--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Wednesday, September 24th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, Trump's combative speech at the U.N., why it can be hard to clean up polluted water even as cancer rates skyrocket, and the robots are coming to the MLB. But first, Jimmy Kimmel returned to the airwaves last night after a brief suspension by Disney for comments he made in the days following Charlie Kirk's killing.
--:-- Jimmy Kimmel: [standing ovation] Thank you, thank you.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Kimmel entered to a standing ovation, and he devoted the first half hour of the show to the controversy. He began by thanking all the people who had spoken out against his removal, including other late-night show hosts and Republicans he disagreed with, like Senators Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell.
--:-- Jimmy Kimmel: Then he addressed his remarks about Kirk, tearing up as he spoke. It was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man. I don't think there's anything funny about it. I posted a message on Instagram on the day he was killed, sending love to his family and asking for compassion. And I meant it. I still do.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Disney, Kimmel said he disagreed with their decision to suspend him, but thanked them for welcoming him back on the air. A large chunk of his monologue was devoted to criticism of the administration, as well as the principles of free speech.
--:-- Jimmy Kimmel: The president of the United States made it very clear he wants to see me and the hundreds of people who work here fired from our jobs. Our leader celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he can't take a joke. He was somehow able to squeeze Colbert out of CBS. Then he turned his sights on me. And now he's openly rooting for NBC to fire Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers and the hundreds of Americans who work for their shows who don't make millions of dollars.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Shortly before the broadcast, Trump took to social media to express anger at Kimmel's return and threatened to sue ABC again.
--:-- Jimmy Kimmel: Kimmel finished by interviewing Robert De Niro in character as the FCC chair, Brendan Carr. Speech, it ain't free no more.
--:-- Robert De Niro (as Brendan Carr): What? It's not free no more? Yeah, we're charging by the word now.
--:-- Jimmy Kimmel: You're charging by the word? How much are you charging?
--:-- Robert De Niro (as Brendan Carr): It depends on what you want to say. Like you want to say something nice about the president's beautiful, thick yellow hair, how he can do his makeup better than any broad. That's free.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Carr had urged Kimmel's suspension and appeared to threaten federal action against ABC affiliates who carried the show. He had told a podcaster that, quote, we could do this the easy way or the hard way.
--:-- Robert De Niro (as Brendan Carr): When concerns are raised about news distortion, there's an easy way for parties to address that and work that out. And in the main, that takes place between local television stations that are licensed by the FCC and what we call national programmers like Disney. They work that out and there doesn't need to be any involvement of the FCC.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, if they don't, there's a way that's not as easy, which is someone can file a complaint at the FCC. And then the FCC, by law, as set up by Congress, has to adjudicate that complaint.
--:-- Robert De Niro (as Brendan Carr): Much of the backlash this past week has focused on the way Carr is alleged to be using the power of the FCC to silence critics.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Carr was a contributor to Project 2025 writing the chapter on the FCC in which he railed against media companies quote censorship against right content and values.
--:-- Robert De Niro (as Brendan Carr): The FCC has enormous influence over these media companies because it's the agency in charge of approving mergers and acquisitions.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Disney, the parent company of ABC, needs government approval for some of its pending business, like ESPN's deal to acquire NFL assets. And Nexstar and Sinclair, the companies that own many of the affiliate stations, have pending deals or are pursuing deals that could require FCC approval.
--:-- Robert De Niro (as Brendan Carr): Some media commentators say there's already precedent here. The FCC recently approved the $8 billion merger between Paramount and Skydance after Paramount controversially paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Trump.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Announcing its agreement, the FCC said it had received assurances from the incoming owners that they were committed to unbiased journalism.
--:-- Robert De Niro (as Brendan Carr): The dissenting Democratic commissioner on the FCC board for that decision accused Paramount of cowardly capitulation to the Trump administration.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As for Kimmel, there's questions as to exactly what the comedian wants in all of this. His contract is set to expire next year, and there's speculation about what happens after that.
--:-- Robert De Niro (as Brendan Carr): Long gone are the glory days of late-night TV, where comedians like Jay Leno could bow out to 8 million viewers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Kimmel, like his competitors, has seen his ratings steadily drop in recent years. Though yesterday's show might have attracted a little more interest.
