Update: Two Israeli Embassy staffers were killed in D.C. What to know.

Summary

Apple News Today: Detailed Episode Summary Release Date: May 22, 2025 | Host: Shemitah Basu

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1. Tragic Shooting at Israeli Embassy Event

The episode opens with a somber report on the fatal shooting outside an event at the Capitol Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. Two staff members from the Israeli Embassy, Yaron Lensky and Sarah Milgram, were killed in the attack.

• Details of the Incident:

  • Victims:
    • Yaron Lensky: A German-born Israeli citizen working in the embassy's political department, passionate about peace initiatives with Arab neighbors.
    • Sarah Milgram: An American employee in the embassy's public diplomacy department.
  • Suspect:
    • Elias Rodriguez: A 30-year-old from Chicago, apprehended at the scene.
    • Incident Description ([00:59]):

      Pamela Smith, D.C. Police Chief: "Prior to the shooting, the suspect was observed pacing back and forth outside of the museum. He approached a group of four people, produced a handgun and opened fire, striking both of our decedents. After the shooting, the suspect then entered the museum and was detained by event security. The suspect chanted Free, Free Palestine while in custody."

• Ambassador's Statement:

  • Yechiel Leiter ([01:47]):

    "The couple was about to be engaged. Yaron purchased a ring this week with the intention of proposing to his girlfriend next week in Jerusalem. I will say this, we are a resilient people. Together we won't be afraid. Together we'll stand and we're going to overcome moral depravity of people who think that they're going to achieve political gains through murder."

2. Reactions and Broader Context

• Political Reactions:

  • President Trump: Took to social media to condemn anti-Semitism, stating that "hatred and radicalism have no place in the USA."
  • Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: Expressed outrage, highlighting the ongoing tensions related to the Gaza conflict.

• Gaza Conflict Context:

  • Over 53,000 Palestinians have been killed since Hamas's attack on October 7.
  • Israel is intensifying its offensive to secure hostages and gain control over Gaza, with Netanyahu asserting that "at least 20 hostages are still alive."

• Humanitarian Efforts:

  • Despite international backlash, Netanyahu allowed limited aid into Gaza after an 11-week blockade, though distribution issues have hindered the aid's effectiveness.

• Event's Intended Purpose:

  • The shooting occurred at an event aimed at fostering unity between Jewish and non-Jewish communities.
  • An organizer remarked to NBC News on the "painful irony" of the attack undermining their bridge-building efforts.

3. COVID-19 Vaccine Eligibility Restrictions

A significant portion of the episode addresses the FDA's new guidance on COVID-19 vaccine approvals and the ensuing policy shift.

• FDA's New Guidelines ([03:05]):

  • Restriction: The FDA will no longer approve new COVID-19 vaccines for healthy individuals under 65 unless additional safety and efficacy trials are conducted.
  • Current Policy: Boosters remain available to all, but under the new rules, only those with medical conditions—such as obesity, pregnancy, or a history of smoking—will continue to have access to boosters without restrictions.

• Statements from Health Officials:

  • Dr. Vinayak Prasad ([04:39]):

    "Americans can be reassured that they will be covered by such approvals. At the same time, we want more evidence at the US Food and Drug Administration. We want to know more about what these products are doing, especially as we enter the seventh, eighth, and ninth dose."

  • Pamela Smith ([04:39]):

    "We have launched down this multi-year campaign of booster after booster after booster and we do not have gold standard science to support this for average risk, low-risk Americans."

• Expert Commentary:

  • Usha Lee McFarling ([05:48]):

    "A lot of people really just want choice. They say, well, don't take away my choice to have the vaccine. Maybe I live with my grandmother who has cancer and I want to get it to protect her."

• Industry Concerns:

  • Usha Lee McFarling ([06:10]):

    "The problem is that these trials take a long time, months, and can be quite expensive. Vaccines are not very profitable, certainly not compared to drugs like ozone, for example. So one concern is that vaccine manufacturers just may say, well, it's just not worth it."

• Policy Implications:

  • ABC News highlights that traditionally, the CDC sets vaccine recommendations, with the FDA handling approvals, marking a departure in public health protocol under the current administration.
  • NPR points out reduced CDC communications, with rising cases of measles, salmonella, listeria, and hepatitis A and C juxtaposed against the WHO's new pandemic treaty, which the US is exiting under Trump's lead.

4. President Biden's Health and Cognitive Concerns

A focal point of the episode is the emerging narrative around President Biden's health, both physically and cognitively.

• Health Developments:

  • President Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer, bringing his health into sharper focus.

