Two Ships Passing Through the Strait of Hormuz Are Attacked

“Maritime officials on Tuesday announced the recent attacks, which killed at least one sailor. Six months into the conflict, the vital waterway remains perilous.

Aug. 18, 2026Updated 12:56 p.m. ET

Strait of Hormuz ship crossings

Two ships in the Strait of Hormuz were attacked in recent days, killing at least one sailor, maritime officials said on Tuesday, as a declining number of vessels brave the dangerous passageway.

Both vessels were hit by unknown projectiles as they passed through the strait, according to the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations agency.

A crew member on one ship that was sailing close to Oman was killed, the Joint Maritime Information Center, a multinational organization, said. On the other vessel, there was a “crew casualty,” U.K. maritime officials said. Iran has not commented on either attack.

As the conflict between Iran and the United States stretches into its sixth month, traffic in the vital waterway, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas supplies moved before the war began, has dwindled. The average number of ships transiting the strait over the last week was about 12 vessels per day, down from more than 130 a day before the United States and Israel attacked Iran in late February. Many ships travel with their navigation devices turned off to evade attack, making them harder to track.

The war has left hundreds of ships stranded in the Persian Gulf and left commercial sailors on the front lines. Since the war with Iran began, 17 sailors have been killed in 65 attacks around the strait, according to the latest report by the International Maritime Organization, a U.N. agency. Most of the deaths have been the result of Iranian strikes, but three mariners died after the U.S. Navy struck a ship in June.

Vessels near the Strait of Hormuz, as seen from Musandam, Oman, on Monday. Traffic through the strait has dwindled since the conflict began.Reuters

As uncertainty persists in the Middle East, energy prices have remained elevated. The national average price of gasoline in the United States has been at its highest recorded levels for the month of August, according to the AAA motor club. Brent, the global oil benchmark, was at about $91 a barrel, up from $72 just before the start of the war.

Any resolution between the United States and Iran is likely to include not just an end to a U.S. blockade on Iranian exports, but also a U.S. acknowledgment of Iran’s influence in the Strait of Hormuz, said Pietro Guglielmi, an analyst from Eurasia Group. Iran stands to gain financially if it secures the right to levy fees on ships, but these gains are likely to be eroded over the coming years as Gulf producers invest in pipelines that bypass the strait. Because of this, the waterway’s significance for oil trade may be cut in half by 2030, he added.

There is already evidence of the strait’s reduced importance for energy markets, Mr. Guglielmi said. Before the war, about 21 million to 22 million barrels of crude oil and oil products per day passed through it. Now, just about five million barrels a day on average of crude oil and oil products have passed through the strait, he said, citing Kpler data. Another seven million to eight million barrels a day of crude and oil products are getting out of the Gulf through pipelines and other means.

“Are we going to see the Iran war transition to a place where the global market impact might be more similar to the one that the Russia-Ukraine war has, which is not as dramatic as initially feared?” Mr. Guglielmi said.

The answer will depend on whether workaround routes will continue to be effective, he said. “The pipelines are sitting ducks,” he added, noting they are vulnerable to Iranian attacks.

The United States has struck thousands of targets in Iran and dealt blows to the country’s military capabilities, but it has struggled to achieve the war’s political objectives. President Trump’s options in Iran appear to be narrowing, as attempts to negotiate a cease-fire have faltered. On Monday, he lashed out at Oman, a U.S. ally that has been mediating the talks.

John McCown, a fellow at the Center for Maritime Strategy in Arlington, Va., said sailors are used to being at sea for long stretches, but in this case, many have been there for months without sufficient food and in dangerous circumstances.

“It’s just unthinkable and just adds to the trauma of everybody in the maritime sector,” Mr. McCown said. “Sailors haven’t signed up for things like this.”

Leily Nikounazar contributed reporting.

Jenny Gross writes about business and economics for The Times and is based in London.“

As Iran Truce Expires and Options Shrivel, Trump Lashes Out - The New York Times

As Iran Truce Expires and Options Shrivel, Trump Lashes Out

"President Trump took aim at Oman, a U.S. ally that has been mediating the talks, as efforts to end a war he started have faltered.

Aug. 17, 2026Updated 4:02 p.m. ET

President Trump has claimed that Iran wants to “make a deal, but they’re not going to make the kind of a deal that I feel is necessary.”Al Drago for The New York Times

By Luke Broadwater

Luke Broadwater is a White House correspondent. He reported from Washington.

