Concerns Grow Over Conditions on Aircraft Carrier, and Trump Pushes New Hacking Effort

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**Tracy Mumford** (0:30)
From the New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today is Friday, August 14th. Here's what we're covering.

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We make sure that every ship, every crew, every captain has everything we can provide them at every single moment. Some deployments are longer than others.

**Tracy Mumford** (0:50)
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is pushing back against reports of deteriorating conditions on one of the Navy's aircraft carriers stationed near Iran. The USS Abraham Lincoln, which has a crew of about 5,000 sailors, has been deployed now for almost nine months. And Democratic senators have been sounding the alarm about reports of poor living conditions and the well-being of the crew. In a social media post this week, Senator Ruben Gallego wrote that the sailors have, quote, moldy showers, sporadic hot water, rationed meals and soap, broken toilets, and grueling 12 to 16-hour shifts with no days off. And in a letter addressed to Hegseth and the acting Navy secretary this week, Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote that the crew's mental health was suffering. Echoing reports from the military-focused publication Navy Times, which said that multiple sailors on the ship have tried to jump overboard.
Naval experts say that extended deployments, like the Lincolns, take their toll on people and equipment. Earlier this year, a different aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, faced food shortages and mechanical problems after being at sea for 326 days, supporting President Trump's campaigns in Venezuela and then in Iran. It was the longest carrier deployment since the Vietnam War.
According to a US official, the Navy is now sending another aircraft carrier to the Middle East to relieve the Lincoln. But a retired Navy vice admiral told The Times that the longer-than-scheduled deployments mean that it will take years for the Navy to get back to its full capabilities. He said that keeping warships out for extended periods can have knock-on effects, like throwing off carefully planned maintenance schedules. Adding, quote, I guarantee you that the first two years of the Trump administration will definitely affect the next two years of the Trump administration.
Last night, President Trump signed a national security memo green-lighting a new strategy for the US. The president is encouraging private American companies to help fight hackers. Under the memo, vetted companies would partner with the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security to strike international cyber-criminal groups. That could include surveilling them and trying to disrupt and bring down their systems.

**Dustin Volz** (3:21)
The new national security memorandum from the Trump administration is essentially, in some ways, mimicking the Chinese system of deputizing private sector hackers for national security goals here.

**Tracy Mumford** (3:35)
My colleague Dustin Volz covers cyber security. He says the concept of the new memo, basically giving the private sector the OK to go on cyber offense, has echoes of China and Russia's approach to cyber attacks. But it's something no US administration has ever publicly endorsed before.
Instead, the US approach has mostly been about trying to build up defenses and leaving any cyber attacks to military and intelligence agencies.

**Dustin Volz** (4:03)
So, there are a lot of questions about this new approach, how it will work, who might participate. But it is something that is coming after many, many years of a problem that has only gotten worse each and every year as cyber attacks continue to target American businesses, consumers and critical infrastructure.

**Tracy Mumford** (4:25)
Dustin says some experts he spoke with were interested to see the US trying something new after years of policies that haven't always been able to keep up. Every year, cyber attacks like ransomware cost American businesses and consumers tens of billions of dollars. But Dustin says there are also widespread concerns that this change could provoke more cyber conflict and potentially have unforeseen consequences depending on who US companies end up targeting.
In Washington state this week, a judge ordered the prediction market Kalshi to stop most of its operations there. The latest legal battle over how these markets operate. Kalshi, along with similar platforms like Polymarket, lets users place bets on almost anything from football games to who will win an election. They have exploded in recent years to the point that people are betting billions of dollars a month on them. Along with that rise has come a lot of scrutiny. In the Washington case, the judge ruled Kalshi was violating the state's laws regulating gambling. Online sports betting is illegal there. A spokesperson for Kalshi said it disagreed with the judge's decision and was considering its legal options. But challenges like this have also come up in Nevada, Minnesota, New York, and there have also been growing concerns about the risk of insider trading on the platforms. For example, earlier this year, a Google employee was accused of making more than a million dollars on bets about what people would search on Google. And critics say the federal agency that's in charge of regulating prediction markets, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is not equipped to handle this fast-growing industry and all the potential fraud that comes with it. Many of the laws on the books about insider trading were written decades ago, long before prediction markets ever existed. And under the Trump administration, the CFTC staff has been cut to its lowest level in at least 20 years. Critics have also pointed to the potential for conflicts of interest. Under President Trump, whose oldest son is a paid advisor to Kalshi and an investor in Polymarket, the CFTC has sued states that have tried to block prediction markets, arguing that only it has the authority to police the industry.