• Cognitive Decline Reporting:

  • Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Investigation:

    • In their book, "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again," they reveal that Biden's declining mental acuity was known to his closest aides but was concealed from the public and even other government officials.

    • Jake Tapper ([09:05]):

      "Cabinet secretaries, multiple Cabinet secretaries tell us that, you know, if there was a crisis at 2 am they would have been worried. They did not have confidence that he would have been a reliable commander in chief with a middle of the night crisis."

    • Jake Tapper ([10:01]):

      "The outside pollsters, Murphy, Guerin and Pollack never talked to Biden. They were never allowed to speak with him. And you know, they'd been having concerns about his age and the impact of his age on his candidacy for months, but they never got to talk to him. And finally, Chuck Schumer is able to confront Joe Biden and say, I've talked to your pollsters. Have you? They think you only have a 5% chance of winning. He's the only one we can find that actually said to Biden, if I were you, I would drop out. He's the only one we can find saying that."

• Biden’s Response:

  • The former president has refuted claims about his cognitive decline, asserting there is no evidence to support such allegations.

• Implications:

  • The revelations have stirred debate about Biden's ability to continue serving, especially in light of his announced cancer diagnosis.

5. Other Notable Political Developments

• House Legislation on Trump's Agenda:

  • The House approved a bill to fund President Trump's tax and immigration policies, including extending trillions in tax cuts and introducing new spending measures while cutting over $1 trillion from social safety nets over the next decade. The legislation awaits Senate revisions.

• Diplomatic Tensions with South Africa:

  • President Trump's Meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa:

    • The meeting became contentious as Trump propagated unfounded claims of a "white genocide" in South Africa.

    • Shemitah Basu ([12:26]):

      "Nothing happens to them? No, there is quite nothing happens to them. There is criminality in our country. People who do get killed, unfortunately, through criminal activity, are not only white people, majority of them are black people. Police statistics in the country show that white South Africans are not killed at a higher rate than other South Africans."

    • Context: Trump misrepresented footage of protests against violence towards farmers as depicting actual grave sites.

• Luxury Jet from Qatar:

  • The Defense Department has accepted a luxury Boeing jet from Qatar to serve as a temporary Air Force One for President Trump, sparking debates over the Emoluments Clause and ethical considerations.
    • Pentagon Spokesperson: Assured adherence to federal regulations and proper security measures.
    • Ethics Concerns: Experts argue for stricter enforcement to prevent such foreign gifts.

6. Upcoming Content and Conclusion

The episode concludes by teasing the continuation of the conversation with Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson regarding President Biden's mental acuity. Listeners are encouraged to follow up in the Apple News app for the subsequent episode.

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Notable Quotes:

• Pamela Smith ([00:59]):

  "Prior to the shooting, the suspect was observed pacing back and forth outside of the museum..."

• Yechiel Leiter ([01:47]):

  "Together we won't be afraid. Together we'll stand and we're going to overcome moral depravity of people who think that they're going to achieve political gains through murder."

• Usha Lee McFarling ([05:48]):

  "A lot of people really just want choice. They say, well, don't take away my choice to have the vaccine..."

• Jake Tapper ([09:05]):

  "Cabinet secretaries... did not have confidence that he would have been a reliable commander in chief..."

• Jake Tapper ([10:01]):

  "They're the only one we can find saying that."

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the multifaceted discussions from the episode, ranging from international incidents and public health policy shifts to pivotal political narratives surrounding presidential health and legislative actions. For listeners seeking in-depth analysis and updates, the Apple News app remains the go-to platform.

Transcript

[Shemitah Basu]

Good morning. It's Thursday, May 22nd. I'm Shemitah Basu, this is Apple News today. On today's show, the COVID vaccine will soon be available to fewer people. What Biden's closest aides knew about his declining mental acuity in office and Trump derails his meeting with South Africa's president with false claims and a surprise screening Foreign but first, two staff members at the Israeli Embassy were shot and killed outside an event at the Capitol Jewish museum in Washington, D.C. last night. The man and woman were a young couple named Yaron Lensky and Sarah Milgram. In a statement to the press after the incident, D.C. police Chief Pamela Smith said a suspect is in custody and identified him as 30 year old Elias Rodriguez from Chicago.

[Pamela Smith]

Prior to the shooting, the suspect was observed pacing back and forth outside of the museum. He approached a group of four people, produced a handgun and opened fire, striking both of our decedents. After the shooting, the suspect then entered the museum and was detained by event security. The suspect chanted Free, Free Palestine while in custody.

[Shemitah Basu]

Milgram was an American who worked in the embassy's public diplomacy department. Lashinsky was a German born Israeli citize who worked in the embassy's political department. He described himself on his LinkedIn as being dedicated to, quote, expanding the circle of peace with our Arab neighbors. The Israeli ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter, told journalists the couple was about to be engaged.