--:-- Robert De Niro (as Brendan Carr): Both Nextar and Sinclair decided not to carry Kimmel on their stations last night, meaning about a quarter of national ABC affiliates showed local programming instead.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now to New York, which has been hosting the world's leaders gathered this week for the U.N.'s General Assembly.
--:-- Richard Engel: This year, the U.N. is marking its 80th anniversary. But in his speech yesterday, President Trump appeared to see little worth celebrating about the international organization.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It has such tremendous, tremendous potential, but it's not even coming close to living up to that potential. For the most part, at least for now, all they seem to do is write a really strongly worded letter and then never follow that letter up.
--:-- Richard Engel: Trump questioned the very purpose of the U.N. and was critical of its attitude toward him as president of the United States.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He spoke for 56 minutes, far longer than the 15 minutes allotted to leaders on the podium.
--:-- Richard Engel: In that time, he jumped between a dozen or more topics. He described climate change forecasts as a con job, made false claims about the mayor of London, and warned that migration was destroying Europe.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And he finished with a celebration of national identity.
--:-- Richard Engel: Our ancestors gave everything for homelands that they defended with pride, with sweat, with blood, with life and with death. Now the righteous task of protecting the nations that they built belongs to each and every one of us.
--:-- Shamita Basu: NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel told the network what he saw in Trump's message.
--:-- Richard Engel: So he really portrayed the institution that he was in, established after World War II 80 years ago. He said that it is basically a waste of time and that countries around the world, if they want to save their countries, particularly the ones in Europe, should follow his example.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But perhaps the biggest news to emerge from the day's events came, as it often does, not from the podium, but from the sideline discussions and Trump's social media.
--:-- Peter Waldman: He posted yesterday that he thought Ukraine could take back all its territory occupied by Russia and called Russia a paper tiger.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This is a major change from his position to this point, which has emphasized the need for Ukraine to give up parts of its land.
--:-- Peter Waldman: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky later confirmed he had had a productive meeting with Trump at the General Assembly and mirroring Trump language said the world attention to the UN is fading.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before arriving at the General Assembly, it was no secret that Trump has been critical of the UN.
--:-- Peter Waldman: When he first entered office, he promised to end two conflicts quickly, Gaza and Ukraine, by sidestepping collective peacekeeping processes and instead using his personal relationships with the leaders of Israel and Russia.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That approach has so far yielded little progress.
--:-- Peter Waldman: And he's continued to withdraw from the UN's multilateral structures, like the World Health Organization and the Human Rights Council.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Since Trump took office in January, the U.S. has stopped paying dues to the UN, and it currently owes more than $3 billion dollars.
--:-- Peter Waldman: UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called cuts to aid a death sentence for many, for so many more, a stolen future.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's turn now to an investigation from Bloomberg in Iowa, which has the second highest cancer rate in the country.
--:-- Peter Waldman: And for a rural state, that would seem to be unusual. It does not have a lot of heavy industry that we usually associate with carcinogens.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But as reporter Peter Waldman told us, Iowa does have a massive $50 billion agriculture industry, and some health experts believe there's a possible connection.
--:-- Peter Waldman: Iowa is the number one state in corn production in the United States, the number one in hog production, and it produces just extraordinary amounts of manure from hogs, and it consumes an extraordinary amount of chemical fertilizer to grow all that corn.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Iowa farmers put billions of pounds of nitrogen fertilizer in the form of a chemical compound called nitrate on their crops and all of that manure every year.
--:-- Peter Waldman: Up to half of it becomes runoff due to rain, or gets converted to nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas.
--:-- Shamita Basu: According to Bloomberg, that's made Iowa's water, by some measures, the most polluted in the United States.
--:-- Peter Waldman: And for decades, as the use of these chemicals has climbed, so has Iowa's cancer rate.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's been difficult for researchers to prove the two are directly connected, but beyond the possible link to cancer, health experts have observed links between nitrate and a number of other health risks, like birth defects, thyroid disease, and rare blood disorders.
