8.7.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the reading of The New York Times four Thursday,
August seventh, twenty twenty five. As a reminder, Radio I
is a reading service intended for people who are blind
or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
printed material. Your reader for today is Scott Johnson. Will
begin with the Merriam Webster Word of the day, and

(00:23):
today's word is adjudicate. Adjudicate. To adjudicate a dispute between
two parties is to make an official decision about which
party is right. To adjudicate a case or claim is
to settle it judicially. Adjudicate is also used to mean

(00:43):
to act as judge, as in the case will be
adjudicated in the state courts, or the property title cannot
be transferred until a case concerning the affected rights of
way is adjudicated. Today's front page headlines from the national
print edition of The New York Times. Trump souring on India,

(01:07):
vows double tariffs, Cast's friend as foe, threat jeopardizes effort
to counterbalance Beijing's might. China turning to Ai to push
its propaganda, tracking US officials and influencers, Trump weighs playing
a role in Mayer race, said to call Cuomo focus

(01:28):
on Mamdani set up like a logistical hub for packages,
but it's for people. Airport becomes vital to trump crackdown
on immigration, a new entree for zookats, domestic pets, and
targeting unhealthy foods. Kennedy also imperils a cause. Our first

(01:53):
story is headlined India, once America's counterweight to China, is
now facing Trump's wrath. It's by Alex Travelli, reporting from
New Delhi. President Trump all but declared economic war against
India on Wednesday, threatening to add a twenty five percent

(02:14):
punitive tariff for India's purchases of Russian oil on top
of a twenty five percent tariff he announced last week.
In his second term, mister Trump has been expected to
marshall India as a friendly counterweight to the challenge posed
by China. When added together, the fifty percent tariff paints
India as a political enemy, putting it in the company

(02:37):
of Brazil, whose leftist president sparred with mister Trump when
the country was threatened with a similarly punishing tiff rate.
The crisis between India and the United States suddenly looks
much bigger than the terms of trade. The onslaught against
India started on July thirtieth, when mister Trump declared that

(02:57):
India's economy was dead. That point, his administration had been
angling to reduce India's trade barriers, but said nothing about
its two years of buying Russian oil at a wartime discount.
Before the shock of mister Trump's announcement in April of
sweeping global tariffs, the world's two largest democracies seemed to

(03:18):
be enjoying the friendship that its leaders had forged. At
a meeting with mister Trump at the White House in February,
India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi described India's intention to become
one of the world's most advanced economies with the United
States as a partner. In the language of America, It's
make India great again mega, he said. When America and

(03:43):
India worked together, this MAGA plus mega becomes a mega
partnership for prosperity. That's a quote mister Trump smiled. Left unmentioned,
but lingering just out of sight was China, the only
country with a population to rival India's and an economy

(04:03):
to stand in its way. China is also far and
away America's most important economic competitor. Together, the United States
and India were seen as ready to use each other
to try to restrain China's might. Total trade between the
United States and India was roughly one hundred and thirty
billion dollars last year. India's top exports to America include pharmaceuticals, autoparts,

(04:30):
electrical goods, and gemstones. Mister Mody's confidence in enlisting the
United States in its economic rise was well grounded. US
administrations have been courting India as a geopolitical ally for
more than a quarter century since India announced its nuclear
arsenal as a deterred had said to China, and American

(04:53):
dollars have poured into India as China's economy has matured
and become more assertive. The COVID nineteen pandemic and the
war in Ukraine were the catalysts for a surge in investment.
Multinational companies grew excited about doing business in India to
reduce the risk of exposure to China as it girds

(05:13):
for a trade war with the United States and possibly
a real war with Taiwan. Manufacturing and professional services led
the way. Wall Street followed banking on the future growth
of India with its relatively young population and enviable political stability.
Over the past week, mister Trump's escalating attacks on India

(05:36):
have suddenly undermined this joint venture and sent reverberations throughout
the business worlds of both countries. On Wednesday, an executive
order by mister Trump said that India would face an
extra twenty five percent tariff starting on August twenty seventh
if it continued to buy oil from Russia. That levy

(05:57):
on Indian goods imported into units United States would come
on top of a twenty five percent tariff that mister
Trump announced last week, which is set to take effect
on Thursday, and on its own ranks as one of
the highest rates in Asia. India's Foreign Ministry responded to
mister Trump's executive order on Wednesday, reiterating that the country's

