This is Gary and Shannon and you're listening to KFI AM six forty the Gary and Shannon Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app. A state of emergency has been declared on Greece's island of Santorini. It was rattled by a pretty strong earthquake. This is after they've seen dozens of earthquakes over the last couple of days, much smaller ones. But this new one about a five point two they said, occurred at a depth of only three miles. We all
know because we're earthquake experts. That's pretty shaky, they said. Thousands of people have been fleeing the island of Santorini and its neighbors there in the U, G and C because they are concerned that there is yet even bigger earthquakes on the horizon. There were a couple court things to tell you about when it comes to the Trump administration. A federal judge has temporary blocked the administration and Doge head Elon Musk from implementing the fork in the Road
federal employee buyout offer at least until Monday. More than two million federal employees had a deadline of tonight to accept the administration's buyout offer about eight months salary and benefits, but again it's on hold. We do know that about forty thousand of them have already accepted the offer. Federal judge in Seattle also issued a nation wide preliminary injunction against the Executive Order on birthright citizenship, a day after a judge in Maryland also issued a temporary block on
the order. Bottom of the hour, By the speaking of Trump, there's some strange science and Trump story that we'll get.
To that's coming up at the bottom of the hour. What else is going on? Time for what's happening, Well, our.
Second storm is making its way through southern California. You're going to notice the drizzle, obviously some very light rain over the course of the day today. By about six seven o'clock tonight is when we expect to see some of it coming in the form of actual rain, a little bit more steady, a little bit more water, but still less than an inch expected to fall in most areas.
Some mountain foo hill locations could see two inches. But for the most part, you're just going to see a lot of localized flooding because that's what happens when it doesn't rain for a while, and it could potentially cause some problems as you're driving home from work tonight. The former interpreter who stole millions from Sho hey Otani is to be sentenced today federal charges that related to him stealing about seventeen million dollars from Shohyotani.
Just a note, wouldn't it.
Be nice to have so much money that seventeen million missing didn't really cause a blip. This guy, Epei Misuhara, admitted to transferring money from show Heyotani's account for more than two years to pay off his own gambling debts. He said he impersonated show Hey on a couple of dozen occasions and calls to the bank. Prosecutor said that this thing was deep and it was extensive fraud, and that Shoh was harmed substantially by Ipe Mizuhara's actions.
Don't look now, but mortgage are going down. Mortgage.
The average US rate on a thirty year mortgage fell to six point eight nine percent, the third straight weekly decline. If you were lucky enough to hit this thing at the bottom, you're still sitting on about a two point nine maybe a three point three percent mortgage rate. I don't know if we ever see that again, and mortgage rates are influenced by a lot of things, obviously how the bond market reacts to the Fed's interest rate policy decisions.
But the average rate on a thirty year mortgage did fall to a two year low just above six percent last September. It's mostly been going up since then, and that's the sharp rise that we've seen in the tenure treasury LEELD treasury yield, that is which lenders use as a guide for pricing some of those home loans. So again it looks like it's down for the third straight
week to six point eight nine percent. We talked about this in the ten o'clock hour today, but it looks like firefighters who reported to show up to assist during the Palace sage and eating fires couldn't go because there were a bunch of fire equipment vehicles that were down
for maintenance. KTLA has jumped on this story. The Wall Street Journal had a version of it, but they looked inside the largest LA Fire Department maintenance yard in the Lincoln Heights area and they saw dozens and dozens of unserviced emergency vehicles. The union president said, I don't know exactly why each one of them is there, but I can tell you what has caused them to be there.
The LAFD has not had the funding mechanism to supply enough mechanics and enough money for the parts to repair all of the engines and trucks and ambulances that are stuck in there. New video shows somebody detaining a fellow passenger on a Frontier Airlines flight. Why because the guy punched the window on a Frontier Airliness flight from Denver down to Houston.
He punched the window.
