--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Wednesday, February 12th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, why President Trump and Elon Musk want to gut an agency that protects consumers, American teacher Mark Fogel's been released from Russia, and Hollywood hits a promising gender parity milestone. But first, just over a week ago, a military aircraft carrying around three dozen detained migrants departed for Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. naval base in Cuba.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Officials with the Trump administration say these migrants are dangerous criminals, describing them as, quote, the worst of the worst. But right now, we don't have a way of verifying that. We know very little about who's been sent there, how long they'll be kept at Guantanamo, or the crimes they're accused of committing.
--:-- Kristi Noem: My goal is that people are not in these facilities for weeks and months. My goal is that there's a short-term stay. They're able to go incarcerate them, take them, follow the process, and get them back to their country.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But Sylvia Foster-Frau, immigration reporter for The Washington Post, has been talking to some human rights lawyers who say they are troubled by what little they've learned so far.
--:-- Sylvia Foster-Frau: They have not been able to make contact with these immigrants and make sure that they have legal access. And according to them, because they're coming from the U.S., all due process rights go with them now to where they're being taken in Guantanamo. And really, in general, there's so little that any of us know about who these people are, what their immigration status is. Do they have a history of violent crime or was there only crime crossing the border?
--:-- Sylvia Foster-Frau: Foster Frau told us where these migrants are being housed at Guantanamo also has lawyers concerned. They're actually being held on the side owned by the Defense Department. That's a military prison. It's called Camp 6. It's where suspected terrorists were sent after the September 11th attack.
--:-- Sylvia Foster-Frau: Lawyers and aid groups say the living conditions there are inhumane. Some prisoners have called it a tomb above ground. Under U.S. law, this facility is only authorized to be used for suspected members of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or terrorist organizations affiliated with those groups.
--:-- Sylvia Foster-Frau: The Trump administration has said the detained migrants at Guantanamo are part of a violent Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua. But that gang has not been designated a terrorist group by the administration or connected to the terrorist groups affiliated with September 11th.
--:-- Sylvia Foster-Frau: So lawyers say migrants at Guantanamo cannot be held at Camp 6 legally. The Defense Department responded to these allegations by saying they technically consider migrants to be in custody of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, not the Department of Defense, despite where they're currently detained.
--:-- Sylvia Foster-Frau: But one lawyer Foster Frau spoke to said that distinction is difficult to make. He said basically it's pretty impossible to detach the military facility from ICE custody because it was completely built to hold suspected terrorists, that it's been completely modeled and configured to suit a group like that and not immigrants.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Trump says he wants to send up to 30 migrants to Guantanamo and he ordered the construction of new detention space This week a federal court in New Mexico blocked his administration from sending three Venezuelan men to the island. Other legal challenges are expected as well.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's turn to President Trump and Elon Musk's efforts to reshape Washington by gutting federal agencies. Yesterday evening, Musk joined the president in the Oval Office as Trump announced a new executive order aimed at drastically cutting federal jobs.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The White House said agency heads would be ordered to consult with Musk's Department of Government Efficiency and prepare to initiate a large-scale reduction in the workforce and limit hiring to essential positions only.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Meanwhile, one of Musk's recent targets is the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an independent agency within the Federal Reserve that oversees financial products and services used by Americans and aims to protect consumers from predatory or fraudulent behavior.
--:-- Brian Schwartz: It was created by the Obama administration in response to the 2008 financial crisis. It's been kind of this Wall Street cop, and it's been taking on banks, big and small, for quite some time.
--:-- Brian Schwartz: That's one recent occasion when the CFPB went after a big bank. They ordered Bank of America to pay over $100 million to customers for systematically double-dipping on fees, imposed on customers with insufficient funds in their account.
--:-- Brian Schwartz: And the Bank of America was accused by the CFPB of withholding reward bonuses explicitly promised to credit card customers and misappropriating sensitive personal information.
--:-- Brian Schwartz: After the CFPB's orders, Bank of America said they voluntarily reduced overdraft fees and eliminated insufficient fund fees.
--:-- Brian Schwartz: But this week, as we mentioned on Monday's show, the entire agency was put on pause when Russell Vogt, the new head of the Office of Management and Budget and acting director of the CFPB, ordered it to close for at least the week.
--:-- Brian Schwartz: The CFPB has been a real target of Republicans for years. The Republican lawmakers have been questioning the concept of CFPB's funding, that there's not enough congressional oversight on how CFPB is funded, and that the CFPB sometimes goes too far with their enforcement actions.
--:-- Brian Schwartz: The agency has a budget of $823 million for the 2025 fiscal year, and the money comes from the Federal Reserve.
--:-- Brian Schwartz: In his first term, Trump proposed slashing the agency's budget and rolling back regulations. He's raised concerns without providing evidence of possible fraud, and he's accused the agency of weaponizing its power.
--:-- Brian Schwartz: Elon Musk, meanwhile, recently proposed on social media to, quote, delete CFPB, calling the work it does duplicative of other regulatory bodies.
--:-- Brian Schwartz: However, consumer advocates and ethics experts tell CNN then Musk's involvement in trying to gut the agency is a concerning conflict of interest because he owns several businesses that could benefit from looser financial regulations.