(06:19):
motives for importing oil from Russia were tied to the
energy needs of its one point four billion people. It
was quoting extremely unfortunate that the US should choose to
impose additional tariffs on India for actions that several other
countries are also taking in their own national interest. The

(06:40):
Ministry's statement said. Indian officials signaled over the weekend that
they did not intend to stop buying Russian oil. With
his tariff threats, mister Trump has thrown months of trade
talks between both countries into question. Just a couple of
weeks ago, negotiators and business leaders sounded upbeat, even with

(07:02):
some difficult details to be settled. The expectation was that
India and the United States mean too much to each
other to let a global trade war tear them apart.
Mister Mody was one of the first world leaders to
visit mister Trump in Washington after he returned to the
White House in January. The two men had long shared

(07:23):
what was by all appearances a close relationship. As political leaders,
both are regarded as strong men. The United States was
earlier wary of mister Mody, who had been denied a
visa to the United States on the grounds that he
played a role in the deadly anti Muslim riots in

(07:44):
two thousand and two, but he was embraced when he
became Prime Minister in twenty fourteen. Part of the calculation
was based on security and the possible future of military
alliances across Asia. Yet India's attractive as a partner in defense,
always hinged on the promise of its economy. Companies like

(08:07):
Apple have poured billions into India, which in twenty twenty
three eclipsed China in population, with eyes on India's domestic
market and its capacity to export manufactured goods to the
United States and elsewhere. Those investments were supposed to be
better than profitable. They were supposed to reduce or eliminate

(08:27):
everyone's dependence on China to be the factory of the world.
The twenty five percent tariff alone, already much higher than
Asian competitors like Vietnam, Japan, and South Korea, would reduce
the viability of such a trade. A fifty percent tariff
would kill it. On Tuesday, mister Trump took aim at

(08:48):
two other industries that were explicitly being developed in India
as an alternative to China. Pharmaceuticals, where India has world
beating advantages and sell more than ten billion dollars a
year to the United States is to face a special
tariff that could eventually reach two hundred and fifty percent,

(09:10):
Mister Trump said to be announced within a week or so.
In his words, Eli Lilly as one of many American
corporations that have invested in India, for example, recently invested
three billion dollars in an Indian factory. India makes nearly
forty percent of the generic drugs bought in the United States.

(09:32):
Mister Trump's plan is to bring back manufacturing to the
United States, which is also the reason he has given
for imposing another special tariff on semiconductors. Unfortunately for Indian
and American companies and some in East Asia. Two, everyone
has been spending to make India competitive in this sector. Micron,

(09:55):
based in Idaho, has taken advantage of Indian government subsidies
to put twozero point five billion dollars into building chip
making facilities in mister Mody's home state of Gujarat. High
finances also followed bricks and mortar businesses. The Indian stock
market has been on a bull run, finding enthusiastic new

(10:17):
buyers among middle class Indians that made foreign investors eager
for private deals. Stephen Schwartzmann, the chief executive of Blackstone,
a New York investment firm, said this year that it
was putting eleven billion dollars into Indian data centers to
fuel the global artificial intelligence boom. A Mumbai based investment

(10:39):
professional who was not authorized to speak publicly, said there
was much more at stake in these investments than their
dollar value. Bets like Blackstones are about the future of
business between India, China and the United States, he said,
and bring expertise from one economy to another. India was
benefiting for from that, but now it looks like a vulnerability.

(11:04):
The rupture of the relationship has generated huge uncertainty. Who
wants to be responsible for making the next big bet.
Some parts of the US Indian equation look relatively secure.
The trade in goods between the two countries has never
been as important to their economic relationship as their trade

(11:25):
in services and other people to people exchanges. Indians are
just as present in American boardrooms as American trained Indians
are in Mumbai's corner offices. One aspect of this exchange,
the proliferation of globally integrated high end offices in India,
first in information technology and then across the professions, has

(11:48):
remained a bright spot, worth sixty five billion dollars last year.
It is more valuable than the total trade deficit in goods.
China does not hold a candle to India's ability as
a hub for officework other countries send its way. As
frightening as the new tariffs are for many Indian factories,

(12:08):
most American investors who have built stakes in India are
not yet fleeing. They do, however, remember what happened in
twenty twenty when India and China traded blows at their
border and twenty four soldiers were killed almost overnight. Chinese
companies were forced to ditch their Indian investments at a loss.

