--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Thursday, September 25th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, the White House lays out its terms for giving foreign aid, how Gen Z protest power took down a regime, and hopes of a major breakthrough for an incurable disease. But first, to what we know about the shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One detainee is now dead, and two more are in critical condition after a gunman opened fire yesterday. The Mexican foreign ministry confirmed that at least one of those injured was a Mexican national. The acting ICE director identified the shooter as Joshua John, and he is reported to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Police believe he opened fire from the roof of an adjacent building. Officials said that no law enforcement officers were injured in the shooting and that at the moment the FBI is investigating it as an act of targeted violence.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One witness, Denisis Robleto, told the local CBS News that she was waiting outside the facility, having brought her mother to a scheduled check-in with ICE officials when gunshots rang out.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Here she is being translated by CBS. So many thoughts ran through her mind, she says. She adds, my legs started shaking and my hands too. She claims what she didn't know at first was if those shots were aimed at ICE or if ICE was doing the shooting.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In a press conference yesterday, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson urged people not to jump to conclusions and to wait for the facts to come out. This is an active investigation. There's still a lot of unanswered questions. and I want to encourage all of you to exercise a little bit of restraint and allow them to do their job.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He also asked people to pray for the country. There's a lot going on right now in our country. A lot of it's confusing. It's a scary time. I've got children. I've got three young children. And I'm here to tell you that it is challenging to explain to them what's going on in our country right now.
--:-- Shamita Basu: To be clear, authorities haven't shared a confirmed motive at this stage, and there are a lot of unknowns about who this person is or what might have influenced them. Investigators have released few details.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Despite that, President Trump and Vice President Pence linked the death to left-wing rhetoric toward law enforcement, and the FBI have said there were anti-ICE messages on bullets.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Dallas ICE facility is a field office. It processes detainees after they've been arrested and before they're taken to a long-term detention center. It's become the site for weekly morning prayer vigils, in which people in the community show their support for immigrants as they enter for appointments.
--:-- Shamita Basu: According to the Dallas Morning News, this office has also been the backdrop of protests in the past. And one man was arrested earlier this year after claiming that he had an explosive in his backpack. Police did not find any such weapon upon searching him at the time.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This is the second shooting around a federal immigration facility in Texas in recent months. A police officer was shot in the city of Alvarado back in July.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And as immigration enforcement officers have been sending more people to detention centers these types of facilities have become flashpoints for protests and at times violence. In Chicago, there have been hundreds of arrests in the past week as demonstrators attempt to disrupt activity at the facilities.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Tensions in the Chicago area have been rising in recent weeks as immigration agents have stepped up enforcement efforts. And an ICE officer fatally shot a man, a Mexican national who authorities say was not legally in the country during an attempted arrest earlier this month.
--:-- Shamita Basu: After yesterday's shooting, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ordered more security at ICE facilities nationwide.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now let's turn to foreign aid. This week, we heard President Trump vent his frustration at the U.N.'s perceived ineffectiveness and urge the rest of the world to follow his administration's agenda.
--:-- Shamita Basu: His impatience with multilateral organizations has led the U.S. to withdraw from various U.N. bodies designed to alleviate poverty. And now, new reporting from The Washington Post sheds light on how the administration wants to mold its own aid spending to fit the goals of the White House after dismantling USAID earlier this year and challenge the power Congress gets over public spending.
--:-- Shamita Basu: According to a document recently sent to Capitol Hill from the State Department and seen by The Washington Post, Trump plans to shift almost $2 billion designated for U.S. foreign aid.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So the Trump administration has been very aggressive in pushing against what it sees as handouts to other countries. That's Post reporter Noah Robertson.
--:-- Noah Robertson: This goes against decades of Republican and Democratic orthodoxy on the use of foreign assistance and the benefit that America drives from being a country that is seen to promote democracy, to help cure diseases, to cure famines, making sure that it's a global force for good in the world.
--:-- Noah Robertson: The document reviewed by me says the administration would put the money toward initiatives such as countering, quote, Marxist anti-American regimes in Latin America and investments in Greenland and Ukraine, but does not provide more detail than that.