Now close to the window, the one that's next to you, the one that's immediately in the cabin, that's plexiglass, and you can actually see a little tiny vent hole in the bottom of it to prevent moisture. But he was able to crack the plexiglass window, which is still pretty thick. It's not the kind that you'd buy it at home depot or something like that, but he cracked that window, and that was enough to cause other passengers to determine
that he was potentially a threat. So when the flight attendants asked to see if there was any cops on board. Tanner Phillips, a guy served in the army and several others stepped up, said Tanner said, he was very physical. I picked him up and put him on the ground, and it took a couple of guys to get his arms behind him and secured. So at that point, all they have to tie him up with a couple zip ties and a shoelace and that'll do it. That's what they're supposed to do. They were able to keep him
restrained during the rest of the flight. That didn't help, of course, because people are looking at this cracked window and they think that that's going to be an issue. It's not, and then it looks like The Boy Scouts of America, a historic rebrand of the Boy Scouts of America has been followed by a little uptick in young people who want to join. They're now calling it Scouting America.
They've been leaning into their message of inclusivity. They celebrate their one hundred and fifteenth birthday just a couple of days from now. The CEO and president of Scouting America says there's been some backlash to the rebrand after it was announced last year, but he said overall it's been a positive thing. The gain in membership is small. It's up less than two percent from the year before, but they'll take it. They have over about a million members
in the United States right now. A couple stories we're following a second federal judge in a couple of days as black President Trump's executive order ending birthright citizenship for the kids of parents who are in the United States illegally. This district judge out of Seattle decried what he described does the administration's treatment of the Constitution and said that
Trump was trying to change the Constitution by executive order. Now, this decision from today comes just after a day, sorry, just a day after a judge in Maryland issued a nationwide pause in a separate but similar case that involved some immigrant rights groups and some pregnant women who's soon to be born children would be affected by all of this.
Israel says it has begun preparations for the departure of large numbers of Palestinians from the Gaza strip that would be in line with President Trump's plan to empty the territory of its population so that it could be rebuilt.
And are you a napper?
People who make a habit of sleeping on the job comprise a secret society of sorts within the labor force. They said, there's some famous power nappers, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, for example. These committed nap takers will sneak in short rest breaks because they think the practice would improve their cognitive performance, but still carries a stigma, so they'll go down to their car in the parking garage or turned down a side street before the school run. They can
rent nap pods in some areas by the hour. But there's also a story that suggests that a short nap no more than about thirty minutes could rejuvenate you for the afternoon without really disturbing all of your nighttime sleep. All right, we talked about this headline that's been making its way around. A second type of bird flu has been detected in US dairy cow specifically, a herd in Nevada infected with a new type of bird flu different from the version that spread in the US since last year.
USDA says this tape type A H five N one spilled over from wild birds into cattle at least twice, and the concern is that it could be more than that. The B three one three was the version that was spreading late all of last year and into this year. This new version, known as D one one, was can firmed in the cattle in Nevada on Friday, was detected in milk that's collected as part of a surveillance program launched in December. We've talked about the impact that bird flu is having.
Poultry prices have gone up.
Egg prices have been skyrocking, and that's because we've had to kill or cull, if you like the better term, the more clean term. We've had to call millions and millions of birds so that bird flu doesn't spread. If you get a bird or two birds in a flock of thousands, they kill the entire flock because they know that it is potential, it has the potential to spread wide. So there was also something that happened back in nineteen fifty seven where we just barely dodged a bullet when
it came to the bird flu. Maurice Hillerman Hilleman, sorry was an expert in the flu, and in nineteen fifty seven, this guy was also looking for cheap eggs, not because he wanted to them, because he needed fertilized eggs to make vaccines that would be key to stopping a flu epidemic,
or a flu pandemic in that case. This guy was born just after the Spanish flu back in nineteen eighteen or whatever the politically correct term is now for the Spanish fluw and he started worrying about the egg supply in nineteen fifty seven because scientists had a lot more sophisticated understanding about the flu than they had previously, and that knowledge led them to a fear that there would be another pandemic similar to the Spanish flu in nineteen eighteen,
and they didn't want to see millions of people die again. So in April nineteen fifty seven, Maurice Hillman opens his newspaper and sees an article about glassy eyed patients that were overwhelming the clinics in Hong Kong. The article very short. It's an American newspaper. It's about a sickness in Hong Kong. It was an front page news. It was eight sentences long.
