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- [00:05]
A
Good morning. Israel and Lebanon agreed to a tentative ceasefire even as Iran launches heavy bombardments into nearby countries. The Wall Street Journal goes behind Trump's attempts to contain the fighting.
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B
He doesn't want to keep bombing Iran. He doesn't want more escalation in the Middle East. In his mind, he is the great peacemaker.
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A
How one state is grappling with pollution from data centers. And NPR takes us inside the chaos engulfing 60min. It's Thursday, June 4th. I'm Yasmeen Khan in for Shemitah Basu. This is Apple News. Today, As the talks continued, so did the fighting. Yesterday, Iran struck missiles at its neighbors Bahrain and Kuwait, attacks that killed one person and injured at least 63. And Israel continued to target Iran's proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon with strikes that killed at least nine. Yesterday, the two countries agreed to implement a ceasefire contingent on Hezbollah stopping its attacks. Whether that holds will be crucial to unlocking any progress in negotiations which appear to have stalled.
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B
Again, Iran, for legitimate and non legitimate reasons, is trying to connect the Israel Hezbollah fight to the US Iran ceasefire.
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A
Alex Ward is a national security reporter with the Wall Street Journal.
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B
Basically saying if that fight goes on, then the ceasefire between the US And Iran is over. So the fact that Netanyahu said he was going to escalate that fight could have complicated the Iran peace negotiations. And so Trump was pretty upset about that.
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A
So upset, in fact, that Trump reportedly made an expletive laden call to Netanyahu demanding he stop the bombing. Trump confirmed that in an interview with the New York Post's Miranda Devine.
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C
Axios reported that you had a phone call with Bibi Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, in which you said, are you effing crazy? What are you effing doing? I helped you stay out of jail. Is that true? Did you speak to him in those terms? I did. I wouldn't say angry. I was a little bit perturbed at his constantly fighting with Lebanon. You know, at some point I said, maybe we gotta stop this, we gotta stop it.
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A
Netanyahu characterized the dispute as tactical disagreements. But as Ward told us, the two leaders now approach the war from different perspectives.
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B
Netanyahu's stance hasn't changed. Trump's changed pretty quickly. And for now, Trump is unwilling to reignite the war that he and Netanyahu started in February. So that is the base of their disagreement.
- [02:48]
A
Israel has refrained from hitting Lebanon's capital, Beirut. This week, Iran's foreign minister warned that if Israel crossed that line, it would trigger a full scale resumption of the conflict. Speaking on Capitol Hill yesterday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Israelis were reacting to Hezbollah attacks.
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D
The Israelis see Hezbollah moving around, maybe even launching a missile from the south and they action it in defense. They go after it in the southern portion. And that's what we're seeing in many cases is the defensive strikes.
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A
Less than a week ago, President Trump was reportedly considering an extended truce. Since then, he's veered between suggesting that he, quote, couldn't care less if talks failed to suggesting the talks were going very well as recently as yesterday. What happens next could depend on whether his pressure on Netanyahu will persuade the Israeli leader to hold off on more fighting for now.
- [03:43]
B
Israel has influenced US Thinking on whether not only last year to strike Iran's nuclear sites, but also this year to launch the all out war. So there's some give and take in this relationship. But right now they are having a serious debate in private and now somewhat in public about how to conclude this Iran situation with Netanyahu pushing for more strikes or at least against the deal and Trump saying the deal is the way.
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A
Yesterday, Trump got a reminder of the hardening domestic opposition to the conflict. The House passed a resolution directing him to withdraw from Iran. With four Republicans joining Democrats, that war powers resolution now heads to the Senate. But even if it passes there, how it would be enforced is an open question. Let's turn now to the chaos unfolding behind the scenes of one of America's most storied news programs. On Tuesday, CBS fired Scott Pelley, a longtime correspondent for 60 Minutes who'd been with the network for nearly four decades. In a staff meeting, Peli had attacked his new boss, Nick Bilton, a tech journalist with no TV news experience.
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E
Pelly leaned into him and he said, you know, you're unwanted here and you're unqualified. And what's more, your boss, the woman who hired you, CBS's editor in chief, Bari Weiss, she's murdering the program.
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A
That's NPR media correspondent David Folkenflick, who, who told us about the fight over the direction of CBS News. It started when Weiss, a former opinion journalist who ran a right leaning news site, was hired to run the network back in October.
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E
Bari Weiss has made a case that the legacy media, CBS very much included, is too reflexively anti President Trump, too reflexively anti Israel, too reflexively woke, and that she saw it as her remit to earn back trust among the sort of center of the American people by addressing those concerns.
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A
Over the last week, she's made sweeping changes to the 60 Minute staff.
- [05:53]
E
Weiss fired the executive producer, Tonya Simon, daughter of a much revered former 60 Minutes correspondent, Bob Simon. Under her last year, the show grew 9% in the ratings and had done well digitally. So you'd think those would be benchmarks that would be supported. Her top editor was fired as well. Two of her correspondents were fired last week.
- [06:15]
A
Anderson Cooper, another longtime correspondent, also recently left.
