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Hey, I'm Robert Vinlow and I'm from New York Times Games and I'm here talking to people about Wordle and the Wordle Archive. Do you all play Wordle? I play it every day. Alright, I have something exciting to show you. It's the Wordle Archive. Whaaaaat? Okay, that's awesome. So now you can play every Wordle that has ever existed. There's like a thousand puzzles. What? Wordle Archive.
Now you can do yesterday's Wordle if you missed it. New York Times game subscribers can now access the entire Wordle archive. Find out more at nytimes.com slash games. Subscribe by May 11th to get a special offer. From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Monday, May 5th. Here's what we're covering.
The Times has been looking at how President Trump's sons, Eric and Donald Jr., have been on a blitz of foreign trips and high-profile business deals. Just in the past 10 days, Donald Trump Jr. has been on a paid speaking tour called Trump Business Vision 2025 that had stops in Hungary, Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria and included meetings with government leaders.
At the same time, on behalf of myself, on behalf of my family, we love Dubai, we love the Gulf, we love the people. Eric Trump, who the president put in charge of the main family business, has been racing around the Middle East, celebrating a $2 billion cryptocurrency investment and multiple real estate deals that included a luxury hotel in Dubai and a golf course in Qatar.
The moves are a 180 from Trump's first term when his family refrained from signing international business deals because of the potential for conflicts of interest. Now the family is going full steam ahead. Some of the deals have even directly involved foreign governments. The White House has said there are no ethics issues because Trump's sons run the businesses. But President Trump's financial disclosure report, which he's legally required to file, shows that he benefits financially from many of the projects.
And while the relatives of other presidents, including Hunter Biden and the brothers of Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, also had business dealings that raised ethical questions, Trump's personal stake is what sets these apart. One presidential historian said, looking at the Trump family's recent business dealings, that when it comes to the conflicts of interest, quote, there's nothing like it. There is just nothing like it.
Beyond the foreign ventures, Donald Trump Jr. is also pushing forward with a new project in Washington, D.C. that will cash in on his father's presidency. It's a sprawling private club in Georgetown called Executive Branch that costs $500,000 to join. It's expected to open this summer, and they've already sold many of the membership slots. In response to questions from the Times, Donald Jr. rejected any suggestion he's trading on his father's name.
Now, three more quick updates on the Trump administration. Your secretary of state says everyone who's here, citizens and non-citizens, deserve due process. Do you agree, Mr. President? I don't know. I'm not a lawyer. In an interview on NBC this weekend, President Trump repeatedly said he didn't know whether every person in the U.S. is entitled to due process, despite the fact that it's explicitly spelled out in the Fifth Amendment.
He also said that allowing people their full legal rights would slow down his push for mass deportations. It might say that, but if you're talking about that, then we'd have to have a million or two million or three million trials. When asked if, as president, he needs to uphold the Constitution of the United States, Trump replied again, I don't know.
Also yesterday, the president said he had instructed federal law enforcement authorities to renovate and reopen Alcatraz, the island prison in the San Francisco Bay. He said it would become a maximum security facility for people convicted of violent crimes. It wasn't immediately clear how realistic that is since the prison has been closed since the early 60s and the administration plans to cut billions of dollars from the Justice Department's budget.
And as of today, the last bit of pandemic-era relief for student loan debt is going away. Administration says it will now restart forced collections on the 5 million people whose loans are in default. For the moment, that will mean borrowers could have their tax refunds withheld. Starting next month, the government will also seize money from Social Security benefits. And it's expected to eventually start taking portions of people's paychecks, too.
In Gaza, it has now been more than 60 days since Israel halted all humanitarian aid from entering the territory. No food, fuel or medicine.
Israel says it will not relent until Hamas releases the hostages it still holds. But humanitarian groups warn that the total blockade violates international law and has created catastrophic conditions. Inside Gaza, stockpiles are dwindling. The Times spoke with a man who says his family now eats once a day to try and stretch out what they have left. And they cook on a fire fueled by torn-up shoes because there's no gas.
Videos from the territory show sickly skeletal children, and doctors tell The Times that the lack of food is having devastating ripple effects. For example, burn victims hit in Israeli strikes aren't getting enough nutrition for their skin grafts to heal. Israeli authorities say that the United Nations, aid groups, and private businesses brought enough supplies in during the ceasefire to provide for the population, and they accuse Hamas of hoarding and depriving Gazans.
But aid groups tell The Times a lot has simply run out. And while there are some warehouses still stocked, aid groups say they can't reach them. The U.N. estimates that Israel's new evacuation and no-go zones in Gaza have cut off access to about 70 percent of the territory.
Today, at a federal courthouse in Manhattan, jury selection will begin in the sex trafficking and racketeering case against Sean Combs, known as Diddy and Puff Daddy. Prosecutors allege that for years, the music mogul used his employees, including security guards and personal assistants, to arrange days-long drug-fueled gatherings where Combs assaulted women.
They say Combs had his team then deal with the aftermath, bribing witnesses and keeping victims hidden from the public until their injuries healed. Prosecutors say his actions amount to running a criminal enterprise, which could earn him a sentence of up to life in prison. Combs has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges, and his lawyers say the sexual encounters at the heart of the government's case were entirely consensual.
He's been held in a New York jail since he was arrested in September. Multiple judges ruled he couldn't be released on bail since they thought he might intimidate witnesses and be a threat to the community. In the two years since AI tools like ChatGPT were released and seemed to kind of take over the world, the companies behind them had been steadily improving their products and making them more and more accurate.
But with a wave of recent updates, as they've rolled out what are known as reasoning systems, the number of mistakes the tools make has skyrocketed.
The reasoning systems seem to have made the tools better at math, but worse at facts. They're now generating more so-called hallucinations in response to what seem like basic questions. For example, ask a chatbot, what's a good marathon on the West Coast? And it might suggest a race in Philadelphia. The problem is widespread. Reasoning models from Google, DeepSeek, and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, are all hallucinating at higher rates than they were before.
On one test of a new chatbot system, it made answers up 79% of the time. Why is that? No one has a clear answer. But some experts say it could be because of how the new reasoning systems are designed to work. They take a little extra time to answer a question by basically breaking it down step by step behind the scenes. That process, though, could mean that small errors along the way compound, leading to a final answer that's just wrong.
And finally, scientists say they've taken a significant step forward in creating a universal antivenom for poisonous snakebites.
And a big part of that breakthrough comes from... Very nasty snake. A basement in Wisconsin. Very, very hot venom. That's where a man named Tim Freedy built up his venomous snake collection. Over the course of nearly two decades, Freedy amassed dozens of venomous snakes and allowed the snakes to bite him about 200 times. My arm is very swollen. It's killing me. Over the course of two decades,
Over the years, he also injected himself with more than 600 calibrated doses of venom to build up his immunity to snake bites. His personal experimentation came with blackouts, anaphylactic shock, and at least one coma.
But scientists have now identified antibodies in his blood that neutralize the poison of cobras, mambas, and other deadly species. The research could help solve a global health problem. Snake bites kill an estimated 120,000 people a year, and the danger is only increasing. People are encountering snakes more often these days because of deforestation and changing climates.
The researchers say they've been able to use what they found in Freedy's blood so far to protect mice. The next step, they're going to try it in Australia for dogs that are brought into vet clinics with snake bites. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, Times chief economics correspondent Ben Castleman answers listeners' questions about the economy. That's next in the New York Times audio app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracey Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.