But all he needed was the four words of the headline that to scare the living but Jesus out of them, which was Hong Kong battling influenza, and he was concerned. Within about a month of this. He had requested, obtained, and tested a sample of the virus from his colleagues in Asia, and by May he and his colleagues knew that Americans did not have immunity against this new version of the flu, and he was worried that there would
be a pandemic. So in the spring of fifty seven, the government calls for vaccine manufacturers to accelerate the production of this new flu vaccine for all Americans because of the one that was appearing in Asia. Now, traditionally, farmers have been called on to kill off roosters and any unwonted chickens to keep their costs low, but in this case, Maurice Hillman asked, farmers, don't kill your roosters. I need a huge supply of fertilized eggs to produce the vaccine
before this thing hits the United States. In early June, it did come to the United States. The good news was the new virus was not the killer that the Spanish flu was about forty years before that. The surge in general at the time, he didn't want to alert
the public. He wanted to alert them, I should say he didn't want to alarm them big difference, and they talked about flu and the need for vaccination in a widely distributed television show, and the government also created a bunch of PSAs, and they worked with local health organizations to encourage people to get the flu vaccine. Vaccines were
actually not that popular. They said, the vaccine rate was moderate, not because we were concerned about vaccines or that it was problematic in the fifties, but they didn't see the flu as a threat. Forty years after the Spanish flu, people forgot what the pandemic was. People forgot that there was a possibility that this thing was going to kill millions of people. And antibiotics had been produced lessened the threat that pneumonia was going to kill you if you
did get the flu. But it was basically luck that stopped that pandemic. It was luck that he saw that article, that very very short article about flu in Hong Kong. It was luck that he made that early call to increase production of fertilized egg so that they could use him for the vaccine production. And it was luck, sheer luck that that flu in nineteen fifty seven was not the same as the flu back in nineteen eighteen. All Right,
we get into some strange science stuff here. In a couple of minutes, we're going to start with science funding, and there's a new order from President Trump and some keywords that are being used to look specifically at what we the United States fund when it comes to science research. So cal Edison says its equipment may have sparked a smaller wildfire in LA that broke out the same day
as the Palisades and Eaten fires. This statement today by SoCal Edison says it's possible that it had a role in the Hearst fire came from a required filing with the state utility regulators. In a second filing, they said they're still looking into whether an idle transmission line may have sparked the Eton fire up near Altadena, but it says there is no current evidence evidence that its equipment
was responsible for starting that fire. Bunch of stories from DC that we have been following include the federal judge the temporary blocked the DOGE workers from obtaining access to certain Treasury Department payment records. Treasury officials will not provide access to any payment record or payment system of records maintained within the Treasury Bureau of fiscal service that was
from Judge call Colleen Caller Katli. In this temporary restraining order, also, a judge temporarily blocked the implementation of the federal employee buyout offer at least until Monday afternoon. There are a few federal employee unions that are suing because of that. And in terms of doge in Elon Musk, the share of Republicans who say they want Elon Musk to have significant influence in the administration has fallen pretty substantially since November.
The economist Yugov had a poll that was taken in the days just after the election, and they said forty seven percent of Republicans surveyed said they wanted Musk to have a lot of influence in the Trump administration. In a poll that was released yesterday that went down to twenty six percent. From forty seven percent down to twenty
six percent. Amazon passed Walmart a long time ago in terms of overall market cap, but now they're saying that Amazon is probably going to leapfrog Walmart by another key metric revenue, just straight revenue. For the last dozen years, Walmart's been the top It in fact, eclipsed Exon mobile back in twenty twelve and has been on top since then.