- [06:19]
E
According to associates I've talked to, he was concerned about her vision of the future, her conception of news at CBS going forward. So suddenly you have three of the seven correspondents gone, swept away primarily by Bari Weiss. A welter of accusations that Weiss had intervened in coverage in recent months at 60 Minutes for ideological reasons and in the claims of the reporters who were fired, censoring them, in fact, in their language. And Pelly wasn't having it.
- [06:48]
A
In a statement released yesterday, Pelly accused CBS and its corporate owners, billionaire businessmen Larry and David Ellison, of casting the news program aside to curry favor with the Trump administration. And Folkenflick told us there could be something to that.
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E
David and his father, Larry Ellison, the co founder of Oracle, have intertwined their business interests with the political interests of the president.
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A
Larry Ellison is a Republican donor. He serves on an advisory panel to the president. Trump made Oracle a co owner of TikTok earlier this year, and Folkenflick says the Ellison's decision to hire Weiss may have been a politically calculated move.
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E
At the moment, what Bari Weiss is doing is, I think, in her own mind, a corrective. But it's useful to the Ellisons, who have tried to create tangible signs for the Trump administration that they're here to play ball and seeking his thumbs up for this enormous transaction that would land them this huge coup in Hollywood and in the news business.
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A
The Ellisons are currently seeking approval from Trump's regulators to expand their media empire and buy Warner Brothers Discovery, that's the parent company of CNN. The deal is valued at more than $110 billion. As tech companies pour vast sums of money into building data centers to fuel AI, the power grid is struggling to keep up, which means more often to stay online, these sprawling facilities have to rely on a backup power source.
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F
They fasten these large, kind of the size of a semi truck container, diesel generators to either the side or off in the top of the building. And they create a major pollution issue.
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A
Evan Halper with the Washington Post has been looking into how this is playing out. At the epicenter of America's AI boom.
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F
About a quarter of the data centers in the United States are All concentrated in Virginia. It became a hotspot for tech companies to build their data centers going back decades in Northern Virginia. So much so that there's almost no room to build more data centers there. They seem to keep finding ways to squeeze more in.
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A
There are more than 10,000 diesel generators attached to Virginia's data centers. And even if they're rarely used, they can emit enough pollution to harm public health. One analysis by Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Washington concluded that running this many generators for less than one hour per week had the same impact on public health as five large gas fueled power plants.
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F
This surprised the researchers. It surprised us because again, these are just backup generators. They're only supposed to work on an emergency and, you know, they compare with a major polluting facility.
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A
Researchers say these generators are producing enough emissions to potentially aggravate lung and cardiovascular conditions across Virginia communities and cause at least three premature deaths every year. And if the generators were to operate at the maximum capacity allowed by the state, the the impact could be even higher, contributing to as many as 27 premature deaths. State and industry officials dispute those findings and say government models show that generators have limited effects on air quality. Now, Virginia is an outlier here. Most American communities don't have so many data centers in their backyards. And many newer facilities were built with newer generators designed to emit less harmful air pollution. Still, environmental groups and communities are concerned that without tighter restrictions on when and how long generators can run, pollution could get out of hand as the AI industry ramps up. Recently, the Trump administration and state regulators have been encouraging the operators of data centers to fire up generators more often when regional power grids struggle to keep up with demand.
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F
It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. As you build more data centers and there's not enough power to power them, the default becomes turn on these backup diesel generators and there's going to be a lot of pressure to allow the generators to run more as the needs of AI keep growing and growing and
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A
so does the opposition. Earlier this week, Monterey park in California became the first US City to vote for a permanent ban on any data centers within its boundaries. As of yesterday, 86% of voters supported the move. And to a few other stories we're following. President Trump is proposing a new set of tariffs to replace the ones struck down by the Supreme Court earlier this year. Remember, the court ruled that he could not use emergency powers to unilaterally impose sweeping tariffs. Now Trump is citing an obscure provision of the Trade act, alleging that 60 countries have failed to address concerns over labor practices, which would grant the US the authority to impose tariffs. The uk, The EU and a dozen more countries are on the list of places that could face new 10% import taxes. The administration said those places hadn't done enough to block imports from countries that manufactured goods using forced labor. And India and China, meanwhile, could face even higher tariffs of 12.5% because the administration says they don't prohibit those types of imports. Staying in Washington, Senate Republicans stripped $1 billion in funding for Trump's ballroom project from the party's upcoming immigration bill. Trump has said the funding is needed for security purposes and that the ballroom project will be otherwise exclusively paid for by private donations. But this funding was more or less dead in the water after the official rule keeper of the Senate determined that the language used in the legislative text violated some very specific budgetary rules. Plus, Republican senators were concerned that using taxpayer dollars to fund any part of the ballroom project could jeopardize their position with voters ahead of the midterms. And finally, Google says it wants to release tens of millions of mosquitoes into California and Florida. But there's no need to worry. These mosquitoes are apparently the good kind. Google's army of insects will carry a bacteria that, when they mate, prevents female mosquitoes from breeding. According to the Guardian, Google thinks that releasing these bugs could ultimately lower the number of mosquitoes, spreading disease. The company's life sciences division is now waiting on a federal permit. But if you're living in either state and wondering how to seal your windows, take some comfort in knowing that they're male mosquitoes, which don't bite. 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. McLean's reports on one mother's desperate search for her son as he struggled with drug addiction. If you're listening in the Podcasts app, follow Apple News Narrated to find that story. And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.