--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Thursday, September 4th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, Epstein assault survivors call for action from Congress. Why D.C. courts are even more overwhelmed than they were before the federal takeover. And what President Xi and Putin talk about when they think no one is listening.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But first, to vaccines, where an announcement out of Florida yesterday appears to have fractured a long-held U.S. consensus over public health care. Here's Florida Surgeon General Joseph Latipo speaking to a crowd of supporters.
--:-- Joseph Latipo: The Florida Department of Health, in partnership with the governor, is going to be working to end all vaccine mandates in Florida. All of them. All of them. This would make Florida the first state in the country to remove requirements for vaccines, including those for children. It would include those that help prevent serious diseases like polio, rubella, mumps, and tetanus.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Right now, these vaccines are mandated for school kids under Florida law, so any changes will require action from the state legislature. Florida's decision highlights the increasing influence of HHS Secretary Robert F. jr. Republican Governor Ron DeSantis name-dropped Kennedy's Make America Healthy Again initiative during the state's announcement.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In a sign that suggests public health policy could become a state-by-state issue, three Democratic-led Western states also announced they're forming their own coalition called the Western Health Alliance to help improve vaccine access. Bloomberg's public health reporter Jessica Nix told us about it.
--:-- Jessica Nix: The governors of California, Oregon, and Washington state all came out and said they're going to create their own vaccine recommendations and bypass the vaccine panel that makes recommendations from the CDC. The alliance said the CDC had become a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And Nix told us a similar but more informal agreement between some states in the Northeast has also taken shape. Everything's falling to the states for them to be able to decide how they're going to handle their own vaccinations. And it's becoming very piecemeal. It's becoming confusing and it's changing the vaccine landscape.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So people are going to be more confused about where to get a vaccine, how to get a vaccine, whether they should even get one and if it's the right decision for them. Today, Kennedy is scheduled to testify before the Senate Finance Committee. The hearing was planned before the sudden removal of now-former CDC Director Susan Menares last week and the wave of resignations that came in protest of her removal.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But that is now likely to be a key focus. We can expect that senators want to get some answers about what actually happened with Director Menares being ousted just last week, why these senior leaders have also decided to resign, why there's been so much scrutiny on the CDC in this past month. It's been an especially tumultuous time under Kennedy's leadership.
--:-- Shamita Basu: More than 1,000 current and former HHS employees signed a letter addressed to members of Congress calling for Kennedy's resignation and accusing the secretary of putting the nation's health at risk. Kennedy has defended his moves, saying in an op-ed that the CDC has lost public trust through politicized science and bureaucratic inertia.
--:-- Shamita Basu: After all of this chaos at the CDC a bunch of public health leaders have come out and said this is really alarming for the future of pandemic response for the future of the agency for the future of public health at the CDC.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The victims of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein are speaking out, some for the first time publicly, and encouraging Congress members to release more files. Yesterday, they made their stories and their demands heard on Capitol Hill.
--:-- Marina Lacerda: I was only 14 years old when I first met Jeffrey Epstein. It was the summer of high school. I was working three jobs to try to support my mom and my sister when a friend of mine in the neighborhood told me that I could make $300 to give another guy a massage. It went from a dream job to the worst nightmare.
--:-- Marina Lacerda: Every day I hoped that he would offer me a real job as one of his assistants or something, something important. I would finally have made it big, the American dream. That day never came. I had no way out until he finally told me that I was too old.
--:-- Haley Robson: Haley Robson, who was recruited by Epstein when she was 16, talked about the emotional strain ongoing uncertainty was putting on their lives. Maintaining the real truth in secrecy only allows for conspiracy theorists to tell lies that drives up our anxiety and fears and will continue to lead to more pain, more suffering, and honestly, more deaths of innocent victims.
--:-- Haley Robson: It's time you do as right by us. Unseal all the documents.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Earlier this week, the House Oversight Committee released tens of thousands of pages of files, but most were already in the public domain. For Republican Representative Thomas Massey and Democrat Ro Khanna, it was nowhere near enough.
--:-- Thomas Massey: They want to advance legislation that would compel the Justice Department to release more documents within 30 days of Congress authorization.
--:-- Ro Khanna: But they don't have the support of Republican leadership, so they'll need to collect petition signatures from half the House, that's 218 members, to force the bill onto the floor.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As of Wednesday morning, NBC News reports that they have 134 lawmakers. That's 130 Democrats and four Republicans, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nancy Mace.
--:-- Marjorie Taylor Greene: Mace left her private meeting with Epstein victims in tears without making a comment. She later described having a full-blown panic attack as she spoke to them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Kanna and Massey say that if they can get every Democrat on board, they'll need just two more Republicans. The Republican Speaker Mike Johnson has said their efforts are unnecessary because the House Oversight Committee is already investigating the matter.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some Republicans, like South Carolina's Ralph Norman, said they'll support Massey and Connors' bill if it comes to the floor, but they won't cooperate with the petition to get it there.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The White House is putting pressure on other lawmakers to similarly stay clear, with an official calling voting for the petition a hostile act toward the administration in speaking with NBC.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Epstein had described Trump as a friend to many associates, And in May, the president was told that his name, among many others, did appear in some Epstein files, a fact that doesn't in itself suggest any wrongdoing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In his election campaign, Trump said he'd have no problem releasing the files. Lately, though, his message has changed. Here he is yesterday after being asked about the files by a reporter.
