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--:-- Shumita Basu: Good morning. It's Friday, August 22nd. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shumita Basu: On today's show, how the world forgot Sudan's ongoing civil war, why many big oil and gas corporations want to keep federal greenhouse regulations in place, and how artificial light is messing with city birds. But first, to the Middle East, where the Israeli government has defied international criticism and moved forward with two contentious plans this week in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Let's start in Gaza, which according to the UN is now roughly 90 percent under Israeli control or off limits to Palestinians. After months of warning, Gaza City is now officially under famine, according to a Global Hunger Monitor.
--:-- Shumita Basu: In recent days, Israel has been intensely bombing the outskirts of the city in preparation for what it describes as the next phase of its war. The Israeli military is planning a major offensive to take over Gaza City, which Israel claims is a Hamas stronghold.
--:-- Shumita Basu: There are roughly one million Palestinians living in and around Gaza City. That's about half of Gaza's population. Hundreds of people have started to flee in recent days, and those who stay will be forced to move south through militarized zones in the coming weeks.
--:-- Oren Lieberman: The UN has just warned that this operation will lead to more death and destruction in Gaza because you have to move so many people, many of whom are suffering from malnutrition, starvation, or other diseases or illnesses or, frankly, injuries.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, Israel approved a plan known as the E-1 Settlement Plan to build a new settlement of around 3,400 houses.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law, and Israel had put this plan on hold for over two decades, in large part due to pressure from the United States and other countries until now.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Part of the reason this is moving forward now is the first Trump administration overturned decades of U.S. policy and said settlements are not de facto illegal under international law. And that is all the green light Israel needs.
--:-- Shumita Basu: But there's also the timing here. Next month, a number of states are expected to and have said they will recognize the state of Palestine. And this, the finance minister made clear, is to some extent in revenge for that.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The far-right Israeli finance minister approved this plan, and in talking about it, he said he wants to bury the possibility of a Palestinian state with this settlement.
--:-- Shumita Basu: He blatantly said he views this as the erasure of the Palestinian state. If built, the settlement would split the West Bank in two. It separates the north of the occupied West Bank from the south, and then it cuts off East Jerusalem, the future capital of a Palestinian state, in the eyes of the international community and the UN, from what would be the rest of the country.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And that's why E1 was on ice for so long. But in the current environment, Israel's government feels it can do that.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The Palestinian Authority which governs the parts of the West Bank not under Israeli control has condemned the plan.
--:-- Oren Lieberman: And Lieberman says Israel plans for both the West Bank and Gaza City have been widely criticized by the international community.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The decision to take over Gaza City is especially unpopular within Israel. Some of the largest anti-government protests since the war started took place in recent days.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The hostage trammies have been almost united in their anger. The Israeli military chief of staff even warned the operation could put the hostages at risk.
--:-- Shumita Basu: and repeated polls have shown that a majority, and in some cases an overwhelming majority of the country, support a deal to release the hostages and end the war.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Netanyahu is calling on tens of thousands of Israeli reservists to carry out the planned takeover of Gaza City, further angering the country's exhausted and demoralized military.
--:-- Shumita Basu: While the world's attention is on Gaza and Ukraine, one war that's received relatively little international attention is reaching a critical point, the civil war in Sudan.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Since the fighting broke out in 2023, Sudanese civilians have borne the brunt of the destruction and violence.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The UN has reported that over 12 million people have been displaced, more than Gaza and Ukraine combined.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And there are widespread reports of sexual violence.
--:-- Shumita Basu: This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the famine, which has been officially confirmed in six locations in the country, is on track to spread to nearly three times its scope if the conflict continues.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Several other countries have financial and other interests tied up in this war, which makes the road to peace difficult to navigate.
--:-- Shumita Basu: What's happened in Sudan is the breakdown of the state, the breakdown of a kind of social order.
--:-- Shumita Basu: But that vacuum hasn't been filled by people trying to create a solution or people trying to make peace.
--:-- Shumita Basu: It's been filled by other parties, other countries in the region trying to take advantage of the situation.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic and my guest this week on Apple News In Conversation.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Earlier this year, she traveled to the front lines of the war in Sudan.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Her report featuring photography from Lindsay Adario is called The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth.
--:-- Anne Applebaum: Applebaum told me that she realized when talking to people there just how forgotten they feel.
--:-- Anne Applebaum: There's nobody who's stepping in to mediate. Nobody who's trying to say, wait, let's stop. Let's try and fix this.
--:-- Anne Applebaum: Nobody who's got the clout to pull the sides apart. Not that certainly not the U.N., not the U.S., which is barely there, not Europeans.
--:-- Anne Applebaum: And then there really aren't others who are interested in doing that.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Since Trump's inauguration eight months ago, there's been no official U.S. envoy appointed to Sudan.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Masad Boulos, Tiffany Trump's father-in-law, is the current U.S. senior advisor to Africa.
--:-- Shumita Basu: He met with the head of the Sudanese Armed Forces in Zurich last week, but a bigger meeting on the conflict among the U.S., Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE was reportedly postponed as the powers couldn't agree on their joint statement.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And there's been no sign of restoring foreign aid from the USAID funding that was frozen in January.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The U until then had been the biggest provider of international aid to Sudan
--:-- Anne Applebaum: Applebaum told me that people on the ground are feeling the effects of these cuts
--:-- Anne Applebaum: She told me about a pediatrician she met at a hospital outside the capital of Khartoum who was treating severely malnourished babies and mothers.
