From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today is Wednesday, July 29th. Here's what we're covering. At airports across the US in the past few weeks, help. Help. Help us. ISIS here. Help us. The Trump administration has been carrying out a surge of immigration arrests as it opens a new front in its aggressive effort to deport immigrants. PLEASE leave me alone. ICE officers had already been arresting some people with deportation orders at airports using personal information provided by airlines. But the Times has learned that federal agents are now arresting people with expired US visas, too. That is a much bigger group, potentially hundreds of thousands of people who largely weren't prioritized for deportation under past administrations. Many of them have permission to work in the US and are waiting for visa extensions or green cards. A broad range of people are being caught up in the new crackdown, including newlyweds who've just married US citizens, a former OPAIR from Ecuador, and an Indian engineer waiting for a new work visa. They've been detained at check-in counters and arrival gates by immigration agents in plain clothes. Immigration lawyers told the Times that these kinds of arrests are unprecedented and that they are now rethinking the advice they give to immigrants whose legal status is in a gray area, warning them not to travel. In response to questions from the Times, the Department of Homeland Security did not confirm the expanded airport arrests effort, but it comes as ICE is under pressure to hit a White House target of 2,000 arrests a day. A DHS spokesperson said in a statement that it's working to ensure that quote, "Aliens in our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of our country to self-eport."

Today in the Senate, Dr. Anthony Fouchy, the country's former top infectious disease expert, is set to testify involuntarily. He's been subpoenaed by Republican Senator Ran Paul, the chair of the Homeland Security Committee, who has for years accused Fouchy of funding research that triggered the COVID pandemic and lying about it. Accusations that lack evidence. And if anybody is lying here, Senator, it is you. Fouchy has forcefully denied the allegations before as Paul has pushed the so-called lab leak theory. Animal viruses that became more transmissible and human and you funded it. What's new this time is that the senator is coming in with more than,00 pages of Fouch's private diary where he typed daily notes during the pandemic. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shared the pages with the senator saying they were written on a government computer. My colleagues have gone through the diary and they say there's no smoking gun in there. The diary shows Fouchy wrestling with the crisis of the pandemic in real time as scientists views on what was happening and why were rapidly evolving. What the pages do show though is Fouchy musing about his own importance and fame and writing about celebrities he crossed paths with like Julia Roberts and Barbara Streryand. Times health reporter Cheryl Gay Stolberg has been part of the team going through Fouch's writings ahead of his testimony today. There's a scientific element to them and a political element. On the science they don't really add anything new to the question of where CO 19 originated. They really confirm what we already knew that Fouchi was handling a fast-moving situation in which some scientists suspected a lab leak but in the end concluded that wasn't the case. But on the political front they inflamed the debate about the lab leak and about Fouchy himself.

Now, two quick updates on the Trump administration. Federal health officials have announced they plan to end a program that has helped keep down the cost of monthly premiums for Americans on Medicare. Under the program, which went into place two years ago under President Biden, the government has given insurance companies billions of dollars in subsidies to lower health care costs for millions of seniors, specifically when it comes to their prescription drug plans. In defending the move, Dr. Meett Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the Biden administration's approach had been a quote unacceptable giveaway to insurance companies. Oz claimed that once the subsidies are eliminated, premiums for most Medicare recipients will only go up a little, but the full impact of the policy change is not yet clear. And when it kicks in for next year, Medicare beneficiaries could end up paying hundreds of dollars more per year for their drug plans.

And in the Middle East this morning, the US said it launched joint strikes with Saudi Arabia on Iranianbacked militias in Iraq. According to the Pentagon, those militias had carried out dozens of attacks on US forces and Saudi energy infrastructure this week at the direction of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps. Saudi Arabia's role in the strikes is notable because so far the country has avoided being an open combatant in the US war with Iran. But it's been increasingly dragged into the conflict, especially after another Iran proxy force, the Houthi militia in Yemen, recently started firing on Saudi ships in the Red Sea.

In the past few years, the fracking boom in the US has made the country the world's largest producer of natural gas. One consequence of that though has been a huge volume of waste water. Salty liquid full of all sorts of hazardous chemicals, heavy metals, even radioactive materials. Much of that water is hauled away from fracking sites in tanker trucks and then pumped thousands of feet underground where that water is supposed to stay forever. But my colleague Quinn Gabiki has been covering how in places from Oklahoma to Ohio, the toxic liquid is starting to spread. I recently went outside of Mariota, Ohio. This one has more pressure than any of them in a rural hollow with a local oil and gas producer who took me to an old-fashioned oil well which was flooded with waste water. I don't want to get much on the ground, but that's what we got. When he opened the valve, this jet of fluid erupted into a bucket. How about too much on me? It don't matter anymore. Probably die from it anyway. Experts I spoke with said that the fact that this fluid is making its way up through these oil and gas wells is compelling evidence that the waste injected thousands of feet underground is not staying where it's supposed to. Quinn says Ohio has made itself something of a destination for fracking wastewater, allowing companies from other states to truck it there for disposal, but now local officials in Marietta are starting to push back. I met with the city council president who told me that until roughly this time last year, she had no idea that there were four injection wells right outside the city and that they were permitted together to inject hundreds of thousands of gallons of fracking brine every day within 2 mi of the city's drinking water source. One local water official described the situation as potentially catastrophic and that if radioactive materials enter their water system, it would be potentially impossible to remove them. The fracking industry argues that injection wells are safe. And the president of the Ohio Oil and Gas Association told the Times that when properly built, maintained, and regulated, the wells quote do not pose a significant threat to drinking water. Officials in Marietta, however, have now declared an emergency in the city and have asked the state to immediately stop all fracking wastewater injection nearby.

And finally, Gunther von Hagens, the scientist behind the famous Body Worlds exhibits featuring real human corpses, has died at 81. This opens the eye, especially for the youngsters, for the people which never had a feeling for the body so far. Von Hagens opened the first of his exhibits in the mid '90s, offering people a chance to see bodies preserved and dissected to show every tendon and bone. It just brings a real reality of the body and how it functions. And I think this is really educational. Over the years, more than 50 million visitors pass through the touring presentations. And as NPR interviews show, some were fascinated, some not so much. I thought it was creepy and gross. To make the exhibits possible, Von Hagens developed a process called plastination that removed all the skin, fat, and liquid from human bodies and replaced it with a sturdy plastic material. Von Hagens was drawing on his own medical training and a childhood fascination with how bodies work. Body Worlds drew a lot of critics though, including from religious and human rights groups and in his home country of Germany especially. Some compared his work to Nazi experiments. There were also accusations that he accepted bodies of executed prisoners from China, though there was no evidence he knew the source. His team then instituted a strict protocol for accepting donations. And as his exhibits became more popular, thousands of people have volunteered to have their bodies preserved in Body Worlds. Von Hagens himself said that's what he wants to happen to his body. He said he wants to be plastinated and put on display at the entrance of one of his exhibits wearing his trademark black fedora. Those are the headlines today on the daily. How Apac, the pro-Israel lobby, is going allin on the midterms, becoming one of the biggest political donors this election cycle. You can listen to that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.