The Headlines - A New Threat to Global Shipping, and a Huge Drop-Off in Food Stamps

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

Plus, when A.I. writes your biography.  Here’s what we’re covering: Houthis in Yemen Declare Red Sea Blockade on Saudi Arabia, by Ismaeel Naar G.O.P. Boxed In on Iran War as Trump Sidelines Congress, by Robert Jimison Trump to Impose 50% Tariff on Many Canadian Goods, by Ana Swanson and Ian Austen White House Says New Air Force One Will Be Out of Service for a Month for ‘Upgrades,’ by Tyler Pager Faced With Piles of New Paperwork, People Are Losing Food Stamps, by Jason DeParle Most Forest Fires in Canada Are Simply Impossible to Put Out, by Norimitsu Onishi I Got Slopped, by Kashmir Hill Tune in every weekday morning, and tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. 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 Tuesday, July 21st. Here's what we're covering. In the Middle East, there are fears that a new front in the war could be opening. Yesterday, one of Iran's key proxy forces, the Houthi militia in Yemen, declared that it will choke off a key waterway in the region. It said it would stop all ships from Saudi Arabia, a major U.S. ally,

from passing through a portion of the Red Sea, which has become a critical alternate path for oil shipments as the Strait of Hormuz has been under fire. The Houthis, which are part of the so-called axis of resistance led by Iran, have been fighting the Saudi-backed government in Yemen for years. They've largely stayed out of the U.S. Iran War so far, but the new threat could bring them fully into the broader conflict in the region. It could also put more strain on global energy supplies.

There is some precedent for what that could look like. During the height of the war in Gaza, the Houthis attacked and hijacked ships in the Red Sea in solidarity with Hamas. That forced shipping companies to divert their cargo thousands of miles south around the tip of Africa, sending shipping costs soaring. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill today, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the president's top military advisor, General Dan Kane, will appear before lawmakers. to try and make the case for why Congress should approve tens of billions of dollars in new funding for the war. The greatest fighting force on the planet, the last great superpower must be fully equipped, and that's the job of Congress to make sure it's done. Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, has already signaled he intends to try and push that request through,

even though many other lawmakers, including a handful of Republicans, have raised concerns that President Trump is waging war without congressional authorization. Trump ignored recent votes by the House and Senate directing him to get their approval for the war. Democrats, for their part, are refusing to back the funding request, saying the administration needs to share more details about its strategy in the conflict, which is now stretched for almost five months and is deeply unpopular with the American public. Now, two other quick updates on the Trump administration. Yesterday, the president signed an order that will slap 50% tariffs on a wide range of goods from Canada starting next month, likely reigniting a clash with one of the country's largest trading partners.

Canada has been in the administration's crosshairs ever since it retaliated against Trump's first round of tariffs last year with tariffs of its own, and it's expected to be one of several countries to now face a new wave of surcharges from the White House. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court struck down Trump's sweeping use of tariffs, but the administration has been finding workarounds by turning to more obscure legal provisions. Also, as I understand it, in about a month or so, they're going to send it to have it be maxed out. President Trump says the new Air Force One jet will be temporarily taken out of service this fall for what the White House is calling upgrades and enhancements. It's not clear exactly what those changes will be.

but the Times has reported that the Secret Service raised security concerns about the Qatari-donated jet, which multiple officials say lacks the same anti-missile capabilities as the old Air Force One models. Trump, who was eager to get the luxury jet into service, has been furious about coverage of the plane's security issues, and the administration has been trying to unmask the confidential sources who spoke with the Times. Beyond issuing subpoenas to some of the reporters, the Justice Department has also been trying to get phone records from them and their relatives. That includes information about calls and messages on the phones of one of the reporter's mothers

and two of the reporter's spouses. A Justice Department spokesman said in a statement that any subpoena issued by the department is done, quote, in full compliance with federal law. In the years since Congress passed the one big, beautiful bill, a growing number of Americans are no longer receiving federal food stamp. benefits, commonly known as SNAP. The state with the highest drop-off is Arizona, where the number of people on SNAP has dropped by roughly half, meaning almost 500,000 people there no longer get federal food assistance.

