--:-- Tracy Mumford: From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Monday, May 19th.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer, according to his office. In a statement released yesterday, the office said that on a scale measuring how aggressive prostate cancers are, Biden's is a 9 out of 10.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The cancer has also spread to his bones. Prostate cancer experts told The Times that means it cannot be cured. But there have been significant medical developments in recent years that have improved the prognosis for people with Biden's condition.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Experts say that in the past decade, survival rates have almost tripled. One doctor told The Times that with treatment, Biden, who's 82 years old, could still live for 5 to 10 more years, or even potentially longer.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Because prostate cancer is fed by testosterone, treatment typically includes both injections and pills to eliminate the hormone from the body. Some men also go on to have chemotherapy or radiation.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In the statement, Biden's office said he and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: This morning in Washington, President Trump is expected to have a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin about ending the war in Ukraine.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Trump said that after he talks to Putin, he'll also speak with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, and he posted on social media that he hoped it would be a, quote, productive day that would lead to a ceasefire.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Trump came into office promising to quickly stop the fighting in Ukraine, where over a million Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have been killed or injured. But so far, the White House has been unable to negotiate a wide-scale truce, even as there's been a flurry of discussions, including the first in-person talks between Ukrainian and Russian diplomats that took place on Friday.
--:-- Mark Santora: All of this diplomatic activity is happening against a backdrop of escalating violence.
--:-- Mark Santora: Ukrainian and Western officials see a pattern where Russia tries to use the violence as a means to intimidate both Ukraine and its allies at critical diplomatic moments.
--:-- Mark Santora: This week, we saw the largest drone strike aimed at Ukraine of the entire war, more than 270, basically long-range exploding drones packed with really powerful explosives.
--:-- Mark Santora: And then on the front line, you have stepped up assaults by the Russians ahead of what many Ukrainian and Western officials believe will be a large scale offensive effort this summer.
--:-- Mark Santora: So you see this continuing trend over the last three years, where last year was deadlier than the first two years combined. And then the first three months of this year are deadlier than any other three month period in terms of casualties of soldiers.
--:-- Mark Santora: Meanwhile, a Times analysis of satellite imagery shows that Russia has been beefing up military bases along its border with Finland.
--:-- Mark Santora: The images show recently installed rows of tents, new warehouses, and renovations to hangars for fighter jets.
--:-- Mark Santora: The 800-mile border is the longest line of contact between Russia and the NATO alliance.
--:-- Mark Santora: And while officials from NATO and Finland say they don't see the buildup of infrastructure as an immediate threat, It does suggest that Russia intends to boost its military presence in the Arctic region, which has become increasingly contested.
--:-- Mark Santora: Finnish defense officials told The Times they expect to see Russia significantly boost the number of troops there in the next few years, and that if the war in Ukraine does wind down, thousands of Russian troops from that conflict will likely be redeployed to the Finnish border.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Now, three quick updates from around the U.S. this weekend.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The ayes have it. The motion's agreed to. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is ordered.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Late last night in Washington, D.C., the group of hardline House Republicans who had been holding up the budget megabill that's key to President Trump's agenda agreed to let it move out of committee, despite their ongoing critique that it doesn't do enough to rein in the country's growing deficit.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: But the legislation's path to getting passed in the full House still looks rocky. The GOP holdouts have indicated they continue to push for more reductions in health and environmental programs which could potentially sink it altogether.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Also in the Midwest and Mid
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The roof fell off the whole building and the walls came crashing in. It's bad. We need help.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: A series of deadly storms and tornadoes killed at least 28 people and injured dozens more. Most of those killed were in Kentucky and Missouri.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The mayor of St. Louis called it one of the worst storms in the city's history, estimating that 5,000 buildings there were damaged.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The storms came as the National Weather Service has been struggling to keep some of its offices staffed.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The union that represents federal meteorologists said the weather office in eastern Kentucky no longer has a permanent overnight forecaster and had to scramble on Friday.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: It's one of several offices that's lost staff in the wake of cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: One union official said, For most of the last half century, NWS has been a 24-7 operation. Not anymore.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And in Palm Springs.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: What I can say is this is probably the largest bombing scene that we've had in Southern California.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Investigators say a bombing attack on a fertility clinic this Saturday was carried out by a 25-year-old man who died in the blast.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Authorities called the attack, which injured four others, an act of terrorism, saying the suspect had, quote, nihilistic ideations.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: They're investigating a link between the bombing and an obscure movement that discourages the creation of new life and promotes death.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Ahead of the bombing, audio was posted to a website related to the movement, featuring a man who said he was going to bomb an in vitro fertilization clinic because he was angry at his own existence.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Sources tell The Times investigators are trying to verify whether the recording was made by the bomber.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And finally, across the country, schools are wrestling with how to handle the rise of artificial intelligence.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: There's been concerns about cheating, about chatbots spewing false information, even about teachers letting chatbots write their syllabus.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Many districts have responded by banning the technology.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: But Times reporter Natasha Singer recently went to Florida to see what it looks like when a district goes all in on AI instead.
--:-- Natasha Singer: I went into an English class where the students were reading Oedipus Rex, the Sophocles play, and that's about free will.
--:-- Natasha Singer: Do you believe people have control over their own destiny?
--:-- Natasha Singer: And their teacher, Mr. Reno, had asked the students to write a paragraph about free will versus fate.
--:-- Natasha Singer: And once they had written this paragraph, they then pasted it into the Google chatbot, along with a grading rubric that the English teacher had written that basically said, give students one point if they wrote a good thesis sentence and give students two points if they used really good examples to back up their claim.
--:-- Natasha Singer: And so the English teacher was asking students to get feedback first from a chat bot before they got feedback from her.
--:-- Natasha Singer: And then they handed them in to her. So it's not like she is delegating the actual final grading to a bot, but it was an interim thing that could be done quickly in class and help some students sharpen in their writing.
--:-- Natasha Singer: I think we're really at a critical moment with these new artificial intelligence tools in schools.
--:-- Natasha Singer: And there's a lot of hope that they could be very, very helpful.
--:-- Natasha Singer: On the other hand, Daniel Mateo, the assistant superintendent of Miami-Dade schools, who is in charge of this AI rollout, said to me, like, we are looking at AI as if it is not some kind of magical, transformative, world-changing platform.
--:-- Natasha Singer: We're treating it like just another tool in the arsenal of education.
--:-- Natasha Singer: We have to have guardrails in place. We have to vet it. But we also have to show teachers and students how to use these tools that are going to be part of their lives.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, how Donald Trump and his MAGA movement took up the cause of white farmers in South Africa. That's next in the New York Times audio app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.
