Why Trump Is Gathering Republicans in Texas, and Iran Targets U.S. Warships

From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Tracey Mumford. Today is Wednesday, September 9th. Here's what we're covering. I'm here in Dallas for the first day of the unusual midterm convention that President Trump has decided to throw for the Republican Party. It's the first time in modern history that there's been something quite like this. My colleague Shane Goldmacher is in Texas, where Republicans are gathering today for the kind of high-profile event that normally only happens during the run-up to a presidential election. President Trump will be headlining both nights of the GOP midterm convention, which one person involved in planning it told The Times is as much about boosting Trump himself as it is about boosting the party. The event is a chance for Republicans to raise money. Attendees, including lawmakers, are being charged $25,000 each. And it's also being pitched as a way to galvanize voters ahead of the midterms, where the GOP is expected to face steep losses. But part of the story of this convention is who's not attending. There are a number of key Republicans who have decided not to come here to Texas to appear because President Trump is a potential drag on their chances to win this fall. President Trump's approval ratings are down. Gas prices have been up. Grocery prices have been up. Some of the issues that voters said they put Republicans back in power to deal with have been unaddressed. So one of the things we're watching is who is in fact in Dallas and who is not in Dallas to get a sense of can Republicans win this fall by pulling Donald Trump closer to them, or do they need to push him away a little bit? It's going to be a tricky balance for the party. In the Middle East in recent days, there's been a burst of new attacks with Iran targeting American warships for the first time. It started over the weekend with Iran attempting to attack two U.S. military vessels. U.S. Central Command retaliated. Yesterday, a similar cycle seemed to play out again. The U.S. said it destroyed multiple Iranian oil tankers after Iran attempted to hit a U.S. Navy warhead. So this was a line that Iran had been very hesitant to cross before. They were very reluctant to do the kind of strikes that could inflict heavy casualties for American forces, which is why we hadn't really seen them launch a major strike on a U.S. warship. Erica Solomon covers Iran for The Times. Regional experts and political analysts in Iran that I've been speaking to say that what we're seeing is basically Iran trying to signal it's ready and willing to escalate. From Iran's perspective, they're feeling really unequal. Economic squeeze from the U.S. naval blockade. The country's suffering from a fuel shortage crisis. The economic despair is just really palpable. They don't feel they have much to lose from expanding the conflict right now. Another thing you hear Iranian commentators say a lot is that this is the moment to do it. They're convinced President Trump is going to launch a new round of war against them anyway once the U.S. midterm elections are over. If his party wins, he'll feel emboldened. If they do poorly, they're worried he won't win. They don't feel there's much reason not to go heavy on Iran. So from their perspective, if they want to inflict a political cost on President Trump, they need to do that now. Meanwhile, as Iran steps up its attacks, the global price of oil is now back over $100 a barrel, a milestone it's hit a few times since the war started. Overall, the price of oil is currently about 40% more than it was just before the fighting began in February. The British government agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank, perpetrated by settler terrorists. And all too often, the Israeli government has turned a blind eye to this. Yesterday, Britain, along with France and Canada, took a major step in turning up the political pressure on Israel over the treatment of Palestinians. I do not believe the British people want us to support them. We want to support the occupation by accepting products from settlements in our shops and supermarkets. Britain's foreign secretary said the three countries will ban the import of goods from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, settlements that are considered illegal under international law. While the move is mostly symbolic, it's a sign of how Israel is becoming increasingly ostracized, even by some of its once-close allies. International outrage at Israel had already surged over the war in Gaza, and has been growing in the face of rising violence in the West Bank. Recently, settler violence there has soared to record levels, and Israeli extremists have repeatedly attacked Palestinians, as the Israeli military has stood by. The attacks have been condemned not just by other countries, but also by a growing number of influential Israelis. In an open letter published this summer, more than 200 people, including retired Israeli generals, intelligence officials, and two of the country's former prime ministers, demanded that the government step in to stop the attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. They said what's happening there is terrorism, and that the Israeli government is, quote, knowingly complicit. In response to questions from the Times about the letter, the Israeli prime minister's office declined to address those accusations. Yesterday, Israel did respond forcefully to the sanctions announcement, saying it would close the British consulate in East Jerusalem. ♪♪ Back in the year 2000, a mathematics institute laid out a challenge. It identified seven legendary, enormously complex, unsolved math problems, and said it would award $1 million to anyone who could crack them. They were dubbed the Millennium Problems, and the whole challenge was designed to push the world, leading mathematicians to new heights. Yesterday, OpenAI announced that its AI technology has solved one of them. The tech giant said that one of its latest models cracked what's known as the Navier-Stokes problem, which relates to the movement of water and other fluids. OpenAI said its model solved it in just 88 hours, with as many as 10,000 AI agents working in concert. As a side note, running that amount of AI systems likely cost $1 million. In the math world, some experts are excited about the breakthrough, while others are urging caution about turning over the biggest problems in math to AI. In an interview with The Times, one mathematician at UCLA, who's widely regarded as one of the world's leading mathematicians, warned that using AI to solve problems like this could weaken humans' understanding of math. He said that working at and puzzling through intensely difficult problems teaches you something, comparing it to going to the gym to lift weights. He said that if you let AI do it, quote, it's like having machines that can lift weights for you. And finally, AI might be out there with its fancy math pulling a Goodwill hunting, but when it comes to house hunting, sorry, had to do it, it's causing some issues. More and more listings for houses and apartments, are relying on AI to do virtual staging. Instead of having to move in nice-looking furniture, or asking a tenant to clean up, you just have AI reimagine the space and post those altered images. Real estate listings have, of course, used tools like Photoshop to zhuzh things up for a long time. But some people say that the AI boom is going too far, adding lots of natural light, which is never actually going to pour through those windows, or upgrading the bathroom fan, or adding new furniture fixtures, or redoing the kitchen cabinets. It's raising concerns about false advertising. Things have gotten to the point that some cities and states are moving to crack down on deceptive AI real estate images. California and Wisconsin have passed laws requiring real estate agents to disclose when they use AI to significantly alter listings. And other states are considering that kind of rule, too. One thing to keep an eye out for if you are house hunting, and wondering if the photos are going to be true, you should look for a fireplace. For some reason, AI keeps adding fireplaces. They're showing up in listing after listing in houses that definitely don't have fireplaces. After one condo listing went up in Portland, Oregon, showing some cozy flickering flames, the broker added a disclaimer, saying that the fireplace wasn't real. He told the Times, quote, The AI thought we should put a fire in there. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, my colleague Nick Coriciniti explains President Trump's war on mail-in voting and how it sent some states scrambling ahead of the midterms. What these states are fearing is that the president and his administration are going to do something that they're well known for, racing beyond the legal bounds and trying to implement as much of this executive order as they can before any legal dispute. And that's what we're going to do. We're going to do something that they're well known for, racing beyond the legal bounds, and trying to implement as much of this executive order as they can before any legal dispute. Disputes are settled. You can listen to 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 everything we publish when you download the Times app now. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.