--:-- Donald Trump: It really a Democrat hoax because they trying to get people to talk about something that totally irrelevant to the success that we had as a nation since I been president.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Victims told NBC News yesterday that they had not heard from the administration and its declaration that they were finished investigating the matter made them feel as though they, quote, never existed.
--:-- Lisa Phillips: Us Epstein survivors have been discussing creating our own list. We know the names. Many of us were abused by them. Now together as survivors, we will confidentially compile the names we all know who are regularly in the Epstein world.
--:-- Lisa Phillips: And it will be done by survivors and for survivors. No one else is involved.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Even if Massey and Kanna do eventually get the votes they need, it would still need to pass the Senate and ultimately signed by Trump.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now to D.C., where Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser signed an executive order this week that requires local police to work with federal law enforcement officials indefinitely to the, quote, maximum extent allowable by law.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This means even if Congress does not vote to extend Trump's takeover of the D.C. police when it expires next week, police will continue to support the president's mission to reduce violent crime in the city, which had already been dropping in recent years.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Since Trump's takeover, which began nearly a month ago, arrests in D.C. have ticked up slightly. Nearly 1,000 defendants were booked and taken to court during the first two weeks, compared to 870 arrests over the previous 15 days.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before this, D.C.'s court system was already straining to handle its caseload. And CNN's Holmes-Lybrand told us the federal takeover has been adding pressure.
--:-- Holmes-Lybrand: We've really seen this kind of maximizing the court system in D.C. The D.C. U.S. Attorney's Office, led by former Fox News anchor and Trump ally Janine Pirro, has encouraged prosecutors to bring more cases to federal court and to pursue the most serious charges they can.
--:-- Holmes-Lybrand: There's been kind of this new push of bringing what could have been lower level charges, really pushing those aside and going for the highest, most maxed out charge we can see of any given instance.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's increasing workloads for public defenders, too. One defense attorney told NBC that he's never had more cases than he does right now and that his colleagues are doubling or even tripling their loads.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And there are fewer judges available to hear these cases. Two are on extended leave, and there are 13 vacant seats, which Trump is responsible for filling.
--:-- Shamita Basu: During a recent day of hearings, one judge on the D.C. Superior Court told the courtroom that he had 125 cases to get through that day.
--:-- Shamita Basu: D.C.'s jails are also struggling to keep up, as prosecutors push to keep more people behind bars while their cases work their way through the system.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What that can do is it can lead to a ballooning inside of jails and can also lead to a backlog in terms of what the Bureau of Prisons is able to process. And in one case, a magistrate judge flagged that a woman had been in jail detained after her arrest for about 19 hours despite his order to release her.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And D.C.'s jails are at risk of getting more crowded. Trump recently signed an executive order aiming to end cashless bail in the city an action that experts have said cannot likely be done federally D is one of at least 30 cities plus several states that use this system where a defendant can be released by a judge without paying a fine while they await trial.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Typically, judges release people accused of nonviolent crimes who they determine are not a safety or a flight risk. Trump has called the policy dangerous, but according to researchers at the Brennan Center for justice who have studied cashless bail across dozens of cities, there is no evidence it leads to increased crime.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And a recent analysis of how the system has worked in D.C. over the last decade found that 99 percent of people released while awaiting trial for a violent crime did not re-offend.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following. A federal judge in Boston has ordered the Trump administration to reverse its cuts of more than $2.6 billion in research funding for Harvard University, calling the funding freeze unconstitutional.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The administration is likely to appeal. The judge wrote in her review that it appeared the administration, quote, used anti-Semitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically motivated assault on this country's premier universities.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Trump administration has frozen federal funding at multiple schools and opened dozens of investigations. Three Ivy League schools have reached agreements with the administration to restore funding.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In Beijing yesterday, the world watched as President Xi Jinping delivered an enormous military parade to mark 80 years since the Second World War defeat of Japan.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The parade showcased state-of-the-art military technology like hypersonic missiles, underwater drones, and even a robot wolf. While showing off the country's military might, Xi warned that mankind was faced with the threat of peace and war.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But in less carefully choreographed remarks. He was also caught on mic talking to VIP guest Russian President Vladimir Putin about the prospect of a long life.
--:-- President Xi Jinping: (through a translator) People once only lived to 70, but people say you're just a child at that age now.
--:-- President Putin: With advancements in organ transplants, it'll be possible to achieve immortality.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, the NFL season kicks off tonight with the Dallas Cowboys taking on the Philadelphia Eagles.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Cowboys are coming off what has been called one of the most shocking NFL trades in the past decade after they sent the all-pro pass rusher Micah Parsons to the Green Bay Packers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Ringer has a look at 25 questions that could shape this season, including whether Parsons could make the Packers a Super Bowl contender.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can get live scores super fast on the lock screen of your iPhone by downloading the Apple Sports app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And as always, you can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. If you're already listening in the News app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A lot has been said about kids in school using AI like ChatGPT to cheat on tests or write entire essays. Bloomberg Business Week has the story of how schools across the country are increasingly using bots in their lesson plans.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And how one school in Colorado is getting especially creative with it. 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.
