--:-- Gideon Resnick: Good morning. It's Tuesday, June 24th. I'm Gideon Resnick, in for Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: On today's show, how a primary in New York City reflects a fight for the Democratic Party's future. One part of the Republican tax and spending plan that's getting less attention. And what the first pictures by the world's largest digital camera reveal about space. But first, to the shaky Iran-Israel ceasefire announced by President Trump yesterday.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It marked a stunning change from only 24 hours ago, and less than two weeks after Israel began its strikes. Yesterday afternoon, Trump posted on social media that Israel and Iran had agreed to a complete and total ceasefire, and he congratulated both countries for ending what he labeled the 12-day war.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: However, on Tuesday morning, as Trump was departing the White House for a NATO summit, he said that both countries had violated the ceasefire.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: He spoke to reporters in front of Marine One. I'm not happy with Israel. You know, when I say, OK, now you have 12 hours, you don't go out in the first hour and just drop everything you have on them. So I'm not happy with them. I'm not happy with Iran either.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: He also later explicitly warned Israel not to drop bombs. Trump had initially given a staggered timeline for the ceasefire to take hold over a period of 12 hours, suggesting that Iran would stop its missiles first, and then Israel would follow.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Iran's foreign minister said that if Israel ceased operations, Iran had no intention to continue its response. And it appeared the two countries were attacking each other right up to the deadline.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: CNN and the BBC reported explosions in Tehran as Trump made his announcement, while the Iranian foreign minister said their operations continued until the very last minute in a social media post.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel had agreed to the proposal and that the country had achieved its goals. Later, Israel accused Iran of breaching the ceasefire, saying it had detected missile launches hours after Trump's statement.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And seconds after Trump posted his message, Vice President J.D. Vance was live on Fox News for a pre-scheduled interview with Brett Baer, appearing to be learning the news in real time.
--:-- Brett Baer: Well, we were actually working on that just as I left the White House to come over here, so that's good news that the president was able to get that across the finish line.
--:-- J.D. Vance: I think What it means, Brett, is quite simple. First of all, the president, without, knock on wood, having a single American casualty, obliterated the Iranian nuclear program.
--:-- J.D. Vance: We are now in a place where we weren't a week ago. A week ago, Iran was very close to having a nuclear weapon. Now, Iran is incapable of building a nuclear weapon with the equipment they have because we destroyed it.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Intelligence reports differ on the extent to which Iran was actively pursuing the bomb. And it's still not clear exactly how much damage has been done to their capabilities.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Asked by Bayer if he could be sure where all of the enriched uranium in Iran was, Vance said the important question was whether the uranium could be used to build a weapon.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And we know, based on the success of our mission, of course, the leadership of the president, but the incredible skill of our military, that the two mission objectives are completely successful.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: We know that they cannot build a nuclear weapon. Let's just recap here. Only yesterday, it looked to some as though direct confrontation between the U.S. and Iran was developing.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The U.S. had struck Iran's deep underground nuclear facility over the weekend, and on Monday, Iran hit back with missiles towards American military bases in Qatar.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But as the day went on, we learned more about Iran's strikes, which appeared to be calibrated and carefully designed to avoid further U.S. response.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Qatar and Trump offered slightly different figures but both reported that the U.S. intercepted nearly all of Iran's missiles. There were no casualties.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Advance notice was given to the Qataris, and therefore the U.S. via intermediary, and analysts began talking about the attack as a kind of off-ramp for the Iranian leadership.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: According to Reuters, Qatar then became involved in phone conversations with Iranian officials, and in those calls, agreed to the U.S. proposals.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: There's no guarantee the ceasefire will hold, of course, but most experts agree that Iran has taken significant damage over the past couple of weeks, both in losses to senior members of its leadership and to physical infrastructure.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: There are now key questions for how Iran moves forward. Faraz Maksad, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told the BBC it would be a difficult path forward for the Ayatollah, who may now have to make some concessions in future negotiations.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: One has to take a moment and take stock of what's happened. Its proxy network, its forward line of defense strategy, the forward defense strategy that relied on Hezbollah, the Houthis, the militias in Iraq, those were nowhere to be seen as Iran itself and the regime were being attacked.