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From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford.
Today's Wednesday, March 25th. Here's what we're covering.
In the war with Iran, President Trump is pushing forward on two fronts at the same time.
There's diplomacy and there's military force. Both are currently on
full display. We're in negotiations right now. They're doing it along with Marco JD.
The Times has learned from two officials briefed on the diplomatic approach
that the US put together a 15-point plan to end the war with Iran and sent it over.
We're actually talking to the right people and they want to make a deal so badly.
You have no idea how badly they want to make a deal.
It's unclear what all is in the plan. The officials say it deals with Iran's ballistic
missile and nuclear programs and shipping routes. It's also unclear whether Israel,
which has been bombing Iran in coordination with the US, is on board with it.
But it shows that the White House is eager to negotiate to find an off-ramp to the conflict
that's been driving up oil prices and rattling the economy.
According to officials, the plan was delivered via Pakistan, whose army chief has emerged as a key
go-between for the US and Iran. Iran may have trouble delivering a quick response to the
American outreach, though. Senior officials there have been struggling to communicate with
each other and they're worried that if they meet up to talk in person, they could be bombed.
At the same time, even as President Trump is talking up the negotiations,
defense officials tell the Times the US is sending around 2,000 paratroopers to the Middle East.
It's unclear where exactly they'll be deployed, but the officials said it would be within
striking distance of Iran. They could, for instance, be sent to seize Carg Island, Iran's main oil
export hub, which US warplanes have already targeted. Separately, about 2,300 Marines are scheduled
to arrive in the region this week. They could also be tasked with taking Carg Island or helping to
clear the state of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively closed, choking off a key oil and gas route.
In the face of all this, the US proposal on the table, the new wave of troops,
Iran has been defiant. Multiple Iranian officials have publicly denied their country is negotiating
with the US, and their forces have continued to fire off missiles, proving they still have an arsenal.
Meanwhile, in Europe, today we have received very sad news about this attack on the Jewish school,
and totally unacceptable. Investigators are trying to figure out if a string of attacks on Jewish
sites over the past few weeks have been carried out by Iran or its proxies. Four ambulances
belonging to the Jewish Community Ambulance Service were set on fire and gold as green.
In London on Monday, residents in a neighborhood with a large Jewish population were
woken up by the sound of exploding oxygen canisters, as ambulances parked next to a synagogue were
torched, and in Belgium and the Netherlands, two Jewish schools, a bank and a car in a Jewish
neighborhood have also been attacked. It stoked a new wave of fear and anxiety amid an already
sharp uptick in anti-Semitic incidents. So far, investigators haven't publicly said whose behind
the attacks, though a previously unknown Islamist group has taken credit online. It warned that
the attacks would continue if European countries didn't distance themselves from, quote,
American and Zionist interests. There are questions about whether the group is a bogus front
asking the involvement of Iran. Police have made arrests in some of the cases which could potentially
clarify if they were coordinated and if so by whom. One expert at the International Center for
Counterterrorism told the Times that the goal of the recent attacks, which did not lead to any
injuries, appears to be to create confusion and get attention and that, quote, there's no reason
to believe this was the last attack. In the US, a special election last night in Florida
handed Democrats a surprising win right in President Trump's backyard. In a Palm Beach district
that includes Mar-a-Lago, a first-time Democratic candidate beat out a Republican to flip a
state house seat. The win is part of a broader trend. Since the 2024 election, Democrats have
flipped more than two dozen seats in battleground or Republican-led states, including Arkansas and
New Hampshire earlier this month. Republicans have flipped zero. Democrats say the results show
mounting anger at President Trump and his party, feelings that could carry through to November
in the midterms. Republican strategists, meanwhile, have framed the losses as a kind of natural
regression. It's become common for the party in power to lose seats after they take the White House.
Notably, President Trump himself voted in yesterday's special election using a method he's
repeatedly railed against. Mail in voting. Just this week, he called the practice, quote,
mail-in cheating. He's been pushing Republicans to make it significantly harder to vote by mail,
claiming without evidence that it's led to widespread voter fraud.
This year, social media companies have come under intense scrutiny in a series of lawsuits
that claim their products have harmed children. In yesterday, Metta, which owns Facebook and
Instagram, faced one of its first major losses in court. A jury in New Mexico found the company
misled people about the safety of its platforms and enabled the sexual exploitation of young users.
To build their case, state investigators posed as kids online to show how vulnerable they were to
predators. They said they found Instagram in particular was a, quote, breeding ground for exploitation.
The jury said Metta must pay $375 million in damages, and there could still be more fallout.
In another upcoming trial, the state's Attorney General plans to ask the court to order Metta to
make changes to its apps to make them safer for young users. The fight in New Mexico is being
closely watched by parents, policymakers, and the tech industry. There's been a push to
also force changes at TikTok, Snap, and YouTube. In a statement, a Metta spokesman said that Metta
will appeal the New Mexico decision and that the company is, quote, confident in our record of
protecting teens online. And finally, you can generate almost any kind of video that you can
imagine from goofy memes to cartoons. Just this fall, OpenAI was pushing its Sora app in a big way.
The promise was huge. Sora could generate realistic videos super fast. People used it to turn
out whatever they could think of. Two of my colleagues covering tech at the times made a video of
themselves skydiving with a giant pizza as a parachute. It looked good. Disney even signed a deal
so people could use Sora to generate videos with copyrighted characters like Mickey Mouse or Yoda.
Some people predicted this was the big one, a first step in killing Hollywood and replacing
actors and creators with AI. But now OpenAI just announced it's pulling the plug and shutting Sora
down. It didn't give a reason. The decision appears to be part of the company's efforts to focus
and streamline its operations. People made a lot of Sora videos, but the app never matched the
popularity of OpenAI's breakout hit chat GPT and running a video generation service like Sora
is enormously expensive. It requires way more computing power and electricity than other apps or
internet services. Essentially, hyper-realistic pizza parachutes have a high cost and OpenAI
seems to have decided it wasn't worth it right now. Those are the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford.
We'll be back tomorrow.