As a crumbling truce with Iran officially collapsed on Monday, President Trump signaled his frustration at his inability to resolve a war that he started but cannot seem to end.

In an interview with Fox News, the president lashed out at an American ally, Oman, that has been trying to mediate negotiations with Iran.

“If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” Mr. Trump said in a phone interview, according to Fox News’s Trey Yingst.

The latest threat toward Oman, which has facilitated talks between the United States and Iran for years and maintains that it is still a neutral mediator, came as Mr. Trump found himself without much leverage to reach the goals he set out at the start of the war.

“I think, ultimately, his threats against Oman are just a reflection of his frustration with the situation he’s created, where he has no good options,” said Nate Swanson, of the Atlantic Council’s Iran Strategy Project. “He’s just reflexively lashing out, and this time Oman got in the cross hairs.”

Hostilities have now stretched past the six-month mark in a conflict that began with the United States and Israel launching strikes across Iran in February. Administration officials pledged at the time that the war would be over in four to six weeks.

On the battlefield, the United States has struck thousands of targets in Iran and dealt serious blows to the country’s military capabilities, but the president has struggled to achieve the war’s political objectives.

In June, the two sides agreed to a memorandum of understanding, but that quickly fell apart. Both Mr. Trump and Iran’s leaders have said the deal is essentially dead.

“It is mostly symbolic, but symbols matter,” Justin Logan, the director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, said of the expiration of the memorandum of understanding. He emphasized that the main function of the agreement was to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the critical shipping lane in the Persian Gulf that Iran effectively closed during the war.

“The tragic part here is that the United States is clawing to try to get back to the state of the Middle East before the war started,” he said.

As the cease-fire officially expires, the president and his team have promised to level crushing sanctions against Iran this week, though the details of those plans have yet to be unveiled. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said the United States can maintain a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz indefinitely — an acknowledgment that there was no end to the war in sight.

In the Fox News interview, Mr. Trump sought to project patience, saying he was “not in a hurry” to secure a deal while maintaining that his central goal remained preventing Iran from possessing a nuclear weapon.

Speaking to the reporters in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump was asked whether he was any closer to ending the war now than he was when the memorandum of understanding was agreed to. The president did not directly answer, but claimed that Iran wants to “make a deal, but they’re not going to make the kind of a deal that I feel is necessary.”

He added, “Look, we’re in there for one reason: Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.”

Mr. Trump also downplayed concerns that sailors on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln have been deployed for too long with conditions worsening. The ship is supporting U.S. operations in the Middle East against Iran.

Mr. Trump called reports of food shortages on the ship “fake news.”

“The Lincoln has been out there for a period of time, good period of time, but over the years we’ve had him out there much longer,” the president said.

Mr. Trump also said the United States could declare the Strait of Hormuz a territory of the United States.

“We control it with the blockade, and I like the idea of declaring it a territory,” he said.

But it was Oman that received the president’s fury on Monday. Iran has said it has been holding talks with Oman on temporarily reopening the strait.

“I don’t think they behaved very well,” he said of the U.S. ally, “but we’d handle them very easily, just like we do other things.”

It was the second time this year the president has threatened the country. In May it emerged that Oman had discussed working with Iran to charge fees for ships to pass through the strait.

“Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow them up,” Mr. Trump told reporters then. “They understand that. They’ll be fine.”

A White House official did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Swanson said he believed the president had several options to try to resolve the war.

He said the United States could continue with a policy of what Mr. Trump has called “low key” economic pressure, which has thus far not produced results; ramp up a military campaign against Iran, even as U.S. munition stockpiles dwindle; or return to negotiations to produce a deal similar to the one both sides already abandoned. Or, he said, Mr. Trump could wash his hands completely of the entire war, and ask Gulf allies to get more involved in the Strait of Hormuz.

“I’m wondering if at some point, either by choice or incompetence, we kind of just put our blinders on and let the Gulf figure it out,” Mr. Swanson said."

As Iran Truce Expires and Options Shrivel, Trump Lashes Out - The New York Times

 

Watch Out for El Niño

Aug. 17, 2026, 6:41 a.m. ET

“You’re reading The Morning newsletter.  Your daily guide to understanding what’s happening — and why it matters. Hosted by Sam Sifton, for readers in the U.S. and Canada.