[Yechiel Leiter]

The young man purchased a ring this week with the intention of proposing to his girlfriend next week in Jerusalem. I will say this, we are a resilient people. Together we won't be afraid. Together we'll stand and we're going to overcome moral depravity of people who think that they're going to achieve political gains through murder.

[Shemitah Basu]

On social media, President Trump called for an end to anti Semitism, writing that hatred and radicalism have no place in the usa. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office released a statement saying he is outraged by the killings. D.C. embassies in particular have been a focal point for demonstrations against the war in Gaza, where over 53,000 Palestinians have been killed since Hamas's October 7 attack. Israel is in the midst of its latest offensive to press Hamas to release the remaining hostages. Netanyahu said recently he believes at least 20 hostages are still alive and his military goal is to take full control of Gaza and force Palestinians out. Also this week, after widespread international condemnation, Netanyahu permitted a minimal amount of aid into Gaza after an 11 week blockade. Around 100 trucks carrying flour baby food and nutritional supplements entered the enclave late on Wednesday, but UN Officials say as of this morning because of distribution issues, none of that aid has so far reached Palestinians in need. Last night's shooting took place at an event intended to bring Jewish and non Jewish communities together in an attempt to build common ground and, quote, turn pain into purpose. An organizer of the event told NBC News it was painfully ironic that as they were trying to build bridges, quote, somebody came in with such hate and destruction. This is a developing story. You can check the Apple News app for updates throughout the day. We learned this week that the group of people eligible to get a Covid shot is set to be restricted after the Food and Drug Administration issued new guidance. The FDA said it would no longer approve new vaccines for healthy people under 65 years old unless pharmaceutical companies run additional trials to test their safety and benefits. Right now, anyone can get a booster. Under the new restrictions, boosters would be available to those who have a medical condition that elevates the risk of severe disease, such as obesity, pregnancy or a history of smoking. The head of the FDA's vaccine program, Dr. Vinayak Prasad, stressed that higher risk people would see no changes to accessing.

[Pamela Smith]

Covid shots at risk Americans can be reassured that they will be covered by such approvals. At the same time, we want more evidence at the US Food and Drug Administration. We want to know more about what these products are doing, especially as we enter the seventh, eighth and ninth dose. We have launched down this multi year campaign of booster after booster after booster and we do not have gold standard science to support this for average risk, low risk Americans.

[Shemitah Basu]

Last year, just 23% of adults had a booster shot, with many of those in the over 65s bracket, which the FDA says will remain eligible. This is a major shift in policy, but it's hard to know if it'll make a dramatic effect to infection rates overall. It's also not entirely unusual by global standards. Some countries in Europe restrict free boosters or at least limit their official recommendations to those vulnerable to severe illness. But even there, it's usually possible for healthy younger people to choose to get a shot and pay out of pocket if they want to, Usha Lee McFarling, a national reporter with STAT, told us. That's been the gist of the criticism of this move.

[Usha Lee McFarling]

A lot of people really just want choice. They say, well, don't take away my choice to have the vaccine. Maybe I live with my grandmother who has cancer and I want to get it to protect her.

[Shemitah Basu]

She notes that the announcement has left some physicians confused as to who might be eligible this fall and what it means for people hoping to continue getting boosters and wondering when clinical trials will make that approval possible.

[Usha Lee McFarling]

The problem is that these trials take a long time, months, and can be quite expensive. Vaccines are not very profitable, certainly not compared to drugs like ozone, for example. So one concern is that vaccine manufacturers just may say, well, it's just not worth it.

[Shemitah Basu]

ABC News reports that it's traditionally the CDC that sets these kinds of recommendations, while the FDA determines which vaccines to approve, making this a departure from precedent. It's another indication of the ways our public health apparatus is changing under the current administration. Meanwhile, NPR reports that many of the ways the CDC previously distributed health and outbreak alerts like newsletters, have gone silent. The agency's main social media channels are now run by the Department of Health and Human Services. Cases of measles, salmonella, listeria and hepatitis A and C have continued to rise. All this comes as the World Health Organization celebrated a new pandemic treaty, the first global agreement for how to respond to future pandemics. It included a series of measures aimed at improving collaboration, preparedness and research. The US did not participate, as President Trump has begun the process of withdrawing from the WHO. And Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has urged nations to reject, as he put it, the moribund who. The US Was once the who's biggest donor, the title that China now holds. President Biden's health is back in focus this week after we learned just a few days ago that he's been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. But even before this news, his health, specifically his cognitive health, was a topic of debate and speculation. A turning point in this conversation came nearly a year ago when he and now President Trump met for their first and only debate of the 2024 campaign. Many Americans tuning in were shocked by what they saw.

