I want to cut my energy bill. Can solar panels help? Yes, that's good energy. And they'll help lower my carbon emissions too. That's good energy. And I can get paid for the energy I don't use. Yes, that's good energy. And you have 25 years experience in-house engineers and a five-star rating on trust pilots. Yes, that's good energy. Sounds great! One more thing, the solar panel's battery is another hardware. It's all quality tech that's built to last. Of course! Making solar simpler for your home. That's good energy. Visit goodenergy.co.uk From The New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Wednesday, May 27th. Here's what we're covering. Tonight, we just sent a Texas-sized message to Washington. Change was on the ballot and change won. In Texas, Ken Paxton, the state's far-right attorney general with a long history of scandal and controversy, took down longtime Senator John Cornyn. It was essentially a decisive victory for the MAGA movement over the state's old guard of conservatives. President Trump is the leader of our party, and his endorsement is the most powerful force in politics. The runoff election was the most expensive primary in American history, and Paxton pulled out a win despite being outspent on ads by roughly $80 million. The endorsement of President Trump helped carry him to what is, as of right now, a nearly 30-point win over Cornyn. And it has proved once again that when Trump backs a candidate, he brings voters with him. That's been the case in Louisiana, Kentucky, and Indiana, where just in the last few weeks, the president's preferred candidates have all taken down GOP incumbents that Trump turned on. Now, looking ahead to November, Democrats actually see Paxton's primary victory as an opportunity for them. They see an opening to run against Paxton for his own scandals, but also tie Paxton to the president who is becoming more and more unpopular and losing support among the very voters who boosted him to victory in 2024. Lisa Laird is a national political correspondent for The Times. She says Democrats are feeling confident about their own candidate for Senate, James Talarico. No Democrat has won statewide office in Texas for decades, but Talarico's quickly become a national name, gaining a huge amount of momentum, a lot of fundraising, and his Bible-infused messaging has really resonated in Texas. Democrats feel he'll be a serious contender up against Paxton and all his baggage. Look, the idea of turning Texas Democratic has been like Charlie Brown in the football for Democrats. They keep trying to get it, and the football at the last minute is taken away, and that could very well happen again. This election cycle, it will be very hard for Democrats to win Texas, which is one of the most stalwartly red states in the country, but they feel that Paxton gives them the best shot that they've had in a really long time. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Ebola outbreak has now become the third largest on record, and the Times has learned that the Trump administration is planning to send U.S. citizens who've been exposed to the virus to Kenya, according to several people familiar with those plans. It's a starkly different approach than how past administrations have responded to outbreaks. In those cases, healthcare workers and other Americans who were exposed to Ebola were brought back to the U.S. to be treated in specialized medical units. One public health expert told the Times he was surprised by the change. Ebola has a high death rate, about 50%, and he said people's chances of getting through an infection would be higher in the specialized facilities. The Times talked with an American doctor who got Ebola back in 2014 when he was treating patients in Guinea. He was then brought home, and he said he thought it was unlikely that the facility the Trump administration is setting up in Kenya could match the sophistication of what the U.S. already has. He called leaving Americans there, quote, a dramatic abdication of what we owe our own. A White House spokesman declined to comment. ["The White House Spokesman"] And one last update on the Trump administration. Over his time in office, President Trump has disrupted a lot of funding for medical research. In some cases, it's since been restored, but the Times has been looking at what even short pauses in grant money have meant for the work. When the funding came back, it wasn't just, like, turning back on the research light switch, so to say. My colleague, Simar Bajaj, dug into one research project in particular, where a biomedical engineer at Cornell University, Dr. James Antaki, is trying to create an artificial heart for babies. It is very, very tiny. The pump is like the size of a AA battery. Last year, the project seemed close to a big step, starting a clinical trial. The doctor had the right team, a manufacturer was ready to make the device, and an animal study was lined up with sheep, just the right size to model a baby circulatory system. Everything stopped, though, when the Trump administration temporarily froze more than a billion dollars in funding for the school amid a civil rights investigation. And while Cornell later settled with the White House, Simar said getting things going again has been hard. He called back his postdoc that he had been working with, but that guy had taken a job elsewhere. He wanted to work with his manufacturer to get the device backing up and running, but that manufacturer had moved on, and he had to find someone else. He wanted to restart the animal study, but when he reached back to the farms, the sheep had grown, and they weren't the right size anymore to test this device in. The funding pause was for seven months, but Dr. Antaki estimates that it set his research back at least double that amount of time. This has been playing out in labs across the country, where research has been turned on and off because of the Trump administration's approach to science funding. And really what it reveals is that high-level scientific research is fragile. It depends on timing. It depends on momentum. And when all this is thrown off, the research and its lifesaving potential is really thrown into question. In Iran, the government has started restoring internet access for tens of millions of people. They've been largely cut off since the war began three months ago. The Iranian government claimed it was for national security reasons, but many people argued it was imposed to suppress communications and help the regime maintain control of the population. The blackout hit Iran's already shaky economy hard, crippling the tech sector, and it made it incredibly difficult for people to just do basic things like reach their friends and loved ones. A 39-year-old woman who works in advertising in Tehran told the Times getting access again has felt like coming out of prison. She said she didn't really know what was happening in the world or with people she hadn't been able to see in person. She said she just wanted to catch up with friends online, but she also resented that the government's internet shutdown left her craving such a basic thing. She said, quote, "'That sense of humiliation is what really bothers people. They feel like hostages in this country. The sad part is that we are starting to get used to it.'" One cybersecurity expert said internet traffic in Iran is going up now, but it's unclear how long that will last. And finally, in Silicon Valley, AI startups are now everywhere, promising they can do just about everything. And in that flood, it's become hard for companies to stand out. What is our AI search strategy? So they've started making slickly produced hype videos to try and get attention, filling social media with some bizarre ads. It's not a dream. You just have to wake up. They're trying to catch the eye of talent they may want to recruit or funders who could back their latest project. In some cases, companies are spending tens of thousands of dollars on production for these videos. And notably, a lot of them are not using AI to make them. They're bringing in actors, full crews, et cetera. The head of marketing at a company that dropped $80,000 to make a video told the times they didn't want to use AI because they felt like it would make the company look sloppy. Quote, I feel like people would know. If we had done that, it would just look very cheap. Those are the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.