--:-- Brian Schwartz: There's a financing arm of Tesla, for example, that provides car loans, which are subject to CFPB oversight. Just last month, Musk's social media platform X announced plans to launch a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payment platform in partnership with Visa.
--:-- Brian Schwartz: And there are concerns about whether Musk now has access to information about digital payment systems from his direct competitors The CFPB has investigated the owner of Cash App to name one So the concern from the CFPB side about Doge gaining access to the CFPB is of course that the Doge officials are gaining access to sensitive information, particularly around investigative details.
--:-- Brian Schwartz: And people, particularly Democrats, would argue that they should not be getting access to those types of things.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Democrats in Congress say the CFPB's work is critical to protect consumers, and it can't be shut down without congressional approval.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Senator Elizabeth Warren, who serves on the Committee for Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, and who helped create the CFPB, joined protesters and some of the Bureau's employees who were protesting the stop work order in Washington on Monday.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The CFPB is the cop on the beat. And that cop is the one that caught the crooks and so far has made them give back $21 billion.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Vote, for his part, has restored at least one key function that the CFPB performs, the weekly publishing of the average prime offer rate.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's a tool used by the mortgage market, signaling that some of the agency's functions are vital to the economy.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But as one industry analyst notes, VOTE has broad power over the direction of the agency, including slowing it down or, as this analyst said, putting it to sleep.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now to international news. Mark Fogle, the American teacher imprisoned in Russia since 2021, is back on American soil.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He addressed reporters late last night from the White House alongside President Trump, whom he thanked, with an American flag draped around his shoulders.
--:-- Mark Fogel: I feel like the luckiest man on earth right now.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The White House called this an exchange, and the Kremlin acknowledged a Russian citizen was being freed from the U.S., but didn't immediately give more details.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The White House said it was a show of good faith from Moscow that things are moving in the right direction on efforts to end the war in Ukraine.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Fogel was traveling from the U.S. back to Russia, where he worked at the Anglo-American School of Moscow, when customs officers at the airport discovered marijuana and cannabis oil in his suitcase.
--:-- Shamita Basu: His family said that a doctor recommended it for back issues. Fogel pleaded guilty to charges of transporting and possessing illegal drugs and was sentenced to a 14-year prison term.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The case bore some similarities to that of WNBA star Brittany Griner, who was released from Russian custody in December of 2022.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Vogel's 95-year-old mother, Malfin, worked hard to keep his story in the news and even personally brought up his case with Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania last year, the event where there was an assassination attempt on Trump's life.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She told a local ABC affiliate about finding out that Mark was finally coming home.
--:-- Malfin Fogel: He just said, I'm in the Moscow airport. And of course, he usually calls from the prison. And I said, well, what are you doing there? He says, I'm waiting for a plane to take me to Washington, D.C., which was unbelievable. Unbelievable.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Advocates for the family had hoped that Fogle would be included in the prisoner swap deal that brought home Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and U Marine Paul Whelan They were freed six months ago At least nine other Americans remain in Russian custody Fogel release comes as Trump is expected to speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin again soon.
--:-- Shamita Basu: CNN senior international correspondent Frederick Pleitgen spoke to the network about how the Trump administration is positioning Fogel's release.
--:-- Frederick Pleitgen: They believe that this is part of their larger effort that they have been talking about on trying to end the war in Ukraine.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Of course, we've heard the Russians be very coy about all this, whether or not there have been direct phone conversations between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But the Russians have said that contacts between the two administrations had been intensifying over the past couple of weeks.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In recent days, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that he would be ready for talks as well.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And according to The Washington Post, Keith Kellogg, the retired three-star general who's been appointed as the special envoy to the war by Trump, is expected to consult with other European leaders about a plan this week in Munich.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories we're watching.
--:-- Shamita Basu: President Trump met with Jordan's King Abdullah in Washington yesterday, and the two discussed the ongoing tensions over the ceasefire deal in Gaza.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Trump has repeatedly said he wants nations, including Jordan and Egypt, to resettle displaced Palestinians as part of a plan for the U.S. to take over the Gaza Strip, a plan he reiterated on Tuesday.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We're going to take it. We're going to hold it. We're going to cherish it. We're going to get it going eventually where a lot of jobs are going to be created for the people in the Middle East.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In a post on X later in the day, King Abdullah said there was a unified Arab position against the displacement of Palestinians and described talks with Trump as constructive.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In other news, everyone you know is sick or getting over something or coming down with something.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The CDC says flu cases surged to a 15-year high this winter. Overall, flu infections are up 31 percent, and almost 50,000 people were admitted to hospitals with the flu this week, according to the CDC.
--:-- Shamita Basu: USA Today reports flu shot rates are at a six-year low, and fewer than half of Americans have been vaccinated in 2025.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, in the world of movies, at long last, some kind of parody.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Among last year's top-grossing films, there were just as many movies featuring women protagonists as there were male protagonists.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's according to an annual report that tracks this information, which said it's the first time this has happened in recent history.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The report also said that with the exception of certain movies like The Substance, featuring Demi Moore, an actor over 50, there are far fewer roles for older female actors than male actors.
--:-- 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 Bloomberg Business Week takes us to the Himalayas where a type of mushroom grows that's revered by practitioners of traditional medicine as a cure-all and possibly an aphrodisiac.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The catch it costs 136,000 dollars a pound.
--:-- 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.