[Yechiel Leiter]

Making sure that we're able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I've been able to do with the, with the COVID excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with. Look, if we finally beat Medicare at.

[Shemitah Basu]

That point, the questions about Biden's ability to serve another term were impossible to ignore. But new reporting from CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios's Alex Thompson reveals that people in Biden's inner circle knew about his cognitive decline for years and that they actively concealed it from others in the administration, from elected officials, and from the American people.

[Jake Tapper]

Here's Thompson we had Cabinet secretaries, multiple Cabinet secretaries tell us that, you know, if there was an a crisis at 2am they would have been worried. They did not have confidence that he would have been a reliable commander in chief with a middle of the night crisis.

[Shemitah Basu]

Thompson and Tapper lay out their reporting in a new book called Original Sin, President Biden's Decline, its cover up and his disastrous choice to run again. They're my guests this week on Apple News in conversation and just to say we spoke a few days before Biden's cancer diagnosis was announced. So you won't hear us discuss that in this interview. They told me Biden and his closest confidants didn't seem to be concerned by his disastrous debate performance or the fallout. In fact, they kept him largely isolated from outside opinions about the state of his campaign. Here's Tapper.

[Jake Tapper]

The outside pollsters, Murphy, Guerin and Pollack never talked to Biden. They were never allowed to speak with him. And you know, they'd been having concerns about his age and the impact of his age on his candidacy for months, but they never got to talk to him. And finally, Chuck Schumer is able to confront Joe Biden and say, I've talked to your pollsters. Have you? They think you only have a 5% chance of winning. He's the only one that we can find that actually said to Biden, if I were you, I would drop out. He's the only one we can find saying that.

[Shemitah Basu]

Eight days after that conversation, Biden announced he would step down. In response to the reporting in this book and elsewhere about his health, the former president has said that claims about his cognitive health declining during his presidency are wrong and that there is nothing to sustain them. To hear the rest of my conversation with Tapper and Thompson, stick around after today's show. That episode will play for you next. Before we let you go, a few other stories were following. The House has voted to approve legislation to fund President Trump's tax and immigration agenda, sending the bill to the Senate. The bill would extend trillions of dollars in tax cuts from Trump's first term, along with hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending, while slashing spending on social safety net programs by more than $1 trillion over the next decade. The final vote came in the early hours of this morning, wrapping up a marathon 24 plus hour session. The bill is expected to undergo major revisions in the Senate. Meanwhile, yesterday in the Oval Office, President Trump hosted South African President Cyril Ramaph. But their meeting descended into serious diplomatic discomfort as Trump raised false claims of a white genocide taking place in South Africa. As Ramaphosa suggested that Trump listened to the voices of his country. Trump ordered the lights dimmed and played a video mashup that included grave crossings along a road which Trump claimed were farmers graves. A fact check from multiple news outlets points out that the mounds were in fact part of a protest against the violence against farmers, not actual graves. And when they kill the white farmer.

[Jake Tapper]

Nothing happens to them?

[Shemitah Basu]

No, there is quite nothing happens to them. There is criminality in our country. People who do get killed, unfortunately, through criminal activity, are not only white people, majority of them are black people. Police statistics in the country show that white South Africans are not killed at a higher rate than other South Africans. Trump's false claims largely focused on land seizures. The South African government has passed a law that allows the government to take land without compensation, which is aimed at addressing historical inequalities for land ownership that resulted from apartheid. Before the meeting concluded, Ramaphosa alluded to the controversial Qatari jet. I'm sorry I don't have a plane to give you. I wish you did. I take it. I would take it. If your country offered the United States Air Force a plane, I would take it. Speaking of that jet, the Defense Department has officially accepted a luxury Boeing jet from Qatar to temporarily serve as Air Force One for President Trump. It's believed to be one of the biggest foreign gifts ever given to the US Government, and it's raised bipartisan security and ethical concerns. A Pentagon spokesman said that the administration was abiding by federal rules and regulations and that they would ensure proper security measures were taken. The Emoluments clause of the Constitution forbids the president from receiving gifts from foreign kings and states without the consent of Congress. Some ethics experts have said that Congress needs to more strictly enforce this clause to prevent things like this from happening. You can find all those stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the News app right now, stick around. The rest of my conversation with Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson about former President Biden's mental acuity is coming up next. If you're listening in the podcast app, you can find that episode by searching for Apple News in Conversation, and I'll be back with the news tomorrow.