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- [00:05]
Shemitah Basu
Good morning. It's Wednesday, July 16th. I'm Shemitah Basu. This is Apple News today. On today's show, what to know about the budget showdown happening in the Senate this week. 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 to Texas. 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. We're going to focus today on Camp mystic, an all girls 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. About 550 campers were sleeping as the water surged. Many of the cabins were built in a FEMA defined flood zone. Some were less than 500ft from the river, and the camp had been under flood watch. The camp's director, Dick Eastland, received a life threatening flood warning from the national weather service at 1:14am but the post learned he didn't start trying to evacuate campers for more than an hour. The family spokesperson told reporter Annie Gowen 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. They decided to evacuate the cabins most in danger, which were housing the youngest children as young as eight.
- [01:59]
Annie Gowen
The problem was was that the way that the camp sits on the river, it's kind of a confluence of three 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. You know, the water was swirling. So they then headed there, of course, because it was obviously the most emergent situation.
- [02:22]
Shemitah 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. Dick died during the rescue efforts along with some of the girls. The Post reports that as the waters were rising around 2am Camp counselors, many of them teenagers themselves, were given conflicting messages about how to keep the kids safe. Faced with a lack of concrete information, scared young girls and dark and rainy conditions, many were forced to make life and death decisions.
- [02:59]
Annie Gowen
Many, many people have credited these teenage counselors for saving a lot of these girls.
- [03:04]
Shemitah 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.
- [03:13]
Annie Gowen
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 to get to higher ground.
- [03:24]
Shemitah 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. And even a severe flood warning does not explicitly call for evacuations. The federal agency lacks the authority to give those orders. Parents have blamed both officials at the camp and in Kerr county for not responding sooner to the weather service's warning. 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.
- [04:00]
Annie Gowen
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. There was some complacency, I think, by everybody in the Hill country because they'd never seen anything this.
- [04:25]
Shemitah Basu
Let'S turn now to Washington, where the Trump administration is continuing to flaunt federal budget law for.
- [04:32]
Bo Erickson
Many parts of the federal government. Congress, and therefore the public, does not have clarity on how the Trump administration is spending taxpayer dollars this year.
- [04:42]
Shemitah Basu
That's Bo Erickson, a congressional reporter with Reuters.
- [04:46]
Bo Erickson
And that's because 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.
- [04:58]
Shemitah Basu
Currently, federal law requires the executive branch to provide spending plans by the end of April, but lawmakers say the administration has either failed to share spending plans or they've sent incomplete data.
- [05:10]
Bo Erickson
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.
- [05:26]
Shemitah Basu
Experts told Erickson the lack of transparency is unusual.
- [05:31]
Bo Erickson
One veteran Republican budget expert who worked for President George H.W. 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.
- [05:53]
Shemitah Basu
This is a concern for Congress as it tries to determine its budget for the next fiscal year. But it also has immediate ramifications for people waiting on the money, like in schools nationwide, where the administration has withheld over $6.8 billion that was supposed to be sent to the states on July 1. The money was earmarked for things like after school care, English language learning, teacher training and other programs. The Office of Management and Budget said their review of the funds found they were being, quote, misused to subsidize a radical left wing agenda. Earlier this week, 24 states plus D.C. sued the administration, asking a federal judge to order the release of the money. The White House also wants to cancel over $9 billion for foreign aid and public media, money that both chambers of Congress had previously approved and Trump himself signed off on. The House approved a package to make these cuts last month following threats from Trump, and the Senate will weigh the request this week.
- [06:52]
Bo Erickson
These are really the first tests for Republican leaders up here in Congress on whether or not they are going to go along with President Trump's kind of more asserting power into the federal government and federal spending process or whether or not they try to maintain their authority over this. And one of the issues that is tying kind of this lack of information umbrella altogether is that we are seeing senators now. Republican senators say that they are uncertain about trying to go along with process because they don't really have the clarity of which programs are actually trying to be cut in this process.
- [07:30]
Shemitah Basu
A number of Senate Republicans voiced concerns about cutting funding to pepfar, a global AIDS relief program credited with saving millions of lives. There now appears to be a deal to restore that funding after those objections. Others have spoken out against the proposed cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which could have impacts on emergency notification systems in rural areas. The Senate has until Friday to pass the bill under the law they're using to avoid a Democratic filibuster. If they don't, the previously approved funding will be legally required to go out as expected. New medical recommendations could make major improvements to how women access birth control by addressing a long ignored symptoms pain. For years, the medical community operated under the assumption that the insertion of intrauterine devices, or IUDs, as a form of birth control was a relatively painless procedure, causing only minor discomfort. But that's not exactly what you'd hear if you talk to any of the 6 million women in the US who have one. A quick scan of social media turns up videos of women talking about their experiences, some wincing or crying on exam tables during their appointments. Ali Volpe, a senior reporter with Vox recently wrote about this Everyone sort of.
- [08:55]
Ali Volpe
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.
- [09:07]
Shemitah 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. So it can be less invasive to daily life. But the procedure of inserting it has multiple pain points and can result in severe cramps. Many patients were told by their physicians that over the counter pain management was the only option. 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. They suggest that doctors offer local anesthetics like lidocaine spray or cream or an injection of anesthetics into the cervix. Some physicians are now offering general anesthesia or anxiety medication. Volpe reports that many medical fields have a long history of ignoring or under examining women's pain. 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.
- [10:12]
Ali Volpe
Women's pain and even as recently as now, has sort of been dismissed by their doctors. 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. So this has a long history in medicine.
- [10:30]
Shemitah Basu
Volpe told us that the changing standards around IUDs demonstrates that there's a shift in medicine that's encouraging doctors to see women and gender nonconforming people as the experts of their own bodies. If you're thinking about getting an iud, Volpe has some advice.
- [10:47]
Ali Volpe
Don't wait until the day of your appointment to make a plan. 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. 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.
- [11:18]
Shemitah Basu
Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following 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. 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. It marked the first time a president had federalized National Guard troops without a governor's permission since 1960. A carjacking in Atlanta hit an unusual target, a van rented by Beyonce's choreographer, where thieves stole jump drives containing unreleased Beyonce music and show plans. Beyonce's team was in town for her Cowboy Carter tour. This is a big blow for Beyonce, who's known for going to extreme lengths to protect her music from leaks. 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 and finally if you've ever wanted to own a piece of Mars, today is your chance. A 54 pound rock from the Red Planet is being auctioned by Sotheby's in New York. 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. Because of its apparently recent arrival to our planet, its chemical makeup hasn't changed much and it retains a reddish hue. If you want to make this space rock your own, be prepared to pay as much as $4 million. A high price for a rock, but perhaps a small one for a piece of history. 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. Apple TV's Severance scored the most nominations with 27. Other shows with more than 20 nominations included the Penguin, the Studio and the White Lotus. 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, the Audi who lives in the real world, and the Innie who only exists.
- [13:43]
Ben Stiller
In the office with Mark. One of these, his Audi is 40 some odd years of life experience of a full rich life, and the other is for all intents and purposes two and a half years old 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.
- [14:05]
Shemitah Basu
That episode is queued up to play for you next, and I'll be back with the news tomorrow.