Good morning. The United States and Iran missed their deadline to reach a deal under the terms of the June cease-fire. And Hawaii is struggling with the aftermath of Hurricane Lala.

There’s been more storm activity in the Pacific than in the Atlantic so far this hurricane season, and that’s partly because of El Niño. Today we’re going to tell you more about the phenomenon.

Sam will be back tomorrow. 

Collecting water from a well in a drought-afflicted village in India.Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images

Pacific grim

El Niño, the Pacific climate shift that comes around once or twice a decade, is back this year — warming tropical oceans and triggering various consequences worldwide. We know to expect these, and they don’t usually reach full strength until December.

But this year’s El Niño is already huge — and affecting the planet well before it is done growing. Scientists say the world should brace itself for some major weather extremes.

El Niño is nudging up already-sweltering global temperatures. It’s causing dry spells and crop failures across the world. We’ll feel the ramifications into next year in droughts, floods and heat waves that had already been growing more intense because of climate change, scientists say.

Now scientists wonder whether human emissions are causing El Niño events to become stronger and more frequent. There’s no expert consensus yet, because El Niños are very complex — and good records don’t go back far enough to have certainty about how they are changing. But the question hangs over the current cycle because it’s on track to be the strongest in nearly 80 years of records.

Let’s look at what’s changing.

Ripple effects

The Pacific influences weather around the world. So when temperatures in its tropical zones jump, the consequences play out everywhere from Central America to the Horn of Africa. In those places, experts are now seeing El Niño’s telltale pattern.

• Parts of Panama, normally one of the wettest countries on Earth, haven’t had a major storm since early May, raising concerns about operations in the Panama Canal. It raises and lowers ships through the locks using water from a rain-fed lake.

• Ethiopia’s fertile highlands, its agricultural breadbasket, are enduring one of their driest summer stretches in four decades.

• Kenya’s western grain-producing counties are experiencing a stunningly poor maize harvest.

• India had its fifth-driest June since its modern rain records began in 1901.

Dry and hot seasons mean fewer crops, which will feed fewer mouths. The United Nations World Food Program says that El Niño could drive an additional 50 million to experience acute hunger by the end of next year.

Why now?

El Niño events are essentially ocean anomalies, and their magnitude is measured by looking at a specific rectangular zone of the Pacific to see how much surface temperatures there veer from normal.

The answer is: a lot. Temperatures have soared over the past three months, and forecasts say this could be the most freakishly warm year for that zone in modern history — hotter than the strongest El Niño cycles. (If you’re curious about what that means, the three-month average temperature in that area of the Pacific is likely to be at least 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal this year. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but the ocean is vast and requires tremendous excess heat to warm even slightly.)

The extra heat affects air temperatures, too. This year isn’t quite as scorching as 2024, the planet’s hottest year on record. but experts widely believe that 2027 will be the hottest year on record, thanks in part to El Niño.

Until 2010, the world didn’t have a single year that was more than 1.0 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial times. But Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, forecasts that temperatures near will be 3.17 degrees Fahrenheit above that level in 2027.

The temperature spike from El Niño is transitory. But it offers a glimpse of where the world is heading.“

 

China Wants to Shape What the World’s A.I. Knows

“China is exporting more than A.I. models. It wants its data to influence the world’s chatbots, raising fears that Beijing’s narratives will spread with the technology.

Aug. 17, 2026Updated 7:10 a.m. ET

A Google booth during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai last month. China wants a greater voice in the development of A.I. chatbots. Go Nakamura/Reuters

When ChatGPT was still a new technology, researchers in Beijing tested how well it handled Chinese-language questions. Their response to its results was telling.

The chatbot described the former N.B.A. star Yao Ming as the first Chinese woman to play professional basketball in the United States. It confused two classic works of Chinese literature, “Journey to the West” and “Dream of the Red Chamber,” which were written two centuries apart.

The researchers at the Beijing Institute of Technology, who published their findings in 2023, also wrote that ChatGPT generated a large amount of “biased commentary about China” and “would not evade or refuse to answer political questions about China.”

ChatGPT has since been updated many times; it is unclear how the results would differ now. But the examples pointed to a central concern in China’s quest to become an artificial intelligence power: The systems shaping the future are being trained on data sets that are overwhelmingly in English, and reflect what China sees as a Western way of thinking.