When it comes to revenue, but Amazon is going to release earnings today at the close of trading, it's probably going to be about one hundred and eighty seven billion. Walmart comes out in a couple of weeks and their projected sales would be about one hundred and eighty billion. There is a story also floating around DC about Politico.
You may have seen this.
White House Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt said that the federal government's going to cancel eight million dollars worth of subscri of subscriptions to Politico, and there is a theory going around that these very high end Politico pro plus subscriptions, which are thousands of dollars a year, I mean somewhere. It's hard to nail it down. The Political website doesn't advertise it very well what the final cost is, but
it's somewhere between seven and fifteen thousand. That was the range that I saw for these different subscriptions to Politico. Because it's beyond just what you get on their website. They do a lot of in depth information about about legislation that is pending, about legislation that's being worked on about legislation that was denied. She Caroline Levitt said that Politico and the Associated Press had been receiving millions of
dollars from USAID, which we've talked about. The Agency for International Developments been targeted as one of the huge wastes of money by DOGE. And the Politico people put out a press release just a short time ago and it said that Politico is a privately owned company. We've never received any government funding, no subsidies, no grantsout, no handouts,
not one dime ever in eighteen years. And they said Politico Pro is a professional subscription service used by companies, organizations, and some government agencies, and they subscribe because it makes them better at their jobs. Again, this is what Politico says, helping them track policy, legislation, regulations in real time with news intelligence and a suite of datat products and listen.
If that's the case, fine, If these are individual government workers or even government agencies that need to have that information, fine, but use the power of the government to go in and at least negotiate a better deal than eight million dollars for Politico. National Science Foundation has been combing through thousands of active science research projects alongside a list of keywords to figure out if they include any activities that
would violate President Trump's executive orders. Right now, they have a list of keywords, and this doesn't mean that they're canceling active research for those types of projects that are currently being worked on. They just want to double check them. And this is kind of a to me, it's a
funny list. So the sample of keywords that are now being looked for in these active science research projects at the National Science Foundation advocacy, anti racist barrier, biases, cultural relevance, disability, diverse backgrounds, diversity, diversified as nity, ethnicity, excluded, exclusion, equity, female gender, hate speech, historically implicit bias, inclusion inclusive, inequity,
institutional intersectional, male dominated, marginalized, minority, multicultural. And again, these are not saying that if those words appear in research projects that they're denied. It's just they're going to flag
those and go through and see what they're actually studying. Oppression, polarization, racially segregation, socioeconomics, systemic trauma, underrepresented underserved victims, and the keyword women scientists who get funding from the National Science Foundation have already been put on notice that if they are working on something that does not comply with these executive orders that have been coming hot and heavy out of the Oval Office, than they could lose their funding.
It's time for strange science, strange sience. It's like weird science, but strange.
I referred to bonobos as a monkey. They are an ape and there is a difference. But this is the fun story. So a few captive bonobos seen have faced this task locate this tasty little snack hidden under one of three cups.
It's the shell game.
Because they are brainiacs, they should have no problem finding the sweet treat, right. But here's the wrinkle. They were relying on a human being, not a member of their own species, to flip over the correct cup. And what's even worse is the human being sometimes did see where the food was, so the bonobos had to somehow communicate to the human being where the correct what cup was with the little sweet treat underneath it. Christopher Krupenny is an evolutionary cognitive scientist.
JOHNS.
