--:-- Gideon Resnick: Good morning. It's Tuesday, July 9th. I'm Gideon Resnick in for Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Coming up on today's show, who is behind Project 2025 and what does it propose? The aftermath in Ukraine following Russia's rare daylight attack and the people who locked themselves up for a year to see what living on Mars might be like. But first, let's take a quick look at some other stories that are in the news.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: At least eight people are dead in Texas and Louisiana after Hurricane Beryl came ashore on Monday. At times, millions have been in the dark with widespread power outages in the region. NBC spoke to a family who says they're lucky to be alive because they were fast enough to escape the massive tree that crashed into their home.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: We're in the living room and we moved away. That's where all the spiked wood came down from the ceiling. So we probably would have been killed. Now the storm may be moving on, but danger remains. Without power, many people won't have air conditioning, putting some residents at risk in their own homes as extreme heat scorches the area.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: In legal news, jury selection in Alec Baldwin's trial is today in New Mexico. He faces involuntary manslaughter charges going back to a 2021 incident. Baldwin was filming a Western called Rust. The prop gun that he was holding during rehearsal went off, killing one person and wounding another.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Baldwin has pleaded not guilty, saying that he was not responsible for loading a live bullet into a prop gun that should have held blanks. The movie's armorer was convicted of involuntary manslaughter earlier this year. And today, President Biden is hosting world leaders in Washington for a NATO summit. The war in Ukraine is a major topic, and we'll touch on that more later in the show.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The summit comes amid questions and concerns about Biden's candidacy in the presidential election, with calls from some Democrats for him to step aside. Meanwhile, other high-profile elected officials are speaking out to say they're sticking with Biden for now. That includes Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Chuck Schumer.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Now to some reporting that unpacks a term you may have heard by now but perhaps do not fully understand Project 2025. This is a plan that spearheaded by the American conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, and led by two former Trump administration officials.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And it lays out an exhaustive blueprint for the next Republican White House, with goals that include dismantling the Department of Education, large-scale tax cuts, investing more into fossil fuels, and effectively banning abortion nationwide by restricting medication shipments by mail.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Both Republicans and Democrats have been aware of this plan for quite some time, but the conversation reached a fever pitch over the last month or so, in part driven by President Biden's poor performance at the presidential debate.
--:-- Hannah Knowles: Amid all this anxiety about the Democratic ticket, Democrats do feel like it's more important than ever to focus voters on Trump and what Trump would do. And, how can we turn the conversation away from Biden?
--:-- Gideon Resnick: That's Hannah Knowles, a national politics reporter for The Washington Post. She told us about how Democrats are weaponizing fear around Project 2025 as a campaign tool against Trump.
--:-- Hannah Knowles: They're asking surrogates, allies, and influencers to talk about it as much as they can. They found that it's a really good kind of tagline as they make the case to voters that a second Trump term would be more extreme than the last one.
--:-- Hannah Knowles: And they can point to all these specific goals that Project 2025 has written down and say, oh, my gosh, if you elect Trump, he could come after abortion pills or he could roll back these efforts to address climate change.
--:-- Hannah Knowles: Project 2025 also calls for greater White House influence over the Justice Department, drastically cutting the federal workforce, and giving the president more power over the civil service. That includes building a, quote, army of vetted conservatives ready to take federal jobs if Trump wins re-election.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Trump's campaign, meanwhile, has tried to separate the former president from this proposal over concerns that it could hurt him in November. Trump posted on social media recently that he disagrees with some of the ideas in Project 2025.
--:-- Hannah Knowles: He had also claimed to have nothing to do with the people behind it. But I think that's been a tough story for Trump to sell because more than a dozen of his former appointees are involved. And there's a large overlap between their stated goals and Trump's goals for the White House.
--:-- Hannah Knowles: All the kind of broad strokes I think they very much in sync but it is when you get to some of the social issues when you get to abortion in particular I think that where you see Trump is not eager to be associated with.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Although of course Democrats would say we don't trust what he's saying. He said before he was elected in 2020 that he didn't think Roe v Wade was on the ballot, and look what happened.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The questions and attention around Project 2025 come as the Republican National Committee gears up for its convention next week in Milwaukee. Yesterday, Republicans moved to adopt a platform that softened language on abortion, but included calls for mass deportations and an end to the education department, among other things.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The AP reports that the proposed platform, short on many specifics, could reflect an effort from the Trump campaign to avoid giving more material to Democrats making the case about the potential dangers of another Trump term.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Now to Ukraine, where it's a day of mourning following yesterday's Russian missile attacks. President Volodymyr Zelensky said today that 38 people were killed, including four children.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Russia launched more than 40 missiles toward multiple cities in a rare daytime attack. One of the buildings hit was the main children's hospital in Kiev, Ukraine's largest city.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The strike sent terrified parents into the streets, clutching their children. Here's how one parent described the attack to reporters on the scene, which was translated by the British broadcaster Channel 4.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: We got here five minutes earlier. We managed to get to the pediatric ward. I don't know. It's a nightmare. I don't even know if it was a missile or the fragments of a missile.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The missile ripped through the dialysis ward, smashing windows and damaging at least five sections of the hospital, according to Ukraine's health ministry. It says this facility was the largest and best equipped in the country to care for children in need.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: On social media, Zelensky shared images of the wreckage with children covered in blood and broken glass coating hospital rooms full of cribs. Emergency workers, hospital staff, and civilians have been searching the rubble for survivors.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: White House spokesperson John Kirby was asked about the timing of the strike, whether it was a Russian message to Western allies ahead of the NATO summit.
--:-- John Kirby: Sadly, this is par for the course for Mr. Putin to hit civilian infrastructure, and he doesn't care whether he's hitting hospitals or residential buildings.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: I can't draw the line that this is some sort of message. But Zelensky and other Ukrainian leaders do have a message for the West They say the country badly needs better air defenses so it can shoot down more of the missiles Russia uses.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: President Biden is expected to announce new measures to boost air defense at the NATO summit this week, and Zelensky will be among the attendees.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Kiev's mayor Vitaly Klitschko talked to Channel 4 about the importance of NATO support.
--:-- Vitaly Klitschko: We need support with modern weapons because with defensive weapons, It's defensive because we defend our homeland.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Russia denies targeting the children's hospital. Its attacks have killed thousands of civilians since the invasion began. Ukraine's prosecutor general says he plans to share evidence with the International Criminal Court.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It considers intentional strikes on hospitals to be war crimes. Finally, humans have come home from Mars. Sort of. Four crew members recently emerged from more than a year living inside a NASA experiment on Earth in a space that replicated Mars.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: They were confined to a 1,700-square-foot space where they had to grow their own food, maintain equipment, and do simulated Mars walks. The experiment even mirrored 22-minute communication delays with Earth that would happen up there.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Mission Commander Kelly Haston talked about being able to do work that could lead to people living on the actual red planet.
--:-- Kelly Haston: I am so proud and honored to be part of this crew and project. And to be a part of a small incremental part of the work being done here on Earth that will one day enable humans to explore and live on Mars.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: This is just the first of several simulations on Earth. NASA has two more that are coming up. The idea is to understand the challenges of living on Mars and how humans can deal with them.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And NASA says it might send astronauts to Mars as soon as the 2030s. You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And if you are already listening in the news app right now, stick around for a narrated article from Time. The magazine went to Fiji for an inside look at how the country is leading a charge to reduce plastic waste and hold companies to higher standards for getting rid of plastics in a sustainable way.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: If you're listening in the podcast app, you can follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story. And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