--:-- Peter Waldman: Babies were getting something called blue baby syndrome. Their skin was literally turning blue as a result of asphyxiation in their systems.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The blood supply was not carrying enough oxygen. And so that led to the regulation of nitrate by the EPA.
--:-- Peter Waldman: That was decades ago, back in the 90s. And subsequent efforts to regulate the risks of nitrate in water have largely stalled or failed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In Iowa, state officials and powerful lobbying groups that represent the agriculture industry have played a large part, namely the Iowa Farm Bureau, a group that Waldman reports is known in the state as the fourth branch of government.
--:-- Peter Waldman: A spokesperson for the group declined to answer questions for his investigation, but one former employee of Iowa's Department of Natural Resources, who supervised water quality, told Waldman, quote, We couldn't do anything until checking with the Farm Bureau. They dictated what we could and couldn't do.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In fact, farmers, the way the laws work, are pretty much unconstrained from emitting as much nitrate into the water or nitrous oxide into the air as greenhouse gas as they want.
--:-- Peter Waldman: At the federal level, regulation efforts in recent years have started and stopped as control of Washington changed hands.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In 2015 under Obama the EPA started looking into nitrate to determine if the limit allowed in drinking water needed to be lowered given the research pointing to health risks.
--:-- Peter Waldman: Trump suspended that review in his first term then Biden reopened it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And just when the EPA was getting down to reviewing those and almost certainly tightening the restriction, The Trump administration has now eviscerated the main Office of Research and Development within the EPA that does that work.
--:-- Peter Waldman: So that work has gone poof.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Waldman also spoke to families living in the Iowa countryside. One couple knew 21 people in a five-mile radius who'd been diagnosed with cancer.
--:-- Peter Waldman: One told him farm families don't like to discuss the cancer epidemic, even though they see it plainly all around them. She said farming is their livelihood.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following.
--:-- Peter Waldman: The man accused of attempting to assassinate President Trump on his golf course in Florida was found guilty by a jury yesterday.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Ryan Ruth was charged with five criminal counts after an incident in September of last year in which he was spotted with a rifle in the bushes as Trump's golf party approached.
--:-- Peter Waldman: Ruth's attempt on Trump's life came just weeks after the then-presidential candidate survived a separate assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Amazon was in court yesterday to defend against charges it duped consumers into signing up for its Prime service.
--:-- Peter Waldman: The Federal Trade Commission alleges the company signed more than 35 million people up for Amazon Prime without their consent, a violation of consumer protection laws.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Amazon denies the charges.
--:-- Peter Waldman: A lawyer for the company said no one is automatically enrolled in Prime.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The FTC also says that while it's very easy to sign up for Prime, consumers are forced to navigate a labyrinthine process internally nicknamed the Iliad Flow to cancel.
--:-- Peter Waldman: A fee of $53,000 per infraction could be imposed if Amazon loses the case, potentially exposing the company to billions of dollars in penalties and refunds.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The FTC started investigating Amazon's subscription practices during Trump's first term, and Reuters notes this trial comes as Amazon has recently sought to deepen its ties to the Trump administration.
--:-- Peter Waldman: And finally, to a big shakeup in professional baseball, a sport that has traditionally been very resistant to change.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Major League Baseball says it will implement a challenge system for balls and strikes next season using robot umpires.
--:-- Peter Waldman: Teams will get two challenges per game to question called balls or strikes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Under the new rules, challenges can only be initiated by hitters, pitchers and catchers.
--:-- Peter Waldman: Disputed calls will also be displayed on stadium big screens.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The change is a long time coming, as MLB has tested the technology in the minors for years.
--:-- Peter Waldman: League executives said implementing robo-umps for challenges rather than going to a fully automated system is more palatable for fans who still want a role for live umpires, but also want a backup in case officials miss calls at important moments.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And just to be fair, while umps in the big leagues get a lot of heat for missed calls, they do get about 94% of pitches right.
--:-- 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: Popular Mechanics has the story of the Edmund Fitzgerald, a massive freighter that famously sank in Lake Superior in 1975.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Half a century and one hit song later, researchers think scientific improvements might finally help uncover exactly why the ship went down.
--:-- 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.
