid

From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Friday, August 21st, here's what we're covering. With the war in Iran almost at the 6th month mark, President Trump is issuing new threats. This time, aimed at Iran's economy. On social media this week, he promised what he called an "economic D-Day" and quote, "the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country." Though his administration has not specified what that will look like. What can we expect here? Yeah, you're going to expect I'll be holding a press conference on Monday to talk about exactly what we're going to do. Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Scott Besent, whose department oversees things like sanctions, said a plan will be rolled out next week. But his comments also made something else clear. If we are doing the maximum economic pressure, then that means that likely there will not be a large-scale kinetic restart. Essentially, by going all in on economic warfare, the U.S. is stepping back from its threats of military action. An expert say Iran is listening closely. One former Middle East negotiator who worked for President of both parties said Iran's leaders are likely reading Trump's pivot as a clear sign he does not want to go back to full-scale war. The question now, though, is how effective any new economic pressure on Iran can be. The U.S. is already blockading its ports, and the country has faced years of crippling sanctions. Still, the regime has remained resilient. This week, Trump expanded his threats to target any country that does business with Iran, trying to isolate it further. But experts say following through on that will be very difficult. Iran's most important financial lifeline is China, which buys most of Iran's oil. And one expert on economics at the Council on Foreign Relations told the Times, quote, "I'm skeptical," Trump is willing to risk instigating an economic war with China right now. And one other quick update on the war. The U.S. was finally leaving the Middle East. In recent weeks, there had been a growing number of reports about deteriorating conditions on the aircraft carrier and how the crew had been pushed to its limits, as the ships stayed at sea for months longer than expected, supporting President Trump's military campaign in Iran. Earlier this month, hundreds of family members of the sailors flooded a town hall meeting with Navy officials demanding an update about conditions on board. Now, the Lincoln has started its 13,000-mile journey back to its home port of San Diego, which could take a month or longer. Last year, right after getting back into the White House, President Trump continued his flurry of executive moves. President Trump went on a firing spree. The President fired the inspector's general from a number of federal agencies. He dismissed around 20 inspectors' general, their essentially watchdogs, who were supposed to provide independent oversight of federal agencies, looking for things like waste and fraud. Many of those positions are still unfilled. But Trump has now started to put in some of his own replacements. You know, traditionally, you would appoint accountants or law enforcement or previous internal investigators, people from non-political backgrounds. But what we're seeing is that Donald Trump is appointing people from overtly political backgrounds to these roles. Luke Broadwater covers the White House for the Times. He says Trump's picks for the roles have included a former Republican congressman, a lawyer who worked for Republicans on Capitol Hill. And most recently, one of the authors of Project 2025, the well-known conservative policy initiative, in their new roles. Some of the IGs have started investigating or attacking the president's frequent targets, like California Governor Gavin Newsom and New York Attorney General Latisha James. Typically, what an inspector general does is they scrutinize their own agency. So if you're the inspector general for, let's say, Homeland Security, you're looking at how the Homeland Security Secretary is running the office. Are they spending dollars wisely or contracts going out to the lowest bidder? Things like that. You're not typically going around the country looking for Donald Trump's enemies and attempting to investigate them. And so the criticism is, as some of these inspectors general turn their gaze outside of their own agencies, are they actually scrutinizing the agency they're supposed to? In all, after Trump's firings, as well as big funding cuts for inspectors general's offices, Luke says there's evidence that the oversight work itself has slowed. According to a nonprofit research group, in the first half of this year, the number of investigative reports from IGs assigned to cabinet level agencies dropped 25 percent compared to previous years. In response to questions from the Times, a White House spokeswoman said Trump had hired "highly qualified and accomplished individuals" and that they would carry out his mission of targeting fraud. In California about a decade ago, a group of gunmen attacked an electrical substation in the Bay Area, firing on it over 100 times and causing so much damage that it was shut down for nearly a month. While the gunmen were never caught or identified, it was considered a carefully planned attack with the snipers aiming directly at one key piece of the power facility, its transformers. Around that time, experts warned about what might happen if that kind of coordinated strike was more widespread. According to a former federal energy official, an analysis he commissioned showed that if just nine carefully chosen substations out of the roughly 50,000 in the US were knocked out simultaneously, it could cause a cascading grid failure and plunge the entire country into a blackout. In the Times has learned that since then, the potential for that kind of devastating electrical outage could be higher than ever, in part because of a nationwide shortage of transformers. These transformers come in all shapes and sizes, but the really crucial ones are usually sitting behind barbed wire fences in substations. They're those huge, truck-sized boxes with knobby cones and thick wires coming out of them. And it turns out transformers are actually incredibly hard to make. They're built to spec, assembled by hand, and there's only one facility in the entire country that manufactures the specialized ultra-thin steel that goes into them. Recently, the wait time for new transformers has jumped to more than two years, in part because of surging demand for new grid infrastructure due to the rise of data centers. One energy analyst told the Times that the shortage is, quote, "hair on fire, biting my nails, losing sleep levels of bad." By one estimate, if this kind of nationwide blackout did play out, it could last for months and months and months until the infrastructure could be replaced. The