--:-- Gideon Resnick: Good morning. It's Friday, August 1st. I'm Gideon Resnick in for Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: On today's show, how one of Trump's former personal lawyers got the role of a lifetime. A drug more potent than fentanyl is spreading through Europe. And why a newborn in Ohio has been called the world's oldest baby. But first, late last night, President Trump announced sweeping new tariffs on more than 60 countries that will largely take effect next Thursday.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The minimum was set at 10 percent, but it's at least 15 percent if the country has a trade surplus with the U.S. Some countries, especially in Asia, have been singled out for even higher spikes. Today, we're focusing on one country that's not exactly like the rest, where the chances of a deal look remote, Brazil.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: There, Trump has imposed a 50% tariff among the highest of any country in the world. But he's not doing this because of a trade deficit. The U.S. actually has a surplus with Brazil. Trump is angry that former President Jair Bolsonaro is standing trial for plotting a coup in 2022, and he wants the charges dropped.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: He told reporters why. He loves the country, and he fought hard for those people, and they want to put him in jail. And I think that's a witch hunt, and I think it's very unfortunate.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Manuela Andreano, Reuters chief correspondent for Brazil, told us how the country was reacting to the new tariffs.
--:-- Manuela Andreano: It's being seen as very unprecedented. Brazil and the U.S. have always had good relations. Actually, Brazil has always had good relations with everyone. Brazil prides itself of being everyone's friend. So this is very strange.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Now, there are some key exemptions. Orange juice and airplanes, for example. But some of the most popular products in the U.S. look set to be hit. Coffee and beef were not among the exemptions.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So you can expect that coffee and beef will become more expensive. First, because 30% of the coffee in the U.S. comes from Brazil. And Brazil's the largest coffee producer in the world. It's not going to be so easy to replace that.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And a lot of the beef that Brazil exports to the U.S. is actually used in hamburgers because it's not that high quality. So you can expect burgers and coffee to become more expensive if these tariffs do go into effect.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But Trump hasn't just targeted the country. He's targeted one man personally. He's imposed sanctions on the Supreme Court justice overseeing the criminal case against Bolsonaro.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The administration has defended its targeting of Justice Alexander de Mares by saying that he had politically persecuted Bolsonaro and censored conservative voices when the court sought to dispel far-right material online.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: That included suspending X, formerly known as Twitter. Now, these sanctions are often reserved for foreign nationals accused of human rights violations, and it prohibits them from having any property in the U.S. or doing business there.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But if Trump was hoping that economic warfare would force a deal with Brazil, so far it seems to be having the opposite effect. The current president, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, said in an interview with The New York Times that the trial was a judicial matter and not for trade negotiations.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Andrioni says that his resolve has turned his own domestic fortunes around. Before this his approval ratings were among the worst in his career. But now you know the most recent polls show this fight with Trump has earned him a lot of public support.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And for the first time in months, there are more Brazilians who approve of his government than disapprove him. If a trade deal with Brazil looks far off, there may be more movement elsewhere in the coming days, especially for those countries absorbing the steepest rates.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Let's turn now to a story out of Washington you might have missed this week. A former personal lawyer of President Trump was narrowly confirmed to a lifetime position as a federal appeals court judge, despite facing a host of ethics violation allegations.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Emile Bovey represented the president in three of his four criminal cases. That includes the Manhattan criminal trial, where Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Trump appointed Bovee to a top position in the Justice Department when he took office this year, and then he nominated him for this new role on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: His confirmation has been controversial for a number of reasons. For one, it moved unusually quickly, despite some lawmakers' concerns about his personal connection to Trump.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Bovee will be in a position to potentially review hundreds of lawsuits against Trump's administration, and he'll have the power to shape U.S. law for decades to come.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: At his hearing, Bovee disputed claims that his role defending Trump in court compromises his neutrality.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: I am not anybody's henchman. I'm not an enforcer. I'm a lawyer from a small town who never expected to be in an arena like this.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Also, during the process, several whistleblowers came forward accusing Bovee of putting Trump's agenda above fundamental legal principles in his role at the DOJ.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: They say Bovee encouraged the administration and attorneys at the department to defy court orders related to Trump's immigration agenda.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: As one of the whistleblowers described it, Bovee allegedly told DOJ attorneys back in March that planes carrying migrants that were bound for El Salvador would need to take off, no matter what, even after a federal judge ruled against the flight.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: That is a big no-no in the prosecutorial world. and the Justice Department and Mr. Bovee himself has denied these allegations and said that never happened.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: That's Perry Stein, who covers the DOJ for The Washington Post. She and her colleagues spoke to one of these whistleblowers who says that Bovee misled the Senate Judiciary Committee about his involvement in the DOJ's decision to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams earlier this year.
--:-- Perry Stein: Multiple prosecutors resigned after they refused Bovee's demands that they sign off on a request to a judge to drop the prosecution.
--:-- Perry Stein: Prosecutors wrote pretty scathing resignation letters saying, you know, one saying, I'm no fool. I'm not going to do this work for you. This is a really big breach of protocol. Like, this is not what happens.
--:-- Perry Stein: And really accusing him of quid pro quo that they had Adams agree to help them carry out their immigration policies in exchange for dropping this.
--:-- Perry Stein: Bovee denies ever asking prosecutors to consider dismissing court orders.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Ultimately, every Democratic senator and two Republicans, Senators Lisa Murkowski from Alaska and Susan Collins from Maine, voted against his confirmation.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Emile Bovee's kind of a sign that Republicans are supportive of what Trump is doing in the Justice Department which is creating less distance between the White House and the Justice Department than has traditionally been there
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And Stein says the president decision to appoint Bovee shows how his judicial strategies are evolving in his second term
--:-- Perry Stein: Trump has, you know, very publicly fumed that he's upset about a lot of the judges that he picked in his first term, right? He chose very traditional picks for his judges and U.S. attorneys.
