Good evening. Here’s the latest at the end of Tuesday.
How far left will New York go?Voters in four states went to the polls today to weigh in on a high-stakes slate of congressional primaries. Many of the most interesting races are in New York City. There, a Kennedy scion is hoping to revive the family’s political legacy, rival A.I. giants are spending heaps of money trying to shape the industry’s regulation, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani is wagering a significant chunk of his political capital on like-minded politicians. If Mamdani succeeds, his socialist movement could get a boost on the national level; failure, on the other hand, could empower his opponents. In particular, the mayor and his allies are trying to unseat two Democratic incumbents, Representatives Daniel Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, who have both long supported Israel, and lay claim to a third House seat. The races show how far left New York Democrats have shifted, my colleague Nicholas Fandos said: “The more ‘moderate’ or ‘establishment’ candidates in these races were considered progressives just a few years ago.” Follow along with the results here, which will start to roll in soon after polls close at 9 p.m. Eastern time. So far, the electorate in New York is on track to be much smaller and about a decade older than last year.
The Strait of Hormuz is seeing a notable uptick in trafficMore than 100 vessels passed through the Strait of Hormuz between Saturday and yesterday, the most since the Iran war started more than three months ago. But traffic through the route, which is critical for the global energy market, is still less than half of the daily average before the conflict, and the path is still laden with mines. A U.N. agency also said today that it had started a plan to evacuate the hundreds of ships and thousands of mariners that became stranded in the Persian Gulf during the war. However, the future of the Strait of Hormuz is one of the many issues on which U.S. and Iranian negotiators have offered starkly different visions. The two sides also clashed today over whether Tehran had actually agreed to allow nuclear inspectors to visit its most sensitive sites. For more: In a major bipartisan rebuke, the Senate instructed President Trump to end the war in Iran or seek congressional approval.
Officials knew of Reflecting Pool problems soon after repairsThe Trump administration described the recently renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool as “crystal clear” even after workers discovered it was peeling and turning green. Government documents obtained by my colleagues showed that the National Park Service had noticed chunks of sealant from the $16.4 million project peeling off and floating to the surface less than two weeks after the pool was refilled. Trump recently blamed vandals for the pool’s deteriorating conditions. While workers found two cuts in sections of foam between the pool's expansion joints, those were unrelated to the peeling coating. In other Trump administration news:
China takes back the supercomputer crownA supercomputer in Shenzhen, China, was declared the world’s fastest today. It outperformed — by 20 percent — an American computing system that has held the top prize for the last year and a half. The enormous machines, first built for cracking codes and designing weapons, play major roles in science and national security. For more: As Chinese tech pulls ahead in some categories, U.S. officials warn against relying on it too heavily — but locking it out could lead U.S. companies to fall further behind. More top news
‘Odyssey’ offers a test for A.I. audiobooksNearly 3,000 years after Homer wrote the “Odyssey,” the epic poem is back in the pop culture spotlight, thanks to Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Hollywood adaptation. For those who want to know what the buzz is all about, a new audiobook delivers the story in the distinctive British voice of the actor Michael Caine. (Listen to a snippet here.) Except Caine isn’t really the one telling the story. A company called ElevenLabs licensed Caine’s voice and used A.I. to generate the 13-hour audiobook, with a supporting cast of 20 different A.I. voices. My colleague asked two prominent “Odyssey” translators what they thought, and got very different reactions.
America has many foundersThe titans of the American Revolution, like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, remain household names 250 years after the nation’s birth. But so many other participants in the great drama have been overlooked. The Times Magazine asked seven leading historians to each write about one of these “everyday founders.” There’s a backwoods agitator, a native leader and a patriot housewife. Through their perspectives, the story looks different — and that’s the point. Read them here.
Dinner table topics
|
