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- [00:05]
Gideon Resnick
Good morning. It's Friday, August 1st. I'm Gideon Resnick in for Shamita Basu. This is Apple News today. On today's show, how one of Trump's former personal lawyers got the role of a lifetime. A drug more potent than fentanyl is spreading through Europe, and why a newborn in Ohio has been called the world's oldest baby. But first, late last night, President Trump announced sweeping new tariffs on more than 60 countries that will largely take effect next Thursday. The minimum was set at 10%, but it's at least 15% if the country has a trade surplus with the U.S. some countries, especially in Asia, have been singled out for even higher spikes. Today we're focusing on one country that's not exactly like the rest of the where the chances of a deal look remote. Brazil. There, Trump has imposed a 50% tariff, among the highest of any country in the world. But he's not doing this because of a trade deficit. The US Actually has a surplus with Brazil. Trump is angry that former President Jair Bolsonaro is standing trial for plotting a coup in 2022, and he wants the charges dropped. He told reporters why he loves the.
- [01:22]
Perry Stein
Country and he fought hard for those people, and they want to put him in jail.
- [01:26]
Gideon Resnick
And I think that's a witch hun.
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Perry Stein
And I think it's very unfortunate.
- [01:31]
Gideon Resnick
Manuela Andriano, Reuters chief correspondent for Brazil, told us how the country was reacting to the new tariffs.
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Manuela Andriano
It's being seen as very unprecedented. Brazil and the US have always had good relations. Actually, Brazil has always had good relations with everyone. Brazil prides itself of being everyone's friend. So this is very strange.
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Gideon Resnick
Now, there are some key exemptions, orange juice in airplanes, for example. But some of the most popular products in the US look set to be hit.
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Manuela Andriano
Coffee and beef were not among the exemptions. So you can expect that coffee and beef will become more expensive first, because 30% of the coffee in the US comes from Brazil, and Brazil's the largest coffee producer in the world. It's not going to be so easy to replace that. And a lot of the beef that Brazil exports to the US Is actually used in hamburgers because it's not that high quality. So you can expect burgers and coffee to become more expensive if these tariffs do go into effect.
- [02:31]
Gideon Resnick
But Trump hasn't just targeted the country, he's targeted one man personally. He's imposed sanctions on the Supreme Court justice overseeing the criminal case against Bolsonaro. The administration has defended its targeting of Justice Alexander de Maresch by saying that he had politically persecuted Bolsonaro and censored conservative voices when the court sought to dispel far right material online that included suspending X, formerly known as Twitter. Now, these sanctions are often reserved for foreign nationals accused of human rights violations, and it prohibits them from having any property in the US or doing business there. But if Trump was hoping that economic warfare would force a deal with Brazil, so far it seems to be having the opposite effect. The current president, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, said in an interview with the New York Times that the trial was a judicial matter and not for trade negotiations. Andreoni says that his resolve has turned his own domestic fortunes around.
- [03:25]
Manuela Andriano
Before this, his approval ratings were among the worst in his career. But now, you know, the most recent polls showed this fight with Trump has earned him a lot of public support. And for the first time in months, there are more Brazilians who approve of his government than disapprove him.
- [03:40]
Gideon Resnick
If a trade deal with Brazil looks far off, there may be more movement elsewhere in the coming days, especially for those countries absorbing the steepest rates. Let's turn now to a story out of Washington you might have missed this week. A former personal lawyer of President Trump was narrowly confirmed to a lifetime position as a federal appeals court judge despite facing a host of ethics violation allegations. Emil Bovey represented the president in three of his four criminal cases. That includes the Manhattan criminal trial, where Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Trump appointed Bovey to a top position in the Justice Department when he took office this year, and then he nominated him for this new role on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. His confirmation has been controversial for a number of reasons. For one, it moved unusually quickly, despite some lawmakers concerns about his personal connection to Trump. Bovee will be in a position to potentially review hundreds of lawsuits against Trump's administration, and he'll have the power to shape US Law for decades to come. At his hearing, Bovey disputed claims that his role defending Trump in court compromises his neutrality.
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Perry Stein
I am not anybody's henchman. I'm not an enforcer. I'm a lawyer from a small town who never expected to be in an arena like this.
- [05:03]
Gideon Resnick
Also during the process, several whistleblowers came forward accusing Bovey of putting Trump's agenda above fundamental legal principles in his role at the doj. They say Bovee encouraged the administration and attorneys at the department to defy court orders related to Trump's immigration agenda. As one of the whistleblowers described it, Bovey allegedly told DOJ attorneys back in March that planes carrying migrants that were bound for El Salvador would need to take off, quote, no matter what, even after a federal judge ruled against the flight.
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Suna Rasmussen
That is a big no, no in the prosecutorial world and the justice department. And Mr. Bovee himself has denied these allegations and said that never.
- [05:44]
Gideon Resnick
That's Perry Stein, who covers the DOJ for the Washington Post. She and her colleagues spoke to one of these whistleblowers who says that Bovee misled the Senate Judiciary Committee about his involvement in the DOJ's decision to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Earlier this year, multiple prosecutors resigned after they refused Bovey's demands that they sign off on a request to a judge to drop the prosecution.
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Suna Rasmussen
Prosecutors wrote pretty scathing resignation letters saying, you know, one saying, I'm no fool. I'm not going to do this work for you. This is a really big breach of protocol. Like, this is not what happens. And really accusing him of quid pro quo that they had Adams agree to help them carry out their immigration policies in exchange for dropping this.
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Gideon Resnick
Bovey denies ever asking prosecutors to consider dismissing court orders. Ultimately, every Democratic senator and two Republicans, Senators Lisa Murkowski from Alaska and Susan Collins from Maine, voted against his confirmation.
