The Headlines - A Forced Retreat for Trump and Hegseth, and What to Know About the Russia Plague Scare

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

Plus, the woman who helped make the moon landing possible. Here’s what we’re covering:Long-Deployed Aircraft Carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln Set for Homecoming, by John Ismay and Jan RansomTrump’s Retreat: From the Gulf to Britain, American Forces Pull Back, by David E. Sanger and Eric SchmittHow a U.S. Diplomat Suppressed and Altered Reports Critical of Israel, by Natan Odenheimer and Adam RasgonChrista Pike, Awake and Confused, Is at the Center of a Legal Storm, by Emily CochraneWhat Experts Want to Know About the Russia Plague Scare, by K. R. CallawayThe Woman Whose Software Guided the Apollo Missions Has Died, by Trip Gabriel Tune in every weekday morning, and tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Thursday, October 8th. Here's what we're covering. How are we doing, sailors? 265 continuous days without a port call. Two times extended when you thought you were going home. Today, the USS Abraham Lincoln is scheduled to dock back home in San Diego

after a near-record-length deployment during which the crew faced food shortages and logistics issues. You finish the mission nonetheless. Yes, it's hard. That's why you're here. You do difficult and hard things. Defense Secretary Pete Hegsef landed on the ship this week to thank the sailors for their service, which ran for much longer than expected in order to support President Trump's campaign against Iran. When reports emerged the summer of supply shortages and multiple suicide attempts among the crew,

Hegsef and Navy leaders downplayed them, calling them overblown, something has. something Hegeseth repeated when he was on the Lincoln. But experts say the problems the aircraft carrier faced speak to enormous American vulnerabilities that have been exposed by the ongoing war. Taking stock, many of the 13 military bases in the Middle East once used by the U.S., including those in Bahrain, Kuwait, and the UAE, have been severely damaged by Iranian attacks,

making them uninhabitable and forcing troops to be moved out. That's made resupplying ships like the Lincoln much more difficult, because the military is now having to do that from a base more than 2,000 miles away. The same thing applies to the air, with the retreat from Middle East bases and the recent rushed withdrawal of U.S. planes from an airbase in Britain. American bombers can still reach their targets, but only by flying from the U.S., requiring more time and refueling. In all, experts say the U.S. has the capability to keep patrolling the military,

Middle East, but the way it's had to pull back has made missions more complicated. Looking ahead, it could take billions of dollars to rebuild the damaged facilities, and U.S. troop levels in the region might never fully staff back up to what they were before the war started. A new Times investigation has found that a top official at the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem has suppressed and altered communications that were critical of Israel. The official, David Milstein, is the de facto. chief of staff for the U.S. ambassador. He's also the stepson of the prominent right-wing radio host

Mark Levin, a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In his role, Milstein is in charge of reviewing information that gets passed up the chain to the White House and the State Department. The Times interviewed 15 U.S. officials who worked with Milstein and obtained diplomatic documents he reviewed and found that he has actively reframed the situation on the ground in Gaza, and the West Bank, to portray the Israeli government in a positive light. For example, last summer, after dozens of Gazans were killed trying to get food at a U.S. Israeli-backed aid site, Milstein rewrote a report about the incident, calling the humanitarian operation a success while overlooking the casualties.

And this spring, when settler violence in the West Bank surged, Milstein blocked embassy communications that suggested the Israeli government was not taking action to stop the violence. Instead, the embassy sent a cable to Washington that praised Israel for cracking down on the attacks. While it's not clear if Milstein's interventions have had an impact on White House policy, multiple officials the Times talked to

said they were speaking out because they were concerned that Washington has been getting a distorted view of Israeli actions. Milstein declined a request for an interview. And the U.S. ambassador to Israel wrote in a statement that the Times reporting was, quote, lacking in fact, and that he personally and categorically refuted the claims about his staffer. You can find the full investigation in the Times app or at NYTimes.com. In Tennessee. Our understanding was the first thing she said was, where am I and who are you?

Lawyers for Krista Pike say they were shocked to learn that she has woken up in the hospital after becoming the first death. inmate to survive lethal injection. Pike had been on life support and presumed to be brain dead since the attempted execution last week. But her lawyers announced yesterday that she had suddenly regained consciousness and even started talking. She has wanted to know what's happened, and she's asked about several people. She's asked about her team. She's asked about the victim's family. I think she is angry and confused about everything right now. Her legal team said her condition remains severe. She can't move her arms. Her hands are massively swollen. She has pneumonia and she can't swallow. And even though doctors have worked to remove the drug pentobarbital from her

system, she could face serious long-term complications. The update on her condition came on the same day as a judge granted a request by Pike's lawyers to order the state of Tennessee to preserve all records and evidence related to what happened during the botched execution. What happens next to Pike is unclear. Now 50 years old, she's been on death row since she was a teenager when she was convicted of luring her classmate into the woods and murdering her. The state has not said whether it will try again to execute her, though Tennessee's governor has paused all executions there

while an investigation is underway. I think it's incumbent upon Russia to obviously share more information with the world. That's what they should do. That's what we hope they will do. The U.S. and other countries are pushing for more details after the death of a worker in a Siberian research lab set off concerns about the plague. We're watching it very closely hour by hour. We have multiple agencies, not just in the United States, but internationally that are watching it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Russia needs to be more transparent about the mysterious death. There's a lot we don't know at the moment, but here's what we do.

A 28-year-old woman who worked at the Anti-Plaug Institute of Siberia and the Far East died earlier this month of what Russian officials say was pneumonia. The rumors and speculation started swirling once the lab was locked down, and health officials quarantined employees and patients at the hospital where she died, along with others who came into contact with her. While hundreds of cases of plague are reported around the world each year, part of what's fueling concerns now is that the Soviet Union had a long history of advanced bioweapons research, which led to outbreaks of other diseases like anthrax and smallpox.

For their part, Russian officials have said tests did not show the lab worker had been infected with any pathogen related to her work, and that no emergency situation has been identified at the facility. But they've supplied few other details. As one epidemiologist told the times, young people can die from pneumonia. That's not what's concerning. Quote, what I do think is concerning is the Russian reaction so far. Still, health experts say that even if the woman did die of plague, there's no need to panic. They say the risk of widespread contagion would likely be limited, and in its early stages, plague can be successfully treated with antibiotics.

And finally. Sunday, July 20th, 1969, the moment the lunar module touched down on the moon's surface and men will forever remember. Tangleity base here, the Eagle has landed. When NASA pulled off the first ever moon landing, the success of the Apollo mission came down to a lot of carefully crafted code. I was not concentrating on the mission per se. I was concentrating on the software. All of a sudden, it was like, my God, look what happened. We did it. It worked. Margaret Hamilton, the woman who led the team that wrote much of that code, has died at 90 years old. She joined the Apollo Project as a young mathematician back in the 1960s.

Side note, she's actually credited with popularizing the term software engineering. For the lunar mission, she was working with computers that were so old school it's almost stunning to imagine. At the time, software programs were stored using hand-woven copper wires. And just for comparison, an iPhone has 7 million times the amount of storage as the module that was on board that lander. In one famous photo of Hamilton that's gone viral in recent years, she is standing next to a giant stack of paper, almost taller than her, and it is all the printed out code for the moon landing mission. She went on to work on more lunar landings, and her programming went into the first U.S. space station and the early design of the space shuttle. For her contributions to American science, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But she got arguably an even greater honor a few years ago when she was immortalized by Lego,

which issued a miniature Margaret Hamilton figurine, complete with a teetering stack of computer code. Those are the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow with the latest and the Friday News Quiz. Thank you.