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Good morning. It's Thursday, September 25th. I'm Shemitah Basu. This is Apple News today. On today's show, the White House lays out its terms for giving foreign aid how Gen Z protest power took down a regime and hopes of a major breakthrough for an incurable disease. But first, to what we know about the shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas. One detainee is now dead and two more are in critical condition after a gunman opened fire yesterday. The Mexican Foreign Ministry confirmed that at least one of those injured was a Mexican national. The acting ICE director identified the shooter as Joshua John and he is reported to have died from a self inflicted gunshot wound. Police believe he opened fire from the roof of adjacent building. Officials said that no law enforcement officers were injured in the shooting and that at the moment the FBI is investigating it as an act of targeted violence. One witness, Denise Robleto, told the local CBS News that she was waiting outside the facility having brought her mother to a scheduled check in with ICE officials when gunshots rang out. Here she is being translated by cbs.
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So many thoughts ran through her mind, she says. She adds, my legs started shaking and my hands too.
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She claims what she didn't know at.
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First was if those shots were aimed at ICE or if ICE was doing the shooting.
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In a press conference yesterday, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson urged people not to jump to conclusions and to wait for the facts to come out.
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This is an active investigation. There's still a lot of unanswered questions and I want to encourage all of you to exercise a little bit of restraint and allow them to do their job.
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He also asked people to pray for the country.
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There's a lot going on right now in our country. A lot of it's confusing. It's a scary time. I've got children. I've got three young children. And I'm here to tell you that it is challenging to explain to them what's going on in our country right now.
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To be clear, authorities haven't shared a confirmed motive at this stage and there are a lot of unknowns about who this person is or what might have influenced them. Investigators have released few details. Despite that President Trump and Vice President Vance linked the death to left wing rhetoric toward law enforcement. And the FBI have said there were anti ICE messages on bullets. The Dallas ICE facility is a field office. It processes detainees after they've been arrested and before they're taken to a long term detention center center. It's become the site for weekly morning prayer vigils in which people in the community show their support for immigrants as they enter for appointments. According to the Dallas Morning News, this office has also been the backdrop of protests in the past, and one man was arrested earlier this year after claiming that he had an explosive in his backpack. Police did not find any such weapon upon searching him at the time. This is the second shooting around a federal immigration facility in Texas in recent months. A police officer was shot in the city of Alvarado back in July. And as immigration enforcement officers have been sending more people to detention centers, these types of facilities have become flashpoints for protests and, at times, violence. In Chicago, there have been hundreds of arrests in the past week as demonstrators attempt to disrupt activity at the facilities. Tensions in the Chicago area have been rising in recent weeks as immigration agents have stepped up enforcement efforts and an ICE officer fatally shot a man, a Mexican national who authorities say was not legally in the country during an attempted arrest earlier this month. After yesterday's shooting, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ordered more security at ICE facilities nationwide. Now let's turn to foreign aid. This week we heard President Trump vent his frustration at the UN's perceived ineffectiveness and urged the rest of the world to follow his administration's agenda. His impatience with multilateral organizations has led the US to withdraw from various UN bodies designed to alleviate poverty. And now new reporting from the Washington Post sheds light on how the administration wants to mold its own aid spending to fit the goals of the White House after dismantling USAID years earlier this year and challenge the power Congress gets over public spending. According to a document recently sent to Capitol Hill from the State Department and seen by the Washington Post, Trump plans to shift almost $2 billion designated for U.S. foreign aid.
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So the Trump administration has been very aggressive and pushing against what it sees as handouts to other countries.
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That's Post reporter Noah Robertson.
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This goes against decades of Republican and Democratic orthodoxy on the use of foreign assistance and the benefit America drives from being a country that is seen to promote democracy, to help cure diseases, to cure famines, making sure that it's a global force for good in the world.
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The document reviewed by Robertson says the administration would put the money toward initiatives such as countering, quote, Marxist anti American regimes in Latin America and investments in Greenland and Ukraine, but does not provide more detail than that. Robertson says it's part of a broader attempt to leverage money to achieve specific goals.
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The Trump administration has promised a much more transactional foreign policy, one in which it is not giving handouts but is striking deals with other countries, making sure that it is getting something that is clear and direct in return from whatever it puts out.
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A funding extension that was passed earlier this year would allow the administration to move money that had been designated by Congress for certain foreign aid programs to other White House priorities. It's not atypical for administrations to ask lawmakers to move money like this near the end of a fiscal year. But the Post reports that the amount of money the administration is seeking to shift is much higher than normal. It also comes just weeks after the White House told lawmakers it intended to not spend almost $5 billion in other foreign aid money, a move that drew bipartisan criticism.