--:-- Noah Robertson: Robertson says it's part of a broader attempt to leverage money to achieve specific goals. The Trump administration has promised a much more transactional foreign policy, one in which it is not giving handouts but is striking deals with other countries, making sure that it is getting something that is clear and direct in return from whatever it puts out.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A funding extension that was passed earlier this year would allow the administration to move money that had been designated by Congress for certain foreign aid programs to other White House priorities.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's not atypical for administrations to ask lawmakers to move money like this near the end of a fiscal year. But The Post reports that the amount of money the administration is seeking to shift is much higher than normal.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It also comes just weeks after the White House told lawmakers it intended to not spend almost $5 billion in other foreign aid money, a move that drew bipartisan criticism.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There is a lot of pushback from lawmakers and their offices who are concerned that the Trump administration is taking another step to unilaterally move around money that Congress had previously appropriated for other purposes and is now putting it toward its own priorities without the consent of lawmakers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One Republican congressional aide told Robertson that House Republicans were on board with this proposed move. The State Department, which absorbed the remaining parts of USAID, did not respond to a request for comment.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The timing of the ask, Robertson said, puts Congress in a difficult position. Either accept the White House's actions and undermine Congress's role in appropriating funds even more, or risk seeing the money disappear if they try to fight it out.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's turn now to what's happening in Nepal, a country coming to terms with a political earthquake after mass youth protests.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Outrage over corruption and online restrictions brought Gen Z to the streets and ultimately brought down its prime minister. Those protests, spearheaded by young people, turned deadly as security forces fired on demonstrators.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Seventy-four people died. And now the new leader has promised an investigation. On its face, these demonstrations were sparked when the previous government decided to ban more than two dozen social media apps.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But The Wall Street Journal reports this goes far beyond young people clamoring to scroll on social media. Gabrielle Steinhauser, the Southeast Asia bureau chief for the journal, told us about the kind of social commentary that many young people in the country were sharing on those apps.
--:-- Gabrielle Steinhauser: Young Nepalis were starting to share photos and images that they had taken from the social media accounts of children and spouses of well-known politicians and the sort of very lavish lifestyle that some of these people were leading.
--:-- Gabrielle Steinhauser: And some of these posts were getting tagged with the hashtag Nepo Baby or Nepo Kid. When the apps were banned, many of these young people saw it as a government-led effort to censor their anti-corruption campaigning.
--:-- Gabrielle Steinhauser: The rate of young Nepalis who are not in any form of training or education or work is very high. And that obviously is in sharp contrast to some of the, you know, sort of like quite luxurious lifestyle that some of these politicians' kids were leading.
--:-- Gabrielle Steinhauser: So they took this social media ban as a move to censor them by the government. And quite a lot of them took to the streets in response.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The escalation in Nepal was the most dramatic, but Gen Z protests have also taken off in Indonesia, East Timor and the Philippines.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Nepal is the third South Asian country in as many years that's removed and elected government after protests driven by young people.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The theme running through the region is that economies in these Asian countries have grown dramatically, but young people are not seeing the benefits.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A lot of people are struggling to find jobs. In the case of Nepal a lot of people traditionally have moved abroad to work in not very comfortable jobs maybe as domestic helpers or in construction to send money back home.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Or if they stay in their country the only jobs that they can find are kind of in the gig economy right that come without sort of the stability and the benefits that you have in more stable employment.
--:-- Shamita Basu: According to the World Bank in South Asia alone one million people are expected to enter the labor market every month between 2025 and 2030.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yet other data shows the share of young people that are not employed in school or in training in a number of countries in the region are among the highest in the world, outside of countries with active conflicts.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's not a clear answer that you can contain this by cracking down on freedom of speech or social media, I think that what these governments really need to do is think about how do they create opportunities for millions of young people who have an expectation to improve their livelihoods.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And, you know, this is not some kind of altruistic move. I mean, this is what these economies need to do to keep growing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Nepal's new interim prime minister has pledged to change and to listen to the young people she is now leading.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following. The world's most powerful tropical cyclone is bearing down on China after causing massive destruction in its wake.
--:-- Shamita Basu: At least 14 people have died in Taiwan as it passed through the island, and massive waves caused Hong Kong to ground hundreds of flights.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Videos shared on social media showed water bursting through hotel lobbies and people clutching onto poles to avoid being swept away.
--:-- Shamita Basu: China's southern Guangdong province has now evacuated a million people as it braces for the impact.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The numbers are in on Jimmy Kimmel's return to late night after a nearly week-long suspension.
--:-- Shamita Basu: According to ABC, more than 6 million viewers watched live, and his monologue attracted more than 26 million views on social media.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The host was visibly choked up as he addressed the controversy over his suspension for remarks made about the death of Charlie Kirk.
--:-- Shamita Basu: President Trump threatened further action against ABC for putting Kimmel back on the air.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, to a possible medical breakthrough, Huntington's disease has long been considered an incurable and devastating illness.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Its symptoms begin in your 40s and involve a slow but severe decline in cognitive, psychological, and physical function, eventually causing death.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's genetically carried, and there is no cure. But for the first time, researchers say they've successfully treated the condition.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A gene therapy trial was given to 17 patients, a dozen of whom have been followed for three years.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's slowed the progression of the disease by 75%. It's a small trial and it's yet to be peer-reviewed, but Professor Sarah Tabrizi told the BBC it could give people decades of good quality life and describe the results as spectacular.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And if you're already listening in the News app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Bloomberg Businessweek has a profile on David Ellison, the man now at the helm of both Paramount and CBS, after a controversial merger.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