I've talked to a 47-year-old man who's disabled. I talked to a 21-year-old college student. I've talked to a family that was homeless and living in their car. I talked to a grandmother with breast cancer, and she's lost a lot of weight because she's skipping meals to feed her grandkids. My colleague Jason DeParl has covered poverty for more than three decades. He says that things began to change as soon as President Trump's signature legislation was signed into law.

It introduced some work requirements for people getting benefits, which likely accounts for some of the drop-off. But Jason says the most significant change was the huge new penalties states can now face if they make mistakes when giving out food stamps. Because of that threat, Arizona started requiring. way more paperwork from people seeking benefits. At exactly the same moment, there were statewide staffing cuts. The result was chaos, with many people who qualify for benefits simply unable to get them due to the new red tape. All of a sudden, people just couldn't get through on the telephones.

The state was losing their documents. People were getting notices in April saying, if you didn't meet a March deadline, you were going to get cut off. There were lines around the block at the food stamp office. People waited hours just to get in. Several mothers told me they kept their kids out of school because they knew the weights at the SNAP office were going to be so long that they wouldn't have time to leave in the middle and go pick up their kids from school. Republicans in Arizona have cheered the drop-off in SNAP recipients, saying it's a sign that there's been, quote, massive fraud in the system. And some have said the new paperwork was a necessary response to the fact that mistaken overpayments to SNAP recipients had been rising in recent years. Overall, Jason says that while Arizona's huge drop-off in snap enrollment is something of an outlier, nationally it's only dropped by about 10 percent, it could be a preview of what's to come,

as other states try to figure out how to avoid the threat of new federal penalties. Across the U.S., there's been some relief in the last day or two from wildfire smoke that turned the air unhealthy. But that improvement could be fleeting, with fires burning in the Pacific Northwest, and another shot of smoke forecast to spread south today from Canada. More than 900 wildfires are still burning there, and many Canadian fires are impossible to fight. Half of the country's blazes, which are often caused by lightning strikes, burn in areas that are incredibly remote.

They may be dotted with small indigenous communities or completely unpopulated, accessible only by plane and with no roads for firefighters. aircraft can drop water from above, but a fire management expert in Canada told the times that's just intended to buy time until you can get boots on the ground. He added, quote, to be blunt, even if we spend a lot more money, I don't think we could stop these fires.

And finally. Recently, I was a speaker at a conference, and one of the other speakers went to go try to buy my book on Amazon. and ended up finding a book about me and sent me a text asking me why I hadn't told him I had a biography. And I clicked the link. I had no idea I had a biography and saw this very plain-looking book

with this brown cover called the biography of Kashmir Hill. And in my mind immediately, I thought, this is an AI-slop biography. Kashmir Hill covers tech at the times, meaning she had seen these kinds of books for sale before, biographies of public figures churned out by AI. She just never expected to be the subject or victim of one herself. Obviously, she got a copy, 2699, and it had some generic facts about her that you could find on the internet.

But the writer, using my air quotes here, also made up a lot of stuff, at one point claiming to have read her childhood diary. Kashmir tried to reach out to the person selling the book to understand why they were doing this, But she never got a response. So I went looking for someone else who uses AI to write books, and I found a man named Bill Johns, who is 70, he's retired, he lives in Maryland, and he has published more than 400 books to Amazon over just a year. And he told me, hey, everything that's ever been thought or said is on the internet. So Chachibati can get it in the same way that an author could go out and interview people or find documents.

He kind of felt like this was an equivalent process. I asked if I could see his Amazon sales reports, and he is selling a few hundred books per month. He makes about $7 per book. So for him, this experiment has been a success. I went to look at what people thought of the books, and the reviews were not great. He had a lot of one-star reviews, people saying it was the worst book they'd ever purchased.

It was repetitious. It was full of mistakes. So it seems like customers don't love the books. And I don't think they realize when they're buying them that they've been written with AI. Kashmir says that Amazon is generally okay with AI-generated books. Some have even become bestsellers on the site, though the company will take them down if they're really, really bad and generate a lot of complaints.

Kashmir's own unauthorized biography has since disappeared from Amazon. In the meantime, Bill Johns offered to whip up a new one for her. she declined. Those are the headlines. Today on the Daily, how the Pentagon has been disclosing less and less about the war in Iran as the conflict escalates.

You can listen to that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.