--:-- Tracy Mumford: From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Tuesday, November 12th.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Here's what we're covering. A flurry of appointments is underway for Donald Trump's second term. The Times has gotten details on who's been picked for what in the last 24 hours.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Florida Senator Marco Rubio is expected to be named Secretary of State, though Trump could still change his mind. It's an enemies-to-allies storyline for the two men. They famously traded insults when they were both running for president in 2016.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Little Marco vs. Hair Force One. But the two made up, and Rubio went on to become an informal foreign policy advisor for Trump. In terms of what he could bring to the State Department, Rubio's been one of the loudest voices in the Senate calling for a more aggressive stance towards China.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And while he used to take a hard line on Russia, he's been increasingly echoing Trump's criticism of funding for Ukraine. I think the Ukrainians have been incredibly brave and strong and standing up to Russia.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: But at the end of the day, what we are funding here is a stalemate war. And it needs to be brought to a conclusion because that country's going to be...
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Another appointment, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York for United Nations Ambassador. Stefanik has little diplomatic experience, but was in the spotlight last year for her viral face-offs with Ivy League presidents over anti-Semitism on college campuses, which led to several of them losing their jobs.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: She's also accused the United Nations of being plagued by, quote, anti-Semitic rot. And for National Security Advisor, Trump's chosen Representative Michael Waltz of Florida, a former Green Beret who's taken a hard line on China and Iran.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: We need a commander-in-chief that is strong. But most of all, folks, and this is deadly serious, we need a commander-in-chief that our enemies respect and fear. and fear.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Trump's also made picks for two other key roles. He announced former Representative Lee Zeldin of New York will lead the Environmental Protection Agency a position that expected to be key to Trump plan to dismantle climate regulations
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And Trump is expected to name Stephen Miller one of his most influential aides, to be deputy chief of staff. It's not clear yet what all he'd handle, but Miller has spent the last two years working on detailed plans for mass deportations.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Trump's picks so far have been some of his most vocal supporters. He's repeatedly complained that his biggest error in his first term was not being more rigorous about his team, and that he was sold on people back then who turned out to be, quote, disloyal.
--:-- Jack Nickus: [Speaking with residents in the area] The aid to the region has been severely restricted. And at this point many of the aid groups and emergency workers who were there a year ago have now left One of the main hospitals Kamal Adwan Hospital is really teetering on edge
--:-- Jack Nickus: It is being inundated of course with victims of strikes And yet it has essentially no surgeons, a real dearth of medical supplies. And Islam Ahmad, a freelance journalist who spoke with us, told us, quote, life over the past four weeks, if I can sum it up, is a people being exterminated.
--:-- Jack Nickus: Israel is back in North Gaza, where it began the war, essentially, because it says Hamas has come back. And this is really a reflection of Israel's kind of murky strategy in this war.
--:-- Jack Nickus: When it withdraws, the Hamas fighters return, and then the Israeli forces come back and chase them. And the result, I think, is a bloody carousel of sorts, where the Israeli military is coming back again and again and again.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In Haiti, a Spirit Airlines flight attempting to land at the Port-au-Prince airport was shot at and had to divert, marking an escalation in the violence that's taken over the country. A JetBlue flight leaving Haiti was also hit by a bullet yesterday.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: No passengers were hurt. Gangs have been terrorizing Haiti for over a year. Recently, hundreds of homes around the airport were bulldozed to try and build a safe perimeter for the runway, with fewer places for the gangs to hide out.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And Kenya has sent hundreds of police officers to try and help. But the gangs have been escalating their attacks, and the country's in chaos. The interim prime minister was fired this week after less than six months on the job.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And finally... I've been talking to a lot of former senior leaders in the Navy's secretive and elite special boat teams about their high-powered boats, which have become so powerful that riding in them over time could eventually cause brain injuries.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: My colleague Dave Phillips has been reporting on the hidden toll that even routine military training, nowhere near a combat zone can have on soldiers In his latest investigation he looked at what happening to some crew members of the stealth boats that carry Navy SEALs
--:-- Tracy Mumford: These are essentially military versions of supercharged racing boats, and they skim over the water at more than 60 miles an hour, which is great if the water's glassy smooth, but most of the time it's not.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And so they're running over rough seas, going off one wave and crashing into the face of another. And what sailors describe to me is that this is like being in repeated car crashes, and there are high rates of injuries.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Over time, these whiplash events pile up, and you can think of it a lot like playing contact sports for years. Even if you're never injured and carried off the field, there is damage that slowly accumulates.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And what they said is over and over in their peers, when they reached senior levels of these special boat teams, they started to fall apart with symptoms that are tied to brain injury. Things like paranoia, depression, confusion, forgetfulness.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: For some of these guys who got the most exposure to this wave pounding, their lives really turned into disasters. They became delusional and even psychotic. Many of these guys developed serious substance abuse problems, and a number of them died by suicide.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: I talked to the Defense Department about this and the Navy, and they were pretty tight-lipped about it. They said, hey, we know that this is a dangerous job and people can get hurt doing it. But they would not say anything about whether routine driving of boats across the water could eventually cause brain injuries.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, why abortion rights won in the election, even as Kamala Harris lost. 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.