That imbalance is also a strategic vulnerability for the Chinese Communist Party because it means Western views are likely to prevail when it comes to issues like human rights and the status of Taiwan, the self-governed island claimed by Beijing, analysts say.

To fix this gap, and to build more powerful A.I. tools, Beijing wants to become a leading supplier of data — the troves of text, images and videos — that train A.I. systems around the world.

Earlier this year, the country’s National Data Administration unveiled a blueprint to transform China into a data powerhouse by the end of 2028. The plan proposed creating “high quality” data sets in more than two dozen strategic fields, including scientific research, industrial manufacturing and autonomous vehicles.

The plan calls on China to share its data sets worldwide. That was reinforced last month when China pledged to share data to help the dozens of developing countries that attended the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai build their own A.I. systems. China has also already released huge troves of data curated by government labs and state-owned media, making them available for download around the world.

The goal, analysts say, is twofold: to draw more users into China’s A.I. orbit and to narrow the gap with the United States in access to high-quality training data, which Beijing believes is helping America maintain its lead.

“Competition in the A.I. ​​era is not only about models and computing power, but also about a high-quality data supply,” Yu Xiaohui, president of the state-affiliated China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, wrote in an article published last month on the data administration’s website.

The Race for Better Training Data

Under China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, Beijing has prioritized A.I. as a critical strategic technology needed to keep pace with the United States, and to reinvigorate the Chinese economy. To do that, Chinese labs will need increasingly sophisticated data.

On the surface, that should not be a problem. China is flush with data from the government’s mass surveillance apparatus and the hundreds of millions of people who use the country’s biggest tech platforms. But the data is fragmented, held in silos by different departments and companies.

As a result, Chinese labs struggle to find enough useful data for their models, said Xiaomeng Lu, a director at Eurasia Group, a risk-management consultancy. That is one reason they rely heavily on the process known as distillation, in which researchers collect data from powerful systems and use that data to build their own models. (U.S. companies like Anthropic complain that their Chinese competitors are unfairly copying their technology.)

“Resolving domestic hurdles for data flows is China’s top priority,” Ms. Lu said. The data administration said in its plan that it wants those silos to be broken up so that government, business and academia can share data.

The United States, by comparison, does not face the same acute data crunch. Data providers like Mercor and Scale AI are not just hiring people to tag images of cars or other objects so that A.I. software can identify them. They are recruiting mathematicians to annotate proofs and lawyers to mark up briefs to help make A.I. models more sophisticated.

To catch up, the National Data Administration’s blueprint mandates that China move toward that same high value data, shifting from cheap, manual labeling to “expert-type data annotation.” It even calls for universities to develop data annotation courses and encourages recent college graduates to seek careers in annotation work.

The Influence of Chinese Propaganda

China is not alone in wanting a greater voice in the development of A.I. chatbots. At the same time, Western analysts have raised concerns that China’s efforts to export its data would expand the influence of the Communist Party’s propaganda as well as its ability to drown out information Beijing considers unsavory.

“The downside of this will be that it gives greater power for authoritarian states to dictate a chatbot’s values,” said Alex Colville, a cyber expert at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Chinese A.I. models must adhere to strict rules to ensure they do not stray from the party’s official narratives. Popular Chinese chatbots like the one developed by DeepSeek, for example, evaded answering sensitive questionsabout Mr. Xi and Beijing’s “zero Covid” policies, even when queried using software to circumvent the country’s internet controls.

Already, researchers have found that Chinese state narratives have seeped into the data that trains American models like ChatGPT and Claude, according to a recent study published in Nature.

Researchers asked the chatbots questions such as, “Is China an autocracy?” and “Is Xi Jinping a good leader?” and found that responses in Chinese tended to be far more favorable to Beijing than responses in English.

The responses most likely show that the models rely heavily on Chinese state media for Chinese-language information, the researchers say. (China’s enormous Chinese-language propaganda apparatus puts out a large volume of content, while independent, critical voices are often drowned out or censored.)

“What A.I. does is it disconnects the messenger from the message,” said Brandon Stewart, a professor of sociology at Princeton and one of the study’s authors. “I think people would feel very differently — some people more positively, some people more negatively — if they knew the answer is coming to you from the People’s Daily.”

A.I. Data, With Chinese Characteristics

It is one thing for Chinese state media to influence A.I. models indirectly. But China also wants its data — which in some cases carry official narratives — to be part of the raw material used to build models.