--:-- Perry Stein: And all across the country, Trump judges are sometimes ruling against him. And that is very normal in the judicial system, right? Obama judges block some of the Obama Democratic policies and vice versa.
--:-- Perry Stein: This time you see he's really trying to pick different people to prevent this from happening again.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Now to reporting from The Wall Street Journal on a dangerous drug stronger than fentanyl that's spreading through Europe faster than authorities are able to keep up.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Reporter Suna Rasmussen told us about the rise of nidazines.
--:-- Suna Rasmussen: Nidazines are so potent that only a trace amount of them will cause a lethal overdose. So we're talking a couple of grains of salt, of table salt, vanishingly small amounts.
--:-- Suna Rasmussen: Nidazines are around 50 to 250 times more potent than heroin, and five times as strong as fentanyl.
--:-- Suna Rasmussen: Hundreds of people across Europe are dying every year from these drugs, and many don't even know they're consuming them. They're almost always consumed unwittingly by users.
--:-- Suna Rasmussen: They typically appear as contaminants in other drugs, like heroin, but also in more recreational drugs like cocaine or ecstasy, and even in counterfeit painkillers or benzos like Xanax and Valium.
--:-- Suna Rasmussen: And this is one concern that people have here in the UK and in Europe. Although it was first synthesized back in the 1950s, it's only since 2019 that experts have begun noticing it in the drug supply.
--:-- Suna Rasmussen: Much of it is sourced to China, where some of the compounds to produce them are legal. It's produced in labs at low cost and then shipped largely through individual brokers and sellers.
--:-- Suna Rasmussen: Rasmussen managed to contact a seller in China, who told him that they could ship him large quantities right to his door.
--:-- Suna Rasmussen: They would send me the pills to Sky in discrete packaging, they said, and one of them sent me a photo of what appeared to be cat food. And I assume those bags of cat food contained nitazines.
--:-- Suna Rasmussen: So it's quite easy to get in touch with these dealers.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Experts are concerned that gangs operating in Europe might start to distribute them, which could dramatically increase their availability.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: That's partially how the fentanyl crisis in the U.S. got so bad so fast. Cartels, primarily Mexican cartels, began shipping fentanyl especially into the U.S. And a lot of that also came from China.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: There are organized criminal gangs throughout Europe, and some of them have links both to Mexican cartels but also to China, if they decide to import nitazines on a large scale into Europe, that could create a really serious crisis, both for law enforcement in Europe but also for healthcare professionals and drug users.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Europe has strict rules around prescribing and marketing synthetic opioids, which has largely spared it from the horrors of the fentanyl crisis that's played out in the United States in recent decades.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But experts told Rasmussen the spread of nidazines is threatening to change that. The director of a leading treatment provider for drug addiction in the UK told him that nidazines are, quote, the biggest public health crisis for people in the UK who use drugs since the AIDS crisis
--:-- Gideon Resnick: This may already be playing out in West Africa where countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia have declared a national emergency over nidazine usage
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following. In Texas, for the first time since deadly floods rose through hill country in the early hours of July 4th, the top emergency management official in Care County addressed where he was that night.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: William Thomas, the county's emergency management coordinator, testified in a hearing yesterday that he was off duty on July 3rd. He was sick that day and asleep during the worst of the flooding the morning of the 4th.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: My supervisors and sheriff's office leadership were aware that I was off duty. I briefly woke around 2 p.m. when there was no local rainfall or indication of elevated risk and returned to rest.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: I was awakened around 5.30 a.m. on July the 4th by my wife following a call from the city of Kerrville EMC, Jeremy Hughes, requesting that I mobilize.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: By that time, the worst of the flooding had hit low-lying communities, including summer camps like Camp Mystic, where 27 campers and counselors died.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Thomas works under the county judge, Rob Kelly, who testified that he was out of town as the floods hit. In other testimony, local officials said they needed an updated warning system for events like this.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Now to a story out of Ohio about a record-breaking birth. Thaddeus Daniel Pierce was born last weekend and has had the honor of becoming the world's oldest baby, a title bestowed upon him by MIT Technology Review.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Now that's because Thaddeus developed from an embryo that had remained in storage for more than 30 years. The donor was Linda Archard, now 62 years old.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: She told MIT that back in the early 90s, she and her husband decided to try IVF, then a relatively new technology, and create four embryos.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: One resulted in her daughter she had 31 years ago, and another is now Thaddeus. His mom said that they are in awe of the new baby, even if members of their family think it sounds like something from a sci-fi movie.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And finally, does the memory of trying to do a pull-up in the annual presidential fitness test still haunt you? Well, that test is coming back.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: President Trump signed an executive order reinstating it for public school students yesterday. It was phased out by the Obama administration in favor of a program that focused less on athletic performance and more on individual health.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Now, it's not clear what exactly will be in this new version. But for those of us that are long out of school, we can at least take comfort in knowing that we don't have to fake a sick day just to get out of doing pull-ups.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you are already listening to the News app right now, stick around for the latest episode of Apple News in Conversation.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: This week, Shamita talks to journalist TJ Raphael about women who say they were forced to give up their babies for adoption at a Christian maternity home.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: All of the women I spoke to had already decided they didn't want abortions. These women wanted to keep and parent their children. All they wanted was support.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Rafael explains what these facilities promise, what they actually provide, and what that reveals about reproductive choice in America.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News In Conversation to find that episode.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Enjoy the weekend, and we'll be back with the news on Monday.