--:-- Anne Applebaum: And he had heard that the U.S. was cutting aid, and he wanted to tell me that he still had in his warehouse access to these very special high-calorie nutrition supplements that are made especially for malnourished children.
--:-- Anne Applebaum: There's one called Plumpy Nut.
--:-- Anne Applebaum: And he was explaining to me, he said, you know, we still have it and we're very careful with it and we don't waste it.
--:-- Anne Applebaum: We just use it. You know, we use it only for these children.
--:-- Shumita Basu: To hear more about Applebaum's reporting in Sudan, check out this week's episode of Apple News in Conversation.
--:-- Shumita Basu: If you're listening in the Apple News app, we've queued it up to play for you next.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Let's turn now to the environment and how a recent EPA proposal is impacting businesses.
--:-- Shumita Basu: You might remember the EPA announced a plan earlier this summer to eliminate its own authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And while that might seem favorable for companies that have been accused of breaking environmental law, NPR reports that a lot of businesses actually don't want to see the EPA's authority go away because it could create legal problems.
--:-- Shumita Basu: We spoke with climate correspondent Michael Copley about this, and he explained, although companies often complain federal rules are too strict, many of them still prefer having the EPA set standards because it helps to shield them from lawsuits at the local level.
--:-- Michael Copley: Especially fossil fuel companies from states and municipalities that have been impacted by climate change.
--:-- Michael Copley: And one of the defenses that industry has made in those cases successfully in some instances is to say it is the federal government that ultimately has the authority to deal with climate pollution, not state courts.
--:-- Michael Copley: That's what happened in a case in South Carolina where the city of Charleston sued local oil and gas companies saying fossil fuel emissions are making flooding worse.
--:-- Michael Copley: And a judge recently threw the case out in part, he said, because it is the federal government, the EPA, not the state court where the suit was filed that has the authority to deal with greenhouse gas emissions.
--:-- Michael Copley: Beyond the risk of legal action, Copley reports that some companies support EPA regulations because they make business more simple.
--:-- Michael Copley: What companies want is predictability and consistency.
--:-- Michael Copley: They don't want to have to meet different regulations in every state that they operate.
--:-- Michael Copley: And so having sort of a national standard is good for businesses.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The American Petroleum Institute, a trade group for oil and gas companies, told NPR that it, quote, continues to support a federal role in regulating greenhouse gas emissions.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Same with the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, whose members include major electricity producers and a trade group for the natural gas industry, and the Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned electricity companies.
--:-- Jeff Holmsted: Jeff Holmsted an environmental lawyer and former EPA official under George W Bush told NPR the fact that the EPA is moving ahead with its plan to deregulate despite serious concerns from big corporations points to a growing divide between the business and ideological wings of the Republican Party
--:-- Jeff Holmsted: There's plenty of people out there who want to bring lawsuits, and it seems like this would just invite a lot more litigation.
--:-- Shumita Basu: No matter what the EPA decides to do, the Supreme Court previously found that greenhouse gas emissions are covered by federal law.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Challenging that precedent would involve sending the issue back to the highest court to reconsider.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The battle over congressional redistricting nationwide took two big steps forward.
--:-- Shumita Basu: First, in California, the legislature passed a bill yesterday calling for a special election in November, asking voters to suspend the use of maps drawn by an independent commission and enact a new map that could give Democrats five additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Governor Gavin Newsom came up with the plan to counter a Republican bill in Texas to adopt new maps and likely give Republicans an additional five seats in Congress.
--:-- Shumita Basu: That map was created after President Trump asked Texas lawmakers to help him secure his razor-thin majority in the House in next year's midterms.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Texas's maps passed the statehouse Wednesday night and made it through a Senate committee yesterday.
--:-- Shumita Basu: It will now go to the full state Senate for likely passage today.
--:-- Shumita Basu: A Russian drone strike hit a U.S. factory in western Ukraine yesterday, injuring at least 15 people, according to NPR.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The attack caps off a tumultuous week in the war.
--:-- Shumita Basu: After a week of diplomatic summits and talk of a possible meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the two sides are still miles apart.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And despite expectations from the White House and President Trump, a deal for peace appears to be nowhere in sight.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And finally, if your sleep schedule is thrown off by a pesky streetlight, you have something in common with birds.
--:-- Shumita Basu: A new study shows that urban birds stay up significantly later than rural birds thanks to artificial light.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Researchers analyzed audio recordings and found birds in cities sung for about an hour more in the evening than birds in darker areas.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The findings highlight just how impactful light pollution can be.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The Guardian reports light pollution affects 23% of Earth's surface and is getting worse.
--:-- Shumita Basu: According to the study, larger-eyed birds, like the American robin, European goldfinch, and northern mockingbird, all extended their days more than average.
--:-- Shumita Basu: It's not yet known what impact this will have, but one scientist said artificial light might have some positive ones, like extending foraging and mating, and increasing the survival rates of fledglings.
--:-- Shumita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And if you're already listening in the news app right now, stick around for the rest of my conversation with Anne Applebaum about the civil war in Sudan.
--:-- Shumita Basu: If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News in Conversation to find that episode.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Enjoy the weekend and I'll be back with the news on Monday.