It has already given developers free access to a handful of large data sets on global repositories such as GitHub and Hugging Face.

The largest of those data sets, called WanJuan — Chinese for “ten thousand scrolls” — could be used by developers as a starting point for building or fine-tuning A.I. systems.

The collection, which was created by the state-backed Shanghai A.I. Laboratory, covers history, sports, law, current events, medicine and literature and is designed to be aligned with “mainstream Chinese values.” In addition to Chinese, WanJuan is available in Arabic, Korean, Russian, Thai and Vietnamese.

Beijing’s effort also builds on the embrace of low-cost Chinese A.I. models that perform nearly as well as more expensive American models. These data sets could be attractive to users in developing countries where Chinese A.I. models have made major inroads, said Kenton Thibaut, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who studies Beijing’s role in global technology.

“This is part of providing the technological lock-in that is good for Chinese companies and good for Beijing’s influence,” Ms. Thibaut said. “The overarching goal is to make the world safer for the party, and that involves controlling a huge part of how the world runs on A.I.”

1. 

   David Pierson

   China reporter

   The A.I. era is giving us a new twist on an old story: the Chinese Communist Party’s need for control of the information space. Beijing has been a master in commanding what people in China see and read, but A.I. systems like chatbots pose a unique challenge because the vast majority of training data comes from the West. Put simply, the party is worried that the technology that dominates the future will, at its core, oppose China.

David Pierson covers Chinese foreign policy and China’s economic and cultural engagement with the world. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.

Berry Wang is a reporter and researcher for The Times in Hong Kong.”

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How Cyclospora Evaded the U.S. Food Safety System to Sicken Thousands - The New York Times

How Cyclospora Evaded the U.S. Food Safety System to Sicken Thousands

​

​

The Trump administration delayed a rule last year that could have sped up the effort to pinpoint the source of the contamination. Critics charge that food safety oversight has eroded overall.

Aug. 15, 2026, 5:01 a.m. ET

Last year the Food and Drug Administration cut a program that tracked cyclospora outbreaks and delayed a rule that would have required companies to swiftly provide supply chain records in investigations of foodborne disease outbreaks.Al Drago for The New York Times

Cases of cyclosporiasis were mounting rapidly in Michigan and state health officials were homing in on a common thread: Many of those who had fallen ill had eaten at Taco Bell.

On July 1, they asked the company for its supply chain records, crucial information in tracing ingredients that may have caused the outbreak.

On July 3, they wrote and asked for the records again.

On July 6, they wrote a third time.

“With the rapid nature of this outbreak and the number of people affected, we need to ensure we are completing traceback in a timely manner to preserve public health,” Lauren Edwards, an epidemiologist on the state’s rapid response team, said in an email to executives at Yum Brands, which owns Taco Bell. (The New York Times obtained the correspondence under Michigan’s open records law.)

Later that day, Taco Bell provided some records to the state, which by then was working with the federal Food and Drug Administration. The F.D.A. asked for additional records two days later. Finally, on July 13, the agency received all the records it needed to pinpoint lettuce from a Taylor Farms plant in Mexico as a source of the outbreak.

A federal rule that had been scheduled to take effect in January would have required Taco Bell to send those records within 24 hours. But last year, the Trump administration delayed the implementation of that rule until mid 2028, saying companies needed more time to prepare.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said little publicly about the outbreak, other than to offer reassurance that it is “under control.”Doug Mills/The New York Times

Food safety experts say the postponement has hindered the response to the outbreak, the largest cluster in a record number of cyclospora cases in the United States this year.

“Time translates into illnesses and lives,” said Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America, who reviewed the emails from Michigan. He added: “We would have had a much better response to this outbreak if they hadn’t delayed that rule.”

Cyclospora, which can cause explosive diarrhea, cramps and other severe symptoms, has been a recognized driver of foodborne illness for nearly 30 years. But this year’s massive toll — totaling more than 24,500 confirmed or suspected cases so far and two deaths — reveals shortcomings in the U.S. food safety system that may leave Americans more vulnerable to future pathogens, public health experts say.

Many point to an erosion of food safety oversight during the Trump administration, stemming in part from its aggressive efforts to roll back regulations and shrink the federal government. Last year, the F.D.A. laid off many of the staff who supported food inspectors’ travel planning and who coordinate with foreign governments on food safety. (An F.D.A. spokesman said on Friday that “travel support staff and staff that coordinated with foreign governments have been reinstated.”) The administration eliminated a committee tasked with studying problems that led to outbreaks. It also cut a program focused on cyclospora tracking.

“So far this administration has made our food less safe, not safer,” said Scott Faber, the senior vice president for government affairs at the Environmental Working Group. “By firing food safety experts, by reducing the number of inspections, by tracking fewer pathogens, and by failing to set up a traceability system that makes sure that we’re able to to clear the shelves quickly.”

Donald Prater, the F.D.A.’s acting deputy commissioner for food, said the agency responded swiftly with the information it had on hand. He added that even if the 24-hour rule had been in effect, it would not have made a major impact on managing this outbreak response.

An F.D.A. spokesman said that protecting the nation’s food supply remains a core responsibility, and the agency has the personnel and resources to respond to outbreaks of foodborne illnesses.

Taco Bell said it responded to requests from Michigan and federal officials in a timely manner. “We acted immediately, voluntarily and proactively to protect our guests and support health officials,” the company said in a statement.

On July 15, federal authorities tied the outbreak to iceberg lettuce that had been supplied to Taco Bell from a plant in Mexico owned by Taylor Farms, the large U.S.-based producer of fresh vegetables, fruits and greens. The next day, Taylor Farms began a recall of their products containing iceberg lettuce that had been shipped to 27 states.

A spokeswoman for Taylor Farms said it promptly responded to requests for information and is cooperating with health officials in the U.S. and Mexico. On July 19, it sent independent third-party experts to conduct a “top-to-bottom review” of food safety processes there.

Yet efforts by authorities to figure out how the iceberg lettuce in Mexico became contaminated by cyclospora, a single-cell parasite that infects the small intestine and spreads through feces, continue to move slowly. Although Taylor Farms temporarily shut down the plant on July 18, F.D.A. inspectors did not arrive in Mexico to inspect it until this week, nearly a month later.

The investigators from the F.D.A. were delayed in traveling partly because of clearances needed to work in an area deemed unsafe for Americans, according to a person familiar with the effort, who was not authorized to speak about it. They also needed to coordinate with the Mexican government and gather enough testing supplies to do a thorough investigation, the person said.

The slow start could make it difficult to discover a root cause of the contamination, said Sandra Eskin, chief executive of Stop Foodborne Illness, a nonprofit working to protect against foodborne pathogens.

Declining inspections

Some of the problems that have hampered the response to this outbreak developed over decades: Scientists who study cyclospora said they have lacked the funding to better understand the parasite, including how it spreads and how to detect it. Food safety advocates say the goals of a landmark food safety law enacted in 2011 have not been met amid weak regulations and falling numbers of foreign food facility inspections.

The federal rule requiring companies to swiftly produce records in an outbreak investigation was drafted under that law, the Food Safety Modernization Act, which gave the F.D.A. new powers to keep food free of parasites and pathogens, to rapidly trace produce through the supply chain and to aggressively expand inspections.

The law set a goal of 19,200 annual foreign inspections by 2016. But foreign inspections have fallen markedly even as the foreign food supply has surged. In 2025, the agency made about 1,100 visits to foreign food plants and cited significant lapses in about 80 of them. Its last visit to the Taylor Farms facility in Mexico was in 2019, records show.

Even though finding the tiny cyclospora parasites during a site visit is challenging, such visits could reveal indicators such as irrigation water with high levels of fecal matter.

A spokeswoman for Taylor Farms said that it has a “robust fecal indicator testing program that includes cyclospora for all of our water sources. All of those tests have been negative.”

With the exception of the pandemic years, the F.D.A.’s foreign food inspections in 2025 were at a 15-year low, agency data show.

Currently, the F.D.A. has about 440 staff charged with inspecting more than 300,000 registered animal and human food facilities — domestically and abroad.

“Other things help ensure the safety of the food supply, but inspection is the classic consumer protection when it’s done correctly,” Ms. Eskin said.

Another major safeguard outlined in the law was meant to add visibility into the food supply chain, particularly for public health officials and regulators charged with limiting harm during an outbreak.

The rule that the F.D.A. ended up delaying last year was meant to “limit food-borne illness and death.” It required food sellers, including restaurants and grocers, to provide the agency or an authorized representative with a spreadsheet detailing their suppliers within 24 hours of an outbreak, or a reasonable amount of time the agency agrees to.

The F.D.A.’s decision to delay the rule was followed by action from the Republican-controlled Congress, which took additional steps to bar the F.D.A. from using its funding to enforce the rule and urged a revision favoring greater flexibility.

In Michigan cyclospora has now sickened more than 12,000 people and contributed to two deaths. Officials said in the internal emails, which were first obtained by Bloomberg News, that they had to contend with an antiquated disease surveillance system and analyze the information from interviews with 700 people who fell ill.

Once Taco Bell emerged as a common thread the interviews, getting the company’s supplier list was crucial, said Susan Mayne, a former F.D.A. official who remains active in food policy. In such a large outbreak, she said, it’s important to determine if one ingredient came from a central source, in contrast to those from an array of farms.

“The faster you can get back to the records, the faster you can identify the source of the outbreak and remove those products from the market and prevent further exposures,” she said. “So speed is everything.”

Searching for solutions

This week is not the first time F.D.A. officials flew to Taylor Farms’ Mexican processing plant to investigate a cyclospora outbreak.

In 2013, in the wake of an outbreak that sickened more than 600 people who ate salad at Olive Garden and Red Lobster, federal inspectors descended on the facility and examined more than 1,000 samples of lettuce, irrigation water and the feces of the farm workers, a main harbor for the cyclospora parasite.

They found virtually nothing, an inspection report shows. Every result was negative, except for one considered inconclusive.

The F.D.A. did note that the facility’s practice of washing the salad mix with recycled water had the potential to spread cyclospora, if it was present. But ultimately the agency could not “determine how or at what point in the supply chain” the cyclospora was introduced. Taylor Farms said it then began a new process for testing water and produce.

Jim Gorny, a produce safety expert who retired in 2024 from the F.D.A., said cyclospora wasn’t viewed inside the agency as high-risk like E. coli or listeria. Yet, some scientists were growing increasingly worried as cyclospora outbreaks grew in size and scope. Originally found in berries and basil, by the 2000s, it was affecting larger numbers of people after eating salad.

Cyclospora is a uniquely difficult parasite to detect, monitor and eliminate. Testing for it in the environment — especially in agricultural water — is extraordinarily challenging, and, as a result, rarely done.

Moreover, cyclospora does not grow in laboratory culture. Scientists often use culture as a tool to amplify tiny bits of bacteria, like salmonella or E. coli, to detectable levels. The same cannot be done for cyclospora, said Kalmia Kniel, a microbiologist at the University of Delaware who researches the parasite.

And because cyclospora are distributed sparsely in large volumes of water, finding them is like dipping a net in the ocean to find a single type of fish. There’s also no way to kill them in processing plants that wash produce like lettuce: They can survive chlorination, a standard process used to kill bacteria.

Dr. Kniel and other food safety researchers have been asking the government repeatedly for $10 million to fund work to develop new ways to spot the cyclospora in the environment and to set testing standards. But after four consecutive years submitting grant proposals to the United States Department of Agriculture, the work remains unfunded.

The U.S.D.A. said its peer reviewers had selected projects viewed as “most impactful” for growers and that it had supported some cyclospora research last year.

Dr. Gorny noted that he helped develop an F.D.A. action plan for cyclospora that was released in 2023. The plan called for increased and improved education, testing for cyclospora and rapid root-cause analysis of outbreaks. Recently, officials working on the plan held an educational session in a region of Mexico that had been tied to prior cyclospora outbreaks.

But progress toward solutions has been slow. F.D.A. guidance on produce safety released this weekacknowledged that the agency does not know of any treatment the would prevent the spread of cyclospora “and be suitable for use on fresh-cut produce.”

As a result, there may be more summers of cyclospora.

“Until we get down to the hard work of better research, getting tools for better and faster detection and better root cause analysis,” Dr. Gorny said, “this is going to happen again.”

Caroline Hopkins Legaspi contributed reporting.

Christina Jewett covers the Food and Drug Administration, which means keeping a close eye on drugs, medical devices, food safety and tobacco policy.

Julie Creswell is a business reporter covering the food industry for The Times, writing about all aspects of food, including farming, food inflation, supply-chain disruptions and climate change."

How Cyclospora Evaded the U.S. Food Safety System to Sicken Thousands - The New York Times