Hopkins helped run this experiment and said the bonobos knew when their partner was ignorant, and they communicated proactively to make sure that their ignorant partner still made the correct choice. They described the bonobos behavior in a paper that came out Proceedings of the National Academy of Science as USA, and it says it provides compelling evidence that apes like the bonobos can infer someone's ignorance and then also act
to help clear up the confusion. They refer to this the ability to infer someone else's mental state is referred to as theory of mind, and we talk about it. We humans use it to communicate and coordinate with other people, like if if I figure out that you don't have the kind of information that you need, it helps me determine when and how to share specific information with you
to give you that information that you would need. And they have proposed that chimpanzees and bonobos apes may possess theory of mind, but few of them have actually figured
out this idea. In a controlled experiment, they took three male bonobos living at Ape Cognition and Conservation Initiative, which is in Des Moines, Isle, and during the experiment, one of them would sit across from one of the researchers as a treat like a grape or a peanut or something like that was put under one of the three cups, and if he flipped over the correct cup, then the bonobol would be would get the reward get the little treat. In some of the trials, the researcher could see the
treat put under the cup. In others, he didn't know which cup it was put under, and then he would wait ten seconds before he flipped over the cup. The bonobos appeared to know when he had his eye on the correct cup, and in the trials where he had observed the placement, they just waited for him to flip
over the right cup. But when they knew that his view was blocked, they would try to point towards the correct cup in an effort to give him that information that he didn't already have, to fill him in on what he had missed. What he had missed, and the researcher said that they immediately understood the game that was
being played and immediately knew where to point. And somewhat interestingly, they said the oldest of these apes, named Kanzie, was particularly demonstrative in his gestures, would point aggressively at the cup that had the treat under it. He's forty four years old now, and he said he's always on the lookout for a tasty treat. Repeatedly would point and tap to get the human's attention.
And secure that treat. It's kind of interesting.
There is a heart pump that has been developed that is no larger than a fountain pen, just approved by the FDA for use in children. It's already been saving adults lives in this red of revolutionary way. Cardiologists said they don't even need to open the chest cavity to install this heart pump. It's called Impella five point five. The world's smallest heart pump can keep a heart going
during critical moments of heart failure or cardiogenic shock. Twenty one year old Katrina Penny, for example, born with congenital heart defects, but the transplant she got when she was nineteen also failed. For five weeks, she was using this artificial heart pump, again as small as a fountain pen, to keep the failed heart pumping while a second heart transplant was secured. She said, it did save my life.
It's very useful. According to one of the doctors, it's very useful in the sense that it can actually be implantable without cracking open the chest, and they're very excited. Doctors referred to this as a game changer. The pump component on the impella only consists of the very tip of this thing, so it's the size of about a fingertip, which of course makes the whole thing seem pretty futuristic.
And then we talked I talked earlier about this whole bird flu thing and price of chickens, you know, is going to be going up, Eggs is already up.
What do we do?
Is there a way to get our chicken without you know, actual chicken? And here's a new development. Lab grown chicken meat is now on store shelves in the UK. They said it's a the world's first. They said it's an innovative product. It's produced without traditional farming, without animal slaughter obviously, and they say it tastes exactly like chicken. But it's not currently available. It's only a limited addition, a limited location.
I should say. It's called chick Bites.
The product was recently introduced as at a Pets at Home store in London. Plant based ingredients cultivated chicken grown in a laboratory setting. Here's how they do it. They take a single egg.
One egg.
Meatly Is, the company that's behind this thing, emphasizes the health benefits of their product. It contains all the essential amino acids, the fatty acids, the vitamins and minerals found in traditional chicken, without the environmental impact or ethical concerns. One of the CEOs, or Thus CEO, said, just two years ago it felt like a moonshot, and to today we take off with a giant leap forward toward a significant market for which meat is healthy, sustainable and kind
to our planet. Europe has approached this old lab grown meat with some caution, but other nations have shown greater enthusiasm for this. The first fully cultivated hamburger was developed almost eleven years twelve years ago, and since then an Israeli company has pioneered by opening multiple lab to fork restaurants, which sounds disgusting offering consumers. They said, the first hand experience of this innovative food solution.
Ooh, not ready for lab grown meats. Not ready for it. You've been listening to the Gary and Shannon Show.
You can always hear us live on KFI AM six forty nine am to one pm every Monday through Friday, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio Lab