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The regime itself, its ballistic missile program, is being set back significantly. Iran has been significantly weakened.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Let's turn now to New York City, which is holding primary elections today for its next mayor. More than half a dozen Democrats are on the ballot, and the winner of the Democratic primary is likely to be the favorite in November's general election.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Current polling suggests the race has two frontrunners, presenting starkly different visions for New York City and the Democratic Party.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Indeed, in many ways, the primary's two leading candidates embody very different answers to some of the foundational questions that Democrats have been grappling with since losing the 2024 presidential election.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: There's Andrew Cuomo, who served as New York's governor from 2011 to 2021, when he resigned after multiple sexual harassment allegations.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: He is 67 years old and comes from a powerful political family. We are here because we know we can turn New York City around.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: We have already showed what leadership and confidence and unity can do. The other frontrunner in the race is Zoran Mamdani, a 33-year-old Democratic Socialist from Queens who has served two terms as a New York State Assembly member.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The so-called experts said we would be lucky to break 5%. But I always knew that we would build a campaign just like this.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Cuomo is running a pretty standard Democratic campaign. He's pledged to raise the city's minimum wage, make housing, transit, and education affordable and accessible, and strengthen public safety.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: He also argues his experience in federal and state government makes him the best candidate to achieve progressive goals and to oppose President Trump.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Cuomo has much of the Democratic establishment on his side, including people like Representative Jim Clyburn and former President Bill Clinton.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: One of his biggest financial backers is former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. whose donations have helped give Cuomo the largest campaign war chest of all the candidates in the race.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Bloomberg News reporter Laura Namias told us throughout the race, Cuomo has largely been riding on his reputation.
--:-- Laura Namias: Cuomo, I would say, until very recently has pursued what some people have described as a Rose Garden strategy, where his name identification was super high before he even entered the race.
--:-- Laura Namias: He sort of avoided the press, avoided a lot of public appearances that were very carefully staged. And he's been more visible in the last two weeks or so as the race tightened.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: He is seeking to appeal to moderate voters, particularly to Black middle-class voters in the outer boroughs. And he is seeking sort of a more traditional path among people who are likelier to vote in primaries, which tend to be older voters.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Zoran Mamdani is also running on the city's affordability crisis. His platform includes free buses, universal child care, and freezing rent for roughly one million rent-controlled apartments.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: His campaign has seen a lot of excitement from volunteers and has disproportionately attracted small-dollar donors.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: He's been supported by the party's more left-leaning lawmakers, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And Mamdani says he wants to usher in a new generation of leadership for Democrats.
--:-- Laura Namias: It's more of a long shot, at least according to the polls, but Mamdani's path to victory would be primarily through Brooklyn, through voters who are under age 45, and he may be leaning on New York City's Asian, South Asian and East Asian voters who are obviously not a monolith, but who form an increasingly large percentage of New York's population and its voting population.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But she also said no matter who wins the primary, it's possible we'll see both of their faces reappear in November, along with the current mayor, Eric Adams, who is planning to appear on the general election ballot as an independent.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Andrew Cuomo has promised to continue running in the general election on his own independent ballot line if he were to lose the Democratic primary.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It's also a likely possibility that Mamdani would continue running if he were to lose the Democratic primary on the third-party line of the Working Families Party.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So it ain't over yet. There's lots to pay attention to for months and months to come.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Now to President Trump's tax and spending bill. It's a massive piece of legislation that Senate Republicans are currently debating.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And there are many disagreements in the party playing out over the level of spending cuts, particularly to Medicaid.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But today we're going to take a closer look at the fight over part of this bill that's gotten far less attention. A proposal to cut the country's national park budget by over $1 billion over the next year, close to a quarter of the total budget.