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Suna Rasmussen
Emil Bovey's kind of the sign that Republicans are supportive of what Trump is doing in the Justice Department, which is creating less distance between the White House and the Justice Department than has traditionally been there.
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Gideon Resnick
And Stein says the president's decision to appoint Bovey shows how his judicial strategies are evolving in his second term.
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Suna Rasmussen
Trump has, you know, very publicly fumed that he's upset about a lot of the judges that he picked in his first term. Right. He chose very traditional picks for his judges and U.S. attorneys. And all across the country, Trump judges are sometimes ruling against him. And that is very normal in the judicial system. Right. Obama judges block some of the Obama Democratic policies and vice versa. This time, you see, he's really trying to pick different people to prevent this from happening again.
- [07:42]
Gideon Resnick
Now to reporting from the Wall Street Journal on a dangerous drug, stronger than fentanyl, that's spreading through Europe faster than authorities are able to keep up. Reporter Suna Rasmussen told us about the rise of nitizines.
- [07:54]
Perry Stein
Nitizines are so potent that only a trace amount of them will cause a lethal overdose. So we're talking a couple of grains of salt, of table salt, vanishingly small amounts.
- [08:04]
Gideon Resnick
Nitizines are around 50 to 250 times more potent than heroin and five times as strong as fentanyl. Hundreds of people across Europe are dying every year from these drugs, and many don't even know they're consuming them.
- [08:16]
Perry Stein
They're almost always consumed unwittingly by users. They typically appear as contaminants of other drugs like heroin, but also in more recreational drugs like cocaine or Ecstasy, and even in counterfeit painkillers or benzos like Xanax and Valium. And this is one concern that people have here in the UK and in Europe.
- [08:38]
Gideon Resnick
Although it was first synthesized back in the 1950s, it's only since 2019 that experts have begun noticing it in the drug supply. Much of it is sourced to China, where some of the compounds to produce them are legal. It's produced in labs at low cost and then shipped largely through individual brokers and sellers. Rasmussen managed to contact a seller in China who told him that they could ship him large quantities right to his door.
- [09:01]
Perry Stein
They would send me the pills to sky in discreet packaging, they said, and one of them sent me a photo of what appeared to be cat food. And I assume those bags of cat food contain nitazines, so it's quite easy to get in touch with these dealers.
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Gideon Resnick
Experts are concerned that gangs operating in Europe might start to distribute them, which could dramatically increase their availability. That's partially how the fentanyl crisis in the US got so bad so fast.
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Perry Stein
Cartels, primarily Mexican cartels, began shipping fentanyl especially into the US And a lot of that also came from China. There are organized criminal gangs throughout Europe, and some of them have links both to Mexican cartels, but also China. If they decide to import nitzazines on a large scale into Europe, that could create a really serious crisis, both for law enforcement in Europe, but also for healthcare professionals and drug users.
- [09:54]
Gideon Resnick
Europe has strict rules around prescribing and marketing synthetic opioids, which has largely spared it from the horrors of the fentanyl crisis that's played out in the United States in recent decades. But experts told Rasmussen the spread of nitizines is threatening to change that. The director of a leading treatment provider for drug addiction in the UK told him that nitizines are the biggest public health crisis for people in the UK who use drugs since the AIDS crisis. This may already be playing out in West Africa, where countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia have declared a national emergency over nitazine usage. Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following in Texas. For the first time since deadly floods rose through Hill country in the early hours of July 4, the top emergency management official in Kerr county addressed where he was that night. William Thomas, the county's emergency management coordinator, testified in a hearing yesterday that he was off duty on July 3rd. He was sick that day and asleep during the worst of the flooding.
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William Thomas
The morning of the 4th, my supervisors and sheriff's office leadership were aware that I was off duty. I briefly woke around 2pm when there was no local rainfall or indication of elevated risk and returned to rest. I was awakened around 5:30am on July 4th by my wife following a call from the city of Kerrville EMC Jeremy Hughes requesting that I mobilize.
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Gideon Resnick
By that time the worst of the flooding had hit low lying communities including summer camps like camp mystic, where 27 campers and counselors died. Thomas works under the County Judge Rob Kelly, who testified that he was out of town as the floods hit. In other testimony, local officials said they needed an updated warning system for events like this. Now to a story out of Ohio about a record breaking birth Thaddeus Daniel Pierce was born last weekend and has had the honor of becoming the world's oldest baby, a title bestowed upon him by MIT Technology Review. Now, that's because Thaddeus developed from an embryo that had remained in storage for more than 30 years. The donor was Linda Archerd, now 62 years old. She told MIT that back in the early 90s she and her husband decided to try IVF, then a relatively new technology, and create four embryos. One resulted in her daughter she had 31 years ago and another is now Thaddeus. His mom said that they are in awe of the new baby, even if members of their family think it sounds like something from a sci fi movie. And finally, does the memory of trying to do a pull up in the annual presidential fitness test still haunt you? Well, that test is coming back. President Trump signed an executive order reinstating it for public school students yesterday. It was phased out by the Obama administration in favor of a program that focused less on athletic performance and more on individual health. Now, it's not clear what exactly will be in this new version, but for those of us that are long out of school, we can at least take comfort in knowing that we don't have to fake a sick day just to get out of doing pull ups. You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you are already listening to the news app right now, stick around for the latest episode of Apple News. In conversation this week, Shamita talks to journalist TJ Raphael about women who say they were forced to give up their babies for adoption at a Christian maternity home. All of the women I spoke to.
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Manuela Andriano
Had already decided they didn't want abortions. These women wanted to keep and parent their children.
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Gideon Resnick
All they wanted was support. Rafael explains what these facilities promise, what they actually provide, and what that reveals about reproductive choice in America. If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News in conversation to find that episode. Enjoy the weekend and we'll be back with the news on Monday.