--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Wednesday, July 16th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, a timeline of what happened at Camp Mystic the morning of the Texas floods. Getting an IUD is painful. Doctors are formally starting to recognize that. And how much would you pay for a chunk of Mars? But first, the Senate will debate legislation today that would claw back over $9 billion for foreign aid and public media that both chambers of Congress and President Trump himself had previously approved.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Senate narrowly voted last night, 51 to 50, to move ahead on a version of the package. Three Republicans voted against it, along with all Democrats, and Vice President J.D. Vance cast the tie-breaking vote. Some concessions were made to win over a handful of Republican senators, including restoring some funding for PEPFAR, a global AIDS relief program credited with saving millions of lives that Trump originally wanted to cut.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And in response to concerns over cuts to public broadcasting, the White House proposed a plan to continue funding 28 public radio stations serving Native American communities, though the president of Native Public Radio called the plan structurally impractical.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This proposed rescission package is part of a broader effort by the administration to assert more authority over the federal budget, which is supposed to be controlled by Congress. We spoke with congressional reporter Bo Erickson from Reuters.
--:-- Bo Erickson: These are really the first tests for Republican leaders up here in Congress on whether or not they try to maintain their authority over this.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In recent months, the Trump administration has been testing a number of federal budget laws. It has withheld billions of dollars of appropriated funds without notifying Congress, which The Washington Post reports has impacted thousands of programs across at least half a dozen agencies.
--:-- Bo Erickson: For example, the administration withheld over $6.8 billion for school programs that was supposed to be sent to the states on July 1st. The money was earmarked for things like after-school care, English language learning, teacher training, and other programs.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Office of Management and Budget said their review of the funds found that they were being, quote, misused to subsidize a radical left-wing agenda.
--:-- Bo Erickson: Earlier this week, 24 states plus D.C. sued the administration, asking a federal judge to order the release of the money.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And lawmakers say the administration has also either failed to share spending plans or they've sent incomplete data. Federal law requires the executive branch to provide spending plans by the end of April.
--:-- Bo Erickson: A wide swath of federal agencies from the FBI to NASA have not turned over their receipts to lawmakers on how much money is going out the door currently.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And this really raises a transparency question because usually these receipts are a check for the legislative branch to see that the money passed earlier in the year by Congress is making it to the states and the grantees that they intended the money to be used for.
--:-- Bo Erickson: Experts told me the lack of transparency is unusual. One veteran Republican budget expert who worked for President George H Bush told me at this point in the year there has never been less reliable information available to either the public or Congress about actual agency spending than at any time since the modern budget process was established in 1974.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Senate has until Friday to vote to actually pass the bill to rescind funding from public media and foreign aid under the law they're using to avoid a Democratic filibuster. It'll then get sent to the House for a final vote.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If they don't vote to pass it, the previously approved funding will be legally required to go out as expected. Now to Texas.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As recovery workers clear the rubble and search to identify nearly 100 people still unaccounted for in the floods, We're learning more about how evacuation warnings worked and didn't work in the early hours of July 4th.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We're going to focus today on Camp Mystic, an all-girl summer camp that sits where the Guadalupe River and Cypress Creek meet. It was decimated by the floods. 27 counselors and campers died. And the Washington Post ended up speaking with nearly two dozen camp counselors, emergency officials, parents, and experts to piece together a timeline of what happened during those early morning hours.
--:-- Shamita Basu: About 550 campers were sleeping as the water surged. Many of the cabins were built in a FEMA-defined flood zone, somewhere less than 500 feet from the river, and the camp had been under flood watch.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The camp's director, Dick Eastland, received a life-threatening flood warning from the National Weather Service at 1.14 a.m., but the Post learned he didn't start trying to evacuate campers for more than an hour.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The family spokesperson told reporter Annie Gowan that soon after the alert went out, Eastland roused other camp leaders to assess the situation and evaluate whether to evacuate the kids, most of whom had no access to phones.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Gowan told us they decided to evacuate the cabins most in danger, which were housing the youngest children, as young as eight.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The problem was that the way that the camp sits on the river, it's kind of a confluence of waterways. So those had produced a sort of a whirlpool effect, and they could see that the cabins were sort of swirling like a toilet bowl.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One of Dick's sons, Edward Eastland, who's a camp director, made it to one of the cabins and was later found alive, with around a dozen campers clinging to a tree about 200 yards away.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Dick died during the rescue efforts, along with some of the girls.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Post reports that as the waters were rising around 2 a.m., camp counselors, many of them teenagers themselves, were given conflicting messages about how to keep the kids safe.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Faced with a lack of concrete information, scared young girls, and dark and rainy conditions, many were forced to make life-and-death decisions.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Many, many people have credited these teenage counselors for saving a lot of these girls.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One counselor was told by a staff member to stay in her cabin with her young campers, but she and other counselors decided to leave for higher ground instead.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The water was so high at the time that when they finally just were like, we have to get out of here, they took each girl across this big widening gulf, like one by one to get to higher ground.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Camp Mystic had seen floods before but never like this The alert from the National Weather Service predicted far less rain than what ended up falling at the campground.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And even a severe flood warning does not explicitly call for evacuations. The federal agency lacks the authority to give those orders.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Parents have blamed both officials at the camp and in Kerr County for not responding sooner to the Weather Service's warning.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And experts told the Post, given the FEMA flood map and how the area was known for flash floods, it was basically inevitable that Camp Mystic would experience severe flooding at some point.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I think experts would say that the dangers of this were well known, right? I think we had one in the story who said it was unforgivable that the cabins were built there.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There was some complacency, I think, by everybody in the Hill Country because they'd never seen anything this bad.