(12:29):
A war of words and tariffs is different, of course,
but Indian and American cooperation around China is no longer
something anyone can count on now. A story headlined China
turns to AI in information Warfare. It's by Julian E. Barnes,
who covers the US intelligence agencies for The Times. Some

(12:52):
of it involves a company known as Golaxy. Barnes found
out about Goalaxy through Vanderbilt University's Institute of National Security,
where he is a non resident fellow. This year, the
Chinese government is using companies with expertise and artificial intelligence
to monitor and manipulate public opinion, giving it a new

(13:15):
weapon in information warfare. According to current and former US officials,
and documents unearthed by researchers. One company's internal documents show
how it has undertaken influence campaigns in Hong Kong and Taiwan,
and collected data on members of Congress and other influential Americans.

(13:36):
While the firm has not mounted a campaign in the
United States, American spy agencies have monitored its activity for
signs that it might try to influence American elections or
political debates. Former US official set artificial intelligence is increasingly
the new frontier of espionage and align influence operations, allowing

(14:03):
intelligence services to conduct campaigns far faster, more efficiently, and
on a larger scale than ever before. The Chinese government
has long struggled to mount information operations targeting other countries,
lacking the aggressiveness or effectiveness of Russian intelligence agencies, but
US officials and experts say that advances in AI could

(14:27):
help China overcome its weaknesses. A new technology can track
public debates of interest to the Chinese government, offering the
ability to monitor individuals and their arguments as well as
the broader public sentiment. The technology also has the promise
of mass producing propaganda that can counter shifts in public

(14:48):
opinion At home and overseas. China's emerging capabilities come as
the US government pulls back efforts to counter foreign malign
influence campaigns. US by agencies still collect information about foreign manipulation,
but the Trump administration has dismantled the teams at the

(15:09):
State Department, the FBI, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency that warned the public about potential threats in the
last presidential election. The campaigns included Russian videos denigrating Vice
President Kamala Harris and falsely claiming that ballots had been destroyed.

(15:31):
The new technology not allows the Chinese company Goalaxy to
go beyond the election influenced campaigns undertaken by Russia in
recent years. According to the documents, it is now clear
from the documents how effective Goalaxy's campaigns in Taiwan, Hong
Kong and inside China have been, or whether it's technology

(15:53):
can do all that it promises. In a statement, Golaxy
denied that it was creating any sort of bot network
or psychological profiling tour, or that it had done any
work related to Hong Kong or other elections. It called
the information presented by The New York Times about the
company misinformation. Goalaxy's products are mainly based on open source data,

(16:19):
without specially collecting data targeting US officials, the firm said.
After being contacted by The Times, Goalaxy began altering its website,
removing references to its national security work on behalf of
the Chinese government. The documents examined by researchers appear to

(16:39):
have been leaked by a disgruntled employee upset about wages
and working conditions at the company. While most of the
documents are not dated, the majority of those that include
dates are from twenty twenty, twenty twenty two, and twenty
twenty three. They were obtained by Vanderbilt University's Institute of

(17:00):
National Security, a non partisan research and educational center that
studies cybersecurity, intelligence and other critical challenges. Publicly, Golaxy advertises
itself as a firm that gathers data and analyzes public
sentiment for Chinese companies and the government, but in the documents,

(17:21):
which were reviewed by The Times, the company privately claims
that it can use a new technology to reshape and
influence public opinion on behalf of the Chinese government. The
company explains how precisely it can aim its efforts at
individual social media and Internet users by using a technology

(17:42):
called the Smart Propaganda System GoPro. The Vanderbilt researchers Brett JA.
Goldstein and Brett V. Benson revealed the existence of the
documents in a guest essay for the New York Times
opinion section, arguing that Goalaxy is able to mine so
social media profiles and then create content that can produce

(18:04):
customized content that feels authentic, adapts in real time, and
avoids detection. The result, they said, is a propaganda engine
that can generate far more material than seen before. AI
driven propaganda is no longer a hypothetical future threat, they wrote,

(18:24):
it is operational, sophisticated, and already reshaping how public opinion
can be manipulated on a large scale. Experts say the
firm is rapidly adopting China's advanced artificial intelligence technologies, which,
according to the internal company documents, should allow Galaxy to

