News
ABC News' $15M settlement with Trump. And, renewed hope for an Israel-Hamas ceasefire
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Today’s top stories
There is renewed hope for a ceasefire deal with Israel and Hamas, which have been engulfed in war for 14 months. Senior Biden administration officials have been in the region pushing for the negotiations. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is back from his latest trip to the Middle East and says this is a moment to bring the conflict to an end.
Children stare at the destruction following an Israeli strike in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on Thursday.
Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty Images
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Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty Images
- 🎧 There is optimism around a potential deal because Hamas has been degraded to the point it can’t carry out another attack like Oct. 7, NPR’s Michele Kelemen tells Up First. Hamas is now being more flexible. A source informed NPR that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to focus more on Iran, so he is more interested in a deal in Gaza. It would be a lengthy ceasefire deal: up to two months. Hamas would release some hostages in exchange for Palestinian detainees released from Israeli jails. This deal would just be a start, Kelemen says.
ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million toward President-elect Donald Trump’s future presidential library to settle a lawsuit over remarks by anchor George Stephanopoulos during an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace on This Week. The TV network is also posting a statement of regret. Trump sued for defamation after Stephanopoulos said that Trump was “found liable for rape,” which misstated verdicts in two of E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuits against him.
- 🎧 Trump was found liable for sexually assaulting Carroll, NPR’s David Folkenflik clarifies. After talking to six First Amendment media lawyers, Folkenflik says they agreed with his gut instinct that Stephanopoulos had a screw-up. The lawyers said they expected the network and Stephanopoulos to clarify the distinction promptly. They also said this should have been a pretty easy call to defend in court because what Stephanopoulos said was close to what the judge said, but the TV network is happy to be past this lawsuit. The settlement comes at a time when the incoming administration has suggested a strong intent to use the powers of government against the press.
Trump has signaled he wants to try to pull back a consumer tax credit for electric vehicles, which his incoming administration has declared wasteful spending. Drivers can currently get a tax credit worth up to $7,500 for buying or leasing an EV. This year alone, buyers claimed more than $2 billion in EV credits. Some shoppers are looking into whether they should act fast. NPR’s Camila Domonoske speaks with experts to look into what shoppers need to know about the EV tax credit’s uncertain future.
Behind the story
Sarah Abdel Hamid al-Aami is searching for her four brothers who were snatched on their way to work by government forces years ago on what she says were bogus accusations of terrorism.
Clare Harbage/NPR
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Clare Harbage/NPR
This essay was written by Morning Edition senior editor and reporter Arezou Rezvani. Rezvani and a team from
Morning Edition are on the ground in Syria, covering the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
For decades, Syrians have lived in a constant state of fear and paranoia. For 54 years, under the rule of dictator Bashar al-Assad and his father before him, there was no tolerance for criticizing the government. Those who did speak out often disappeared into Syria’s notorious prison system, known for soul-crushing torture and killings. The oppression took an even darker turn in 2011 after Assad’s regime crushed pro-democracy protests and clamped down on any association with emerging opposition groups. During the ensuing 13-year civil war, friends, neighbors and colleagues would avoid political discussions. Even in the privacy of their own homes, Syrians remained tight-lipped. Parents withheld their true feelings from their own children for fear they’d say something at school, where they were closely monitored by teachers and staff who would report on families if they sensed any hints of disloyalty at home. It was commonly said that in Syria, “the walls have ears.”
With Bashar al-Assad now gone, Syrians are slowly starting to come out and share their secrets. Long-time friends are revealing details about their lives they had long kept under wraps, like their imprisonments, the rebel-held cities their families are originally from, their religions, political leanings, dreams, aspirations, unfiltered thoughts and ideas. After so many decades of repression, many Syrians say this newfound freedom to speak doesn’t come naturally, that it’s almost like they need to be deprogrammed.
Lurking underneath the thrill of the moment is a great deal of anxiety. There are still a lot of questions about the rebel groups that toppled Assad. Will they accept criticism? Will they hold free and fair elections? Will all religious and minority groups be protected? Have they really abandoned all links with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State? Syrians are celebrating the end of Assad rule, but they’re holding their breath for what’s to come.
Life advice
A father teaches his child to swim in a pond in Sylhet, Bangladesh. Drowning is a leading causes of death globally for children, according to the first ever report on drowning as a public health issue issued by the World Health Organization.
Md Rafayat Haque Khan/Eyepix Group/Future Publishing via Getty Images
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Md Rafayat Haque Khan/Eyepix Group/Future Publishing via Getty Images
More than 300,000 people die from drowning each year. A new World Health Organization report found that nearly all cases are preventable. WHO gathered data from 139 countries for its first-ever report on how to prevent drowning. Children are the highest-risk group, with nearly a quarter of all drowning deaths happening among kids under age 4. The threat is evolving as climate change makes floods more frequent and severe. Caroline Lukaszyk, a technical officer for injury prevention at the WHO, share some findings with NPR.
- 🌊 A lot of the drowning burden is in Southeast Asia and Africa. There are bodies of water everywhere throughout the communities, and people need them for drinking, cooking, washing and bathing. But they pose a risk for unsupervised youth.
- 🌊 It’s good to have life jackets on board boats. There’s work being done to use local materials, such as empty two-liter plastic bottles, as flotation devices.
- 🌊 Swimming lessons that teach water safety and survival skills can be low-cost solutions.
- 🌊 Bystander training and safe rescue and resuscitation are also recommended. It can be key to teach CPR to older children and adults who could be around children playing in bodies of water.
3 things to know before you go
Caroline Davis said a stranger’s generosity reminder her of her dad.