federal government actually co-authored a report for what that could look like, and it sounds like something out of a disaster movie. It predicted there would be widespread shortages of fuel, water, and food, cell phones would be useless, credit cards wouldn't work, and that within several days, quote, "wide-spread social unrest and confusion would ensue." Worst case scenarios aside, some experts say there are things in the works that could bring down the risk of a devastating nationwide blackout. The same data center boom that's been helping to cause the shortage of transformers also means that huge amounts of money are flowing into potential fixes for the problem. For example, with all of that investment, transformer production is ramping up. In the last few years, one Virginia-based company that builds transformers has grown from 1800 employees to 6,000. And researchers are also developing new types of transformers that are easier to repair if they ever get damaged. And finally, a while back, a researcher visiting a zoo in Shanghai noticed a surprising and honestly kind of adorable scene playing out in the ape enclosure. A female gibbon had managed to pick up a little mouse and was gently caressing it with her hand, and the mouse seemed to be okay with it. Those of this kind of heartwarming interspecies friendship are of course all over social media. But the researcher had deeper questions. What was the root of this behavior and how common was it? He's a biological anthropologist, and this summer he co-authored a study in the journal primates that laid out some potential answers. It said that every single one of the nearly 100 primate species, the team analyzed, displayed behavior kind of like keeping a pet. There was the macaque monkey that bonded with a chicken, a troop of kapuchin monkeys that adopted a little baby marmoset, and other interactions between primates and all kinds of animals, lizards, birds, dogs. The new research suggests that the roots of humans craving animal companionship may stretch deep into our primate past. The experts say that the behavior of keeping a pet at all continues to be something of a mystery from an evolutionary perspective. When it's all about survival, why would any species develop a habit of spending time and resources caring for another species? There are a lot of theories floating out there that pets were useful for things like hunting and protection, or even that they could be a status symbol. The researcher, who first spotted the gibbon in the mouse, suspects part of the motivation might be about loneliness, basically scratching an itch for intimacy by scooping up another little warm body. Those are the headlines. If you'd like to play the Friday news quiz, stick around. It's just after these credits. And if you are not a time subscriber yet, you can get a full month of free access to everything the times publishes when you download the Times app now. This show is made by Will Jarvis, Margaret Cadefa, Jake Lucas, Jan Stewart, and me, Tracy Mumford. Original theme by Dan Powell. Special thanks to Isabel Anderson, Sam Dolnick, Miles McKinley, 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? First up, people are out here in New York, living in a flex one bedroom for $4,400 a month. For years, New York City was widely considered the most notoriously expensive place to live in the entire country. Like New York is such a scam, bro. Over the years, though, it has been surpassed by other metro areas. And now, according to federal data, it's no longer even in the top three. According to a new report from the Department of Commerce, what three places in the U.S. have the highest living expenses, taking into account housing, utilities, etc. The answer. Coming in at number three, Los Angeles, number two, Miami, and at number one, San Francisco. On the flip side, if you're looking for affordable places to live, the bottom three on the list are Dothan Alabama, Eagle Pass, Texas, and Monroe, Louisiana. Next question. Tommy John going the distance of brilliant job by Tommy John. This past weekend, the celebrated pro athlete Tommy John died at age 83. John got the nickname "bionic man" after undergoing a pioneering surgery that saved his career. The procedure, which has now become common, is named after him. Your question. What sport did Tommy John play? The answer. Baseball. Whenever I try to get the little extra pop on the ball that you need to get guys out, I just couldn't do it. And I couldn't throw a good curveball. Tommy John was a pitcher, and after years of wear and tear from hurling the ball, he tore a ligament on the inside of his elbow. Doctors grafted in a bit of tendon from his wrist, basically giving him a new elbow. And after that, he went on to win more than 160 major league games, only retiring at age 46. In the years since, hundreds of other baseball players, including stars like Shoei Otani, have gotten Tommy John's surgery. And surgeons say it's actually become increasingly common at the youth level. At one point, a study found that the majority of players who got the procedure were 15 to 19 years old, as kids specialized in sports from a younger and younger age. And last one. What on earth has happened? It's the biggest world story for years, isn't it? This week, the British public and Anglo files everywhere got a bit of a shock when it came out that Prince Harry plans to move back to the UK with his wife and children. The couple famously stepped down from their status as working royals and moved to the US six years ago, after struggling with intense tabloid attention and clashes within the royal family. In some ways, that tension only increased once they left, especially when Harry published a tell-all memoir sharing family details and describing his brother William as his "arch nemesis." What was the name of Harry's book, which went on to sell almost 1.5 million copies on the very first day it was published? Hint for you, the title comes from the rhyming phrase "the air and the air being air to the throne." The answer? His memoir is called "Spare." As in "Williams the Air," Harry's "The Spare." A little bonus for you here. Can you name who these other famous memoirs were written by? I'll give you the title. Becoming. That's Michelle Obama. How about "friends, lovers, and the big terrible thing," emphasis on "friends." That one was from Matthew Perry. Next one, "Bossy Pants." "Bossy Pants" is Tina Fey's memoir. And last one, "Who wrote just kids?" That is by the singer-songwriter Patty Smith. Her memoir was so acclaimed it won the National Book Award. Of course, not every big figure always gets creative with their title. Both Catherine Hepburn and Elton John titled their memoirs "Me." That's it for this week's news quiz. You can always tell us how you did at the headlines at NYtimes.com. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll see you on Monday.