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There is a lot of pushback from lawmakers and their offices who are concerned that the Trump administration is taking another step to unilaterally move money that Congress had previously appropriated for other purposes and is now putting it toward its own priorities without the consent of lawmakers.
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One Republican congressional aide told Robertson that House Republicans were on board with this proposed move. The State Department, which absorbed the remaining parts of usaid, did not respond to a request for comment. The timing of the ask, Robertson said, puts Congress in a difficult position. Either accept the White House's actions and undermine Congress's role in appropriating funds even more, or risk seeing the money disappear if they try to fight it out. Let's turn now to what's happening in Nepal, a country coming to terms with a political earthquake after mass youth protests, outrage over corruption and online restrictions brought Gen Z to the streets and ultimately brought down its prime minister. Those protests, spearheaded by young people, turned deadly as security forces fired on demonstrators. 74 people died and now the new leader has promised an investigation. On its face, these demonstrations were sparked when the previous government decided to ban more than two dozen social media apps. But the Wall Street Journal reports this goes far beyond young people clamoring to scroll on social media. Gabrielle Steinhauser, the Southeast Asia bureau chief for the Journal, told us about the kind of social commentary that many young people in the country were sharing on those apps.
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Young Nepalis were starting to share photos and images that they had taken from the social media accounts of children and spouses of well known politicians and this sort of very lavish lifestyle that some of these people were leading. And some of these posts were getting tagged with the hashtag NEPObaby or NEPO Kid.
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When the apps were banned. Many of these young people saw it as a government led effort to censor their anti corruption campaigning.
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The rate of young Nepalis who are not in any form of training or education or work is very high. And that obviously is in sharp contrast to some of the, you know, sort of like quite luxurious lifestyle that some of these politicians kids were leading. So they took this social media ban as a move to censor them by the government and quite a lot of them took to the streets in response.
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The escalation in Nepal was the most dramatic. But Gen Z protests have also taken off in Indonesia, East Timor and the Philippines. Nepal is the third South Asian country in as many years that's removed an elected government after protests driven by young people. The theme running through the region is that economies in these Asian countries have grown dramatically, but young people are not seeing the benefits.
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A lot of people are struggling to find jobs. In the case of Nepal, a lot of people traditionally have moved abroad to work in not very comfortable jobs, maybe as domestic helpers or in construction to send money back home. Or if they stay in their country, the only jobs that they can find are kind of in the gig economy, right, that come without sort of the stability and the benefits that you have in more stable employment.
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According to the World bank, in South Asia alone, 1 million people are expected to enter the labor market every month between 2025 and 2030. Yet other data shows the share of young people that are not employed in school or in training in a number of countries in the region are among the highest in the world. Outside of countries with active conflicts.
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It's not a clear answer that you can contain this by cracking down on freedom of speech or social media. I think that what these governments really need to do is think about how do they create opportunities for millions of young people who have an expectation to improve their livelihoods. And you know, this is not some kind of altruistic move. I mean, this is what these economies need to do to keep growing.
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Nepal's new interim prime minister has pledged change and to listen to the young people she is now leading. Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following. The world's most powerful tropical cyclone is bearing down on China after causing massive destruction in its wake. At least 14 people have died in Taiwan as it passed through the island. And massive waves caused Hong Kong to ground hundreds of flights. Videos shared on social media showed water bursting through hotel lobbies and people clutching onto poles to avoid being swept away. China's southern Guangdong province has now evacuated a million people as it braces for the impact. The numbers are in on Jimmy Kimmel's return to late night after a nearly week long suspension. According to ABC, more than 6 million viewers watched live and his monologue attracted more than 26 million views on social media. The host was visibly choked up as he addressed the controversy over his suspension for remarks made about the death of Charlie Kirk. President Trump threatened further action against ABC for putting Kimmel back on the air. And finally, to a possible medical breakthrough. Huntington's disease has long been considered an incurable and devastating illness. Its symptoms begin in your 40s and involve a slow but severe decline in cognitive, psychological and physical function, eventually causing death. Its genetic genetically carried and there is no cure. But for the first time, researchers say they've successfully treated the condition. A gene therapy trial was given to 17 patients, a dozen of whom have been followed for three years. It slowed the progression of the disease by 75%. It's a small trial and it's yet to be peer reviewed, but Professor Sara Tabrizi told the BBC it could give people decades of good quality life and describe the results as spectacular. You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the news app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next. Bloomberg Businessweek has a profile on David Ellison, the man now at the helm of both Paramount and CBS after a controversial merger. If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News plus Narrated to find that story. And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.