Good morning. It is August 12th. It is a sunny morning in New York City and one that is already working its way up to being hot. The days of low humidity are behind us and the days of high humidity are supposed to be on their way, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news story is yesterday's presidential announcement that Donald Trump is taking over law enforcement in the District of Columbia. “TRUMP PROCLAIMS FEDERAL CONTROL
OF THE D.C. POLICE” is the two column big headline, “Citing ‘Bloodthirsty Criminals,’ Although Crime Has Dropped Significantly.” The lead is more or less the thing we covered on yesterday's podcast from the Times' live blog, in which the Times helpfully framed Trump's talk about the bloodthirsty criminals with the fact that crime is on the decline in D.C. 

“During the 78-minute news conference,” the Times adds, we're really getting back to the kind of presidential time wasting that came with the outbreak of the COVID pandemic, “during the 78-minute news conference, during which he was flanked by several members of his cabinet, Mr. Trump took the lectern in the White House briefing room and said he also intended to clear out the Capitol's homeless population without saying how officials would do it or detailing where those people would go.” This story is also nicely illustrated with a photograph filling the remaining four columns across the top of the page of the journalists in the briefing room, all thrusting their hands up eagerly to engage with the president's lunatic gambit. 

So far, the mainstream coverage of Trump's DC crackdown has lagged far behind social media, where the leading story or item was footage of a man in a pink shirt, which at first looked like a polo shirt, but on closer examination was some sort of knit if not crocheted leisure shirt, denouncing the federal forces out on U Street for being fascists, and then apparently deciding that words were not enough for the occasion and hooking a wrapped submarine sandwich into an officer's chest and then running away, outpacing the feds in the course of the video. So far, I haven't seen any direct news reporting on the incident. Although for anyone who harbored any hope that the vigilante, despite having had his appearance captured on video, right down to a tattoo peeping out from under his shirt, might have gotten away. He does make an appearance as a figure in a news photo accompanying a Washington Post story about the Trump crackdown in general surrounded by one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine officers with his hands cuffed behind his back. Above the caption, “FBI and Border Patrol officers arrest a man along the U Street corridor on Sunday.” The fact that the sub-throwers picture made it into the Washington Post does seem like a pretty strong suggestion that the feds chasing Trump's imaginary crime wave are so far finding themselves with very little to do. 

The jump on the Times' story seems to make a similar point, with a picture of two agents strolling along on a wide and empty downtown sidewalk at night. The story is filling out the rest of the jump page are “military is again pulled into a domestic concern.” A political science professor at Duke brought in as an expert tells the Times that Mr. Trump's directive deploying National Guard troops to Washington is “a fraught one because it will seem partisan from the get-go.” Correct. It will seem partisan. And then in a nice thematic pairing, the bottom of the page is “Trump administration's crackdown on immigration puts over 60,000 in detention. A budget increase in military involvement add heft to the effort.”

“The number of people in immigration detention,” the Times writes, “reached a new high of more than 60,000 on Monday, breaking a modern record set during the first Trump administration, according to internal records from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The number of detained people has jumped since January, the Times writes, when about 39,000 people were in immigration detention, reflecting efforts by the Trump administration to quickly ramp up arrests and deportations. According to ICE records obtained by the New York Times, more than 1,100 people had been detained since Friday, about 380 people a day.” 

Back on the front page, under the press conference photo, Israel's murder of the five-person Al Jazeera news crew, which made it inside the paper as breaking news in yesterday's edition, gets the sort of analytic reframing the Times uses to justify returning to a story and putting it on page one. “Journalists’ Killings Elevate Israel-Qatar Tension / Nation Crucial to Gaza Talks Is Also Backer of Al Jazeera.” 

After quoting the prime minister of Qatar, which funds Al Jazeera, as saying “these crimes are beyond imagination,” the Times writes “the attack underlined Israel's complex relationship with Qatar, which the Israeli leadership relies on as a back channel to Hamas while simultaneously regarding the country with suspicion.” 

Speaking of regional back channels down below the fold, “China Is Taking
Risky Shortcut To Ship Its Cars.” That headline is a bit indirect because the Times doesn't, pretty understandably, have the goods to flatly declare the thing that the story is really trying to say, namely that the shortcut in question, which is the Times writes, “shipping cars to Europe through the Red Sea and Suez Canal nearly two years after the Houthi militia in Yemen started attacking vessels in the critical Middle East transit route” might not really be such a risk for Chinese shipping. 

After noting that the Houthis say the attacks are in solidarity with Palestinians living through Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza, the Times then writes, “most shipping analysts assume that the Chinese government has reached an understanding with Iran or the Houthis not to harm car carrier ships from China.” This doesn't seem especially sneaky or nefarious. The Houthis have said what the policy aims of their attacks on shipping are, and China is not implicated in those particular policy questions. So as long as China isn't arming or supporting the Israeli war effort in Gaza, why wouldn't its ships go through? But it can't be that easy to apply a rational framework to the events in the Middle East, given that the main actors remain aggressively non-rational. 

There's a NEWS ANALYSIS column on the left of the page. “Gaza City plan faces doubts. Israeli critics say goal of capture is unclear.” Dateline Jerusalem, Patrick Kingsley writes, “since its announcement on Friday, Israel's plan to capture Gaza City has been roundly criticized inside and outside Israel. Palestinians and foreign leaders say the plan will prolong the war and the suffering of Palestinian civilians. The Israeli left says it will likely endanger hostages still held by Hamas. The Israeli right says it will not do enough to defeat the Palestinian armed group. Now a new criticism is emerging within Israel. There is little clarity over what exactly this operation would involve. While there have been vague proclamations from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” the story continues, “Israel's military has yet to complete the tactical battle plan. There's been no public confirmation of how long any occupation of the city will last or when it will begin and how it will differ from Israel's capture of Gaza City in the opening months of the war in 2023.” 

A reader might almost suspect that in the absence of any plan for what to accomplish through the killing, the killing itself would be the plan. 

An explosion yesterday at a plant where US Steel makes Coke in Clairton, Pennsylvania killed two people. Only one of those deaths had been recorded by the Times's print deadline. And the story made page A17 without a front page referral. 

Elsewhere inside the paper, on page A9, the Times reports that a swarm of jellyfish forced the partial shutdown of what the paper calls “one of the largest nuclear power plants in Europe.” Three out of six reactors at the French plant had to be shut down. “Nuclear plants,” the Times writes, “‘often require large volumes of seawater to cool their reactors,’ said Erica Hendy, a professor of biogeochemical cycles at the University of Bristol in England. The plant's intake pipes have screens that prevent debris and marine life from being sucked into those cooling systems, she said, but large swarms of jellyfish can block the screens themselves. Additionally, dead jellyfish can ‘liquefy into a “gel”’ and pass through the screens, causing problems deeper in the plant system.”

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Socca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Keep sending those along if you are able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.