(18:45):
undertake influence operations that are far more sophisticated than foreign
governments have previously been able to conduct in traditional influence operations.
Think Russia's social media efforts in twenty six to spread
chaos in the United States disinformation had to be made
peace by peace. Automated bots could amplify certain messages, but

(19:10):
countries like Russia needed to build troll farms operations using
dozens or hundreds of people to write fake posts, sometimes
in halting English. The disinformation the troll farms could spread
was limited. Goalaxy's technology has the potential to upend the
influence business. Just as artificial intelligence can help American high

(19:34):
school students instantly write out hard to tell they are
fake papers for their classes, foreign governments can use the
new technology to create far more believable propaganda on a
far greater scale. According to the documents, Goalaxy's new technology
has the promise to automatically track broad swings in public opinion,

(19:57):
as well as the arguments of specific influential individuals. Goalaxy's
public facing platform, according to its website, has begun using
deep Seek, an advanced artificial intelligence model developed by a
Chinese company. Goalaxy can quickly craft responses that reinforce the

(20:18):
Chinese government's views and counter opposing arguments. Once put into use,
such posts would drown out organic debate with propaganda. The
company can collect data from an array of Chinese and
Western social media companies. According to the documents, it brings
in tens of millions of pieces of data, including posts

(20:42):
and user dates from Wybot, a popular social media platform,
one point eight million articles per day from we Chat,
for million social media posts from x and ten thousand
Facebook posts, all to amass and refine profiles on individuals.
The company is searching for political commentary that bolster's views

(21:05):
that Beijing supports. It also develops messaging to counter opinions
the Chinese Communist Party is trying to stamp out that
has included criticism of China's COVID policies, opposition to China's
increasing control over Hong Kong, and support for the ruling
party of Taiwan. According to the internal company documents, go

(21:28):
Pro already possesses the ability to be aware of political situations,
target in real time, create high quality content, and perform
rapid counter attacks, the company says, adding that the new
system has already produced certain political effects in relevant state departments.
The company, according to documents, has done work for China's intelligence,

(21:52):
including the Ministry of State Security, the country's main spy agency,
and internal security agencies. For officials say that American spy
agencies had information confirming those partnerships. The company's work, according
to current and former American officials, is aligned with China's

(22:12):
national security strategy, an assessment that documents buttress. Evoking a
phrase used by Mao Zedong, The company suggests that its
technology will be essential to help China prevail over the West.
The go pro system, the company says, will become a
technological platform that can truly tell China's story, amplify China's voice,

(22:39):
and expand China's influence, as well as providing comprehensive technological
support to quickly make the easterly wind overpowering the westerly
wind a reality. That's a quote. James Movennan, who has
studied Chinese information operations, said that Goalaxy has had been

(23:00):
gathering huge amounts of data on potential targets of the
Chinese state and using artificial intelligence to develop new propaganda tools.
Goalaxy is an incredibly important company, said mister Mulvenon, who
is also the chief intelligence officer at Premier Consulting, which
analyzes risks for businesses in China. Quote. It is deeply

(23:23):
tied into Chinese the Taiinese government's security apparatus and the military.
They are building new tools that are proposing to do
a better job at information operations unquote. Golaxy appears to
have focused most of its efforts on collecting information on
the Chinese population, as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan,

(23:47):
but it claims in a document that it has assembled
virtual profiles on one hundred seventeen current and former members
of Congress, including representatives Byron Donald's of Florida, Chip Roy
of Texas, and Andy Biggs of Arizona. All of the
representatives listed in the documents obtained by the Vanderbilt researchers

(24:09):
were Republicans, though it is likely that the firm also
collected information on Democrats. In addition, according to the documents,
Galaxy tracks and collects information on more than two thousand
American political and public figures, four thousand right wing influencers
and supporters of President Trump, in addition to journalists, scholars,

(24:32):
and entrepreneurs. The documents do not show how detailed the
data on American politicians might be, nor does Galaxy say
what it's doing with the information, but US officials have
long claimed that China tracks American politicians policy positions on
issues of importance to Beijing. Former US officials said that

(24:55):
while China tried to meddle in some local elections in
twenty twenty four or, it stayed largely on the sidelines
of the presidential vote, and the US saw no evidence
that Goalaxy conducted influence operations in the United States. The
Chinese government may not direct Galaxy's day to day activities,
but current and former officials say there is little doubt

(25:19):
that the firm's information operations are