--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Thursday, May 22nd. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
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--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, the COVID vaccine will soon be available to fewer people, what Biden's closest aides knew about his declining mental acuity in office, and Trump derails his meeting with South Africa's president with false claims and a surprise screaming.
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--:-- Shamita Basu: But first, two staff members at the Israeli embassy were shot and killed outside an event at the Capitol Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. last night. The man and woman were a young couple named Yaron Lashinsky and Sarah Milgram.
--:-- Pamela Smith: A suspect is in custody and identified him as 30-year-old Elias Rodriguez from Chicago. Prior to the shooting, the suspect was observed pacing back and forth outside of the museum. He approached a group of four people, produced a handgun, and opened fire, striking both of our decedents.
--:-- Shamita Basu: After the shooting, the suspect then entered the museum and was detained by event security. The suspect chanted, "free, free Palestine," while in custody.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Milgram was an American who worked in the embassy's public diplomacy department. Leshinsky was a German-born Israeli citizen who worked in the embassy's political department. He described himself on his LinkedIn as being dedicated to expanding the circle of peace with our Arab neighbors.
--:-- Yehiel Leiter: The couple was about to be engaged. The young man purchased a ring this week with the intention of proposing to his girlfriend next week in Jerusalem.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I will say this. We are a resilient people. Together we won't be afraid. Together we'll stand. And we're going to overcome the moral depravity of people who think that they're going to achieve political gains through murder.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On social media, President Trump called for an end to anti-Semitism, writing that hatred and radicalism have no place in the USA.
--:-- Benjamin Netanyahu: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office released a statement saying he is outraged by the killings.
--:-- Shamita Basu: D.C. embassies in particular have been a focal point for demonstrations against the war in Gaza, where over 53,000 Palestinians have been killed since Hamas' October 7th attack.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Israel is in the midst of its latest offensive to press Hamas to release the remaining hostages. Netanyahu said recently he believes at least 20 hostages are still alive, and his military goal is to take full control of Gaza and force Palestinians out.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Also this week, after widespread international condemnation, Netanyahu permitted a minimal amount of aid into Gaza after an 11-week blockade. Around 100 trucks carrying flour, baby food, and nutritional supplements entered the enclave late on Wednesday.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But U.N. officials say as of this morning, because of distribution issues, none of that aid has so far reached Palestinians in need.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Last night's shooting took place at an event intended to bring Jewish and non-Jewish communities together in an attempt to build common ground and turn pain into purpose.
--:-- Shamita Basu: An organizer of the event told NBC News it was painfully ironic that as they were trying to build bridges, somebody came in with such hate and destruction.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This is a developing story. You can check the Apple News app for updates throughout the day.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We learned this week that the group of people eligible to get a COVID shot is set to be restricted after the Food and Drug Administration issued new guidance.
--:-- Dr. Vinayak Prasad: The FDA said it would no longer approve new vaccines for healthy people under 65 years old unless pharmaceutical companies run additional trials to test their safety and benefits.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Right now, anyone can get a booster. Under the new restrictions, boosters would be available to those who have a medical condition that elevates the risk of severe disease, such as obesity, pregnancy, or a history of smoking.
--:-- Dr. Vinayak Prasad: At-risk Americans can be reassured that they will be covered by such approvals. At the same time, we want more evidence at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. We want to know more about what these products are doing, especially as we enter the seventh, eighth, and ninth dose.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Usha Lee McFarlane, a national reporter with Stat, told us that's been the gist of the criticism of this move. A lot of people really just want choice. They say, well, don't take away my choice to have the vaccine. Maybe I live with my grandmother who has cancer and I want to get it to protect her.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The problem is that these trials take a long time, months, and can be quite expensive. Vaccines are not very profitable, certainly not compared to drugs like Ozempic, for example.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So one concern is that vaccine manufacturers just may say, well, it's just not worth it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: ABC News reports that it's traditionally the CDC that sets these kinds of recommendations, while the FDA determines which vaccines to approve, making this a departure from precedent.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's another indication of the ways our public health apparatus is changing under the current administration.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Meanwhile, NPR reports that many of the ways the CDC previously distributed health and outbreak alerts, like newsletters, have gone silent.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The agency's main social media channels are now run by the Department of Health and Human Services.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Cases of measles, salmonella, listeria, and hepatitis A and C have continued to rise.
--:-- Shamita Basu: All this comes as the World Health Organization celebrated a new pandemic treaty, the first global agreement for how to respond to future pandemics.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The U did not participate as President Trump has begun the process of withdrawing from the WHO.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has urged nations to reject, as he put it, the moribund WHO.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The U.S. was once the WHO's biggest donor, the title that China now holds.
--:-- Shamita Basu: President Biden's health is back in focus this week after we learned just a few days ago that he's been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But even before this news, his health, specifically his cognitive health, was a topic of debate and speculation.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A turning point in this conversation came nearly a year ago when he and now President Trump met for their first and only debate of the 2024 campaign.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Many Americans tuning in were shocked by what they saw.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Making sure that we're able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I've been able to do with the COVID, excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with, look, if we finally beat Medicare.
--:-- Shamita Basu: At that point, the questions about Biden's ability to serve another term were impossible to ignore.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But new reporting from CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios' Alex Thompson reveals that people in Biden's inner circle knew about his cognitive decline for years and that they actively concealed it from others in the administration, from elected officials, and from the American people.
--:-- Alex Thompson: We had cabinet secretaries, multiple cabinet secretaries, tell us that, you know, if there was a crisis at 2 a.m., they would have been worried.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They did not have confidence that he would have been a reliable commander-in-chief with the middle of the night crisis.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Thompson and Tapper lay out their reporting in a new book called Original Sin, President Biden's decline, its cover-up, and his disastrous choice to run again.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They're my guests this week on Apple News in Conversation.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And just to say, we spoke a few days before Biden's cancer diagnosis was announced, so you won't hear us discuss that in this interview.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They told me Biden and his closest confidants didn't seem to be concerned by his disastrous debate performance or the fallout.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In fact, they kept him largely isolated from outside opinions about the state of his campaign.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Here's Tapper.
--:-- Jake Tapper: The outside pollsters, Murphy, Garen, and Pollock, never talked to Biden. They were never allowed to speak with him.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And, you know, they'd been having concerns about his age and the impact of his age on his candidacy for months.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But they never got to talk to him.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, Chuck Schumer is able to confront Joe Biden and say, I've talked to your pollsters. Have you?
--:-- Shamita Basu: They think you only have a 5 percent chance of winning.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He's the only one that we can find that actually said to Biden, if I were you, I would drop out.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He's the only one we can find saying that.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Eight days after that conversation, Biden announced he would step down.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In response to the reporting in this book and elsewhere about his health, the former president has said that claims about his cognitive health declining during his presidency are wrong and that there is nothing to sustain them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: To hear the rest of my conversation with Tapper and Thompson, stick around after today's show. That episode will play for you next.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The House has voted to approve legislation to fund President Trump's tax and immigration agenda, sending the bill to the Senate.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The bill would extend trillions of dollars in tax cuts from Trump's first term, along with hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending, while slashing spending on social safety net programs by more than $1 trillion over the next decade.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The final vote came in the early hours of this morning, wrapping up a marathon 24-plus hour session.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The bill is expected to undergo major revisions in the Senate.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Meanwhile, yesterday in the Oval Office, President Trump hosted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, but their meeting descended into serious diplomatic discomfort as Trump raised false claims of a white genocide taking place in South Africa.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As Ramaphosa suggested that Trump listened to the voices of his country, Trump ordered the lights dimmed and played a video mashup that included grave crossings along a road, which Trump claimed were farmers' graves.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A fact check from multiple news outlets points out that the mounds were, in fact, part of a protest against the violence against farmers, not actual graves.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And when they kill the white farmer, nothing happens to them. No, there is quite... Nothing happens to them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There is criminality in our country. People who do get killed, unfortunately, through criminal activity, are not only white people. Majority of them are black people.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Police statistics in the country show that white South Africans are not killed at a higher rate than other South Africans.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Trump's false claims largely focused on land seizures.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The South African government has passed a law that allows the government to take land without compensation, which is aimed at addressing historical inequalities for land ownership that resulted from apartheid.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before the meeting concluded, Ramaphosa alluded to the controversial Qatari jet.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I'm sorry, I don't have a plane to give you. I wish you did. If your country offered the United States Air Force a plane, I would take it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Speaking of that jet, the Defense Department has officially accepted a luxury Boeing jet from Qatar to temporarily serve as Air Force One for President Trump.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's believed to be one of the biggest foreign gifts ever given to the U.S. government, and it's raised by partisan security and ethical concerns.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A Pentagon spokesman said that the administration was abiding by federal rules and regulations and that they would ensure proper security measures were taken.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Emoluments Clause of the Constitution forbids the president from receiving gifts from foreign kings and states without the consent of Congress.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some ethics experts have said that Congress needs to more strictly enforce this clause to prevent things like this from happening.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all those stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And if you're already listening in the news app right now, stick around the rest of my conversation with Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson about former President Biden's mental acuity is coming up next.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you're listening in the podcast app, you can find that episode by searching for Apple News in Conversation.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
