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Chapter 1: What recent actions has President Trump taken regarding the Strait of Hormuz?
Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Ryland Barton. President Trump says the U.S. will stop helping guide ships through the Strait of Hormuz just a day after beginning what he called Project Freedom. Trump says the pause was needed to finalize a settlement with Iran to end the war. Yesterday, the U.S. military sank six small Iranian boats that it says threatened commercial ships.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the move was aimed at helping stranded civilian sailors.
This is not an offensive operation. This is a defensive operation. And what that means is very simple. There's no shooting unless we're shot at first. We're not attacking them. But if they're attacking us or they're attacking a ship, you need to respond to that. You're not going to let some fast boat come up on a ship and shoot it up.
There are about 1,500 ships stuck in the Persian Gulf. About 1,000 of them are large ocean-going vessels like oil tankers. The tone is ratcheting up again between the U.S. and European allies. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports EU leaders say they reject President Trump's latest threat to raise tariffs on European car imports.
Analysts say Trump was likely reacting out of pique after the German chancellor's comments that Iran is humiliating the United States. But EU chief Ursula von der Leyen says a deal is a deal, talking about the trade deal already negotiated between the U.S. and EU.
French President Emmanuel Macron says given the current state of the world, the last thing allies should be doing is threatening to destabilize each other. He says Europe wants free and fair trade, but if Trump insists, the EU will activate certain instruments.
He's talking about the EU's anti-coercion measure, also known as the trade bazooka, which could be used to levy billions of dollars of tariffs on American imports to Europe. Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris.
A video posted by FBI Director Kash Patel appears to be using AI to rip off an iconic music video by the Beastie Boys. NPR's Jeff Brumfield has more.
The two-minute video about fraud was posted by Patel on Monday. It features an instrumental version of the Beastie Boys' 1994 hit song, Sabotage, but that's not all. The video also contains sequences that appear to be frame-by-frame recreations of the original Sabotage music video, which was directed by Spike Jonze. NPR found six such clips.
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Chapter 2: How are EU leaders responding to President Trump's trade threats?
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