Caroline David
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Caroline David
- This past summer, Caroline Davis was working on a DIY project that required 1,500 pounds of gravel. As she loaded her car with 50-pound bags, a stranger stepped in and warned her of the damage it could cause to the vehicle. The unsung hero then helped her with the load. The interaction reminded her of her dad, who died in 2017.
- Indian tabla player Zakir Hussain, whose career spanned over five decades, died yesterday at age 73. Hussain is revered as a national treasure.
- Two men were arrested Saturday for allegedly flying a drone “dangerously close” to Logan International Airport, the Boston Police Department said. The arrests come as drones have been sighted across the East Coast.
This newsletter was edited by Suzanne Nuyen.
Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, the Food and Drug Administration’s top drug regulator, said she was fired from the agency Friday after she declined to resign.
She said she did not know who had ordered her firing or why, nor whether Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knew of her fate. The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The departure reflected the upheaval at the F.D.A., days after the resignation of Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner. Dr. Makary had become a lightning rod for critics of the agency’s decisions to reject applications for rare disease drugs and to delay a report meant to supply damaging evidence about the abortion drug mifepristone. He also spent months before his departure pushing back on the White House’s requests for him to approve more flavored vapes, the reason he ultimately cited for leaving.
Dr. Hoeg’s hiring had startled public health leaders who were familiar with her track record as a vaccine skeptic, and she played a leading role in some of the agency’s most divisive efforts during her tenure. She worked on a report that purportedly linked the deaths of children and young adults to Covid vaccines, a dossier the agency has not released publicly. She was also the co-author of a document describing Mr. Kennedy’s decision to pare the recommendations for 17 childhood vaccines down to 11.
But in an interview on Friday, Dr. Hoeg said she “stuck with the science.”
“I am incredibly proud of the work we were doing,” Dr. Hoeg said, adding, “I’m glad that we didn’t give in to any pressures to approve drugs when it wasn’t appropriate.”
As the director of the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, she was a political appointee in a role that had been previously occupied by career officials. An epidemiologist who was trained in the United States and Denmark, she worked on efforts to analyze drug safety and on a panel to discuss the use of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants, during pregnancy. She also worked on efforts to reduce animal testing and was the agency’s liaison to an influential vaccine committee.
She made sure that her teams approved drugs only when the risk-benefit balance was favorable, she said.
The firing worsens the leadership vacuum at the F.D.A. and other agencies, with temporary leaders filling the role of commissioner, food chief and the head of the biologics center, which oversees vaccines and gene therapies. The roles of surgeon general and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also unfilled.
The U.S. Supreme Court
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
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Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The U.S. Supreme Court refused Friday to allow Virginia to use a new congressional map that favored Democrats in all but one of the state’s U.S. House seats. The map was a key part of Democrats’ effort to counter the Republican redistricting wave set off by President Trump.
The new map was drawn by Democrats and approved by Virginia voters in an April referendum. But on May 8, the Supreme Court of Virginia in a 4-to-3 vote declared the referendum, and by extension the new map, null and void because lawmakers failed to follow the proper procedures to get the issue on the ballot, violating the state constitution.
Virginia Democrats and the state’s attorney general then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to put into effect the map approved by the voters, which yields four more likely Democratic congressional seats. In their emergency application, they argued the Virginia Supreme Court was “deeply mistaken” in its decision on “critical issues of federal law with profound practical importance to the Nation.” Further, they asserted the decision “overrode the will of the people” by ordering Virginia to “conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected.”
Republican legislators countered that it would be improper for the U.S. Supreme Court to wade into a purely state law controversy — especially since the Democrats had not raised any federal claims in the lower court.
Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Republicans without explanation leaving in place the state court ruling that voided the Democratic-friendly maps.
The court’s decision not to intervene was its latest in emergency requests for intervention on redistricting issues. In December, the high court OK’d Texas using a gerrymandered map that could help the GOP win five more seats in the U.S. House. In February, the court allowed California to use a voter-approved, Democratic-friendly map, adopted to offset Texas’s map. Then in March, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the redrawing of a New York map expected to flip a Republican congressional district Democratic.
And perhaps most importantly, in April, the high court ruled that a Louisiana congressional map was a racial gerrymander and must be redrawn. That decision immediately set off a flurry of redistricting efforts, particularly in the South, where Republican legislators immediately began redrawing congressional maps to eliminate long established majority Black and Hispanic districts.
An explosion and fire drew a large emergency response on Friday to a lumber mill in the Midcoast region of Maine, officials said.
The State Police and fire marshal’s investigators responded to Robbins Lumber in Searsmont, about 72 miles northeast of Portland, said Shannon Moss, a spokeswoman for the Maine Department of Public Safety.
Mike Larrivee, the director of the Waldo County Regional Communications Center, said the number of victims was unknown, cautioning that “the information we’re getting from the scene is very vague.”
“We’ve sent every resource in the county to that area, plus surrounding counties,” he said.
Footage from the scene shared by WABI-TV showed flames burning through the roof of a large structure as heavy, dark smoke billowed skyward.
The Associated Press reported that at least five people were injured, and that county officials were considering the incident a “mass casualty event.”
Catherine Robbins-Halsted, an owner and vice president at Robbins Lumber, told reporters at the scene that all of the company’s employees had been accounted for.
Gov. Janet T. Mills of Maine said on social media that she had been briefed on the situation and urged people to avoid the area.
“I ask Maine people to join me in keeping all those affected in their thoughts,” she said.
Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, said on social media that he was aware of the fire and explosion.
“As my team and I seek out more information, I am praying for the safety and well-being of first responders and everyone else on-site,” he said.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
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