--:-- Shamita Basu: New medical recommendations could make major improvements to how women access birth control by addressing a long-ignored symptom, pain.
--:-- Shamita Basu: For years, women told medical providers that IUD procedures were painful. Vox's Allie Volpe joins to discuss why their voices are finally being taken seriously.
--:-- Allie Volpe: Everyone sort of falls on a continuum, but it felt like for a while, and that's certainly what we've seen on social media over the last couple of years, It felt like patients' concerns and pains were not being taken seriously.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The appeal of an IUD is that unlike the pill, it can be highly effective for up to 10 years without management or appointments.
--:-- Allie Volpe: So it can be less invasive to daily life. But the procedure of inserting it has multiple pain points and can result in severe cramping.
--:-- Allie Volpe: Many patients were told by their physicians that over-the-counter pain management was the only option.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But over the past year, the CDC and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have updated their guidelines to include recommendations for addressing the pain.
--:-- Allie Volpe: They suggest that doctors offer local anesthetics like lidocaine spray or cream or an injection of anesthetics into the cervix.
--:-- Allie Volpe: Some physicians are now offering general anesthesia or anxiety medication.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Volpe reports that many medical fields have a long history of ignoring or under-examining women's pain.
--:-- Allie Volpe: The so-called father of modern gynecology, James Marion Sims, practiced his experiments in the 1880s on enslaved women without using anesthesia based on the false stereotype that Black people had higher pain thresholds.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Women's pain, and even as recently as now, has sort of been dismissed by their doctors.
--:-- Allie Volpe: There's been recent reporting about medical gaslighting where women across the spectrum come in with any sort of pain or issue and they feel dismissed by their doctors.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So this has a long history in medicine.
--:-- Allie Volpe: Volpe told us that the changing standards around IUDs demonstrates that there a shift in medicine that encouraging doctors to see women and gender nonconforming people as the experts of their own bodies.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you thinking about getting an IUD Volpe has some advice Don wait until the day of your appointment to make a plan.
--:-- Allie Volpe: Talk to your doctor while you're scheduling your appointment about the different pain management options so you can talk through what might be best for you.
--:-- Allie Volpe: And in that initial appointment, like talk about your concerns, your fears, your preferences, anything that might make this be a scary or difficult experience for you, Talk to your doctor about it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Trump administration is scaling down its military presence in Los Angeles as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the removal of half of the 4,000 National Guard troops stationed there.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Trump had deployed troops in June after protests over immigration raids grew. But the decision went against the wishes of both the Democratic mayor, Karen Bass, and Governor Gavin Newsom, who launched a failed legal challenge to have them removed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It marked the first time a president had federalized National Guard troops without a governor's permission since 1965.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A carjacking in Atlanta hit an unusual target, a van rented by Beyoncé's choreographer, where thieves stole jump drives containing unreleased Beyoncé music and show plans.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Beyoncé's team was in town for her Cowboy Carter tour.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This is a big blow for Beyoncé, who's known for going to extreme lengths to protect her music from leaks.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She pioneered the surprise drop with her 2013 album, and Post Malone described how, in a recent collaboration, a copy of the song was personally sent to his house and kept under lock and key while they worked on lyrics over text.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, if you've ever wanted to own a piece of Mars, today is your chance.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A 54-pound rock from the Red Planet is being auctioned by Sotheby's in New York.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's believed to be the largest piece of Mars found on Earth, and it broke off the planet's surface in an asteroid strike, eventually making its way to the Sahara Desert, where it was discovered in 2023.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Because of its apparently recent arrival to our planet, its chemical makeup hasn't changed much, and it retains a reddish hue.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you want to make this space rock your own, be prepared to pay as much as $4 million.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A high price for a rock, but perhaps a small one for a piece of history.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app, as well as coverage of the Emmy nominations that came out yesterday.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Apple TV Plus' Severance scored the most nominations with 27.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Other shows with more than 20 nominations included The Penguin, The Studio, and The White Lotus.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Earlier this year, I spoke with Severance director Ben Stiller and the show's star Adam Scott, and he told me about playing the two facets of his character, Mark.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Audi, who lives in the real world, and the Innie, who only exists in the office.
--:-- Shamita Basu: With Mark, one of these, his Audi is 40 some odd years of life experience of a full, rich life.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the other is, for all intents and purposes, two and a half years old.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the Innie is more light on his feet and the Audi is a bit more weighed down by what life has kind of wrought on him.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That episode is queued up to play for you next, and I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Thanks for listening to Apple News Today.