--:-- Wyatt Meiscau: That means if you're visiting a national park, There will be less staff to help you when you're in need, to come find you if you get lost, taking you on a guided tour, answering your questions, helping you find the best place to camp, just waiting long lines to get into the park.
--:-- Wyatt Meiscau: And those are all things that already have issues. Trump has claimed that too many sites that are designated as national parks or monuments, and there are hundreds, don't get enough visitors.
--:-- Wyatt Meiscau: So he says many of them would be better managed by states. But a number of conservation groups have criticized this plan.
--:-- Wyatt Meiscau: The director of the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks has said many states don't have the resources to manage these sites themselves.
--:-- Wyatt Meiscau: And an analysis by the National Parks Conservation Association found that in order to cut that much out of the National Park Service's budget, Trump would need to sell off 350 smaller national park sites.
--:-- Wyatt Meiscau: That's more than half. This budget bill goes beyond national parks, though. It would also give the government the power to sell millions of acres of protected public land across 11 Western states to housing developers.
--:-- Wyatt Meiscau: Republican Senator Mike Lee is leading that charge. He previously tried to open up public land for sale in his home state of Utah and says it could be a solution to rising housing costs.
--:-- Wyatt Meiscau: There are plenty of companies that would love to develop some of this stuff, but they haven't been able to because of these protections or because it was too difficult to do, right?
--:-- Wyatt Meiscau: This administration does not necessarily care about that. Not when there's money on the line.
--:-- Wyatt Meiscau: Some Republicans have pushed back on the administration's plan during budget negotiations.
--:-- Wyatt Meiscau: When the bill was in the House, Representative Ryan Zinke from Montana threatened to vote against it unless his state was removed from the proposal.
--:-- Wyatt Meiscau: In the Senate, Lisa Murkowski, who represents Alaska, has been a vocal opponent.
--:-- Wyatt Meiscau: And Meiskau says that people who live near national parks and monuments are concerned too.
--:-- Wyatt Meiscau: I go to protests at very small national monuments that most people have never heard of, and a couple hundred people show up.
--:-- Wyatt Meiscau: And it's truly just like shows that people care about these places, even if they only visited once in their entire life. They're being loud about voicing that opinion that they do not want that to happen.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Republicans are hopeful to pass the overall tax and spending package before the July 4th recess.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following. The Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to continue deportations of certain immigrants to countries with which they have no prior connection.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Earlier this year, the administration attempted to deport a number of people to South Sudan without giving them a meaningful opportunity to contest their removal, which a lower court placed an injunction on.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The migrants in that case had been convicted of violent crimes, and U.S. immigration officials at the time said they were not able to quickly return them to their countries of origin.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: As is standard with many cases on the so-called shadow docket, the Supreme Court's order gave no reason as to why the conservative majority decided the case in this way.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Sticking with Supreme Court related news, today marks three years since the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: A new study released on Monday found that the number of abortions in the United States had actually risen last year, driven in part by access to telemedicine.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It estimated that pills prescribed by telehealth were responsible for about one-fourth of abortions that year.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: According to the Washington Post, 17 states ban all or most abortions, and telehealth was increasingly relied on for some in states with very restrictive bans.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And finally, a revolutionary observatory has taken its first images using a 3,200-megapixel camera, the largest ever built.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The Rubin Telescope captured the light from distant stars and galaxies and revealed thousands of previously unseen asteroids.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: One image showed colorful gas clouds swirling in a region 9,000 light-years away.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Brian Stone at the National Science Foundation said the observatory will eventually capture more information about our universe than all optical telescopes throughout history combined.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And if there is another planet in our solar system, it expects to find it within a year.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It should also detect asteroids in striking distance from Earth, so we can all sleep a little easier.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: 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, we have a Narrated article that's coming up next.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Scientific American has the story of the trend of men spending on testosterone supplements and how many might not be aware of some of the risks.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: If you're listening in the podcast app, you can follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And we'll be back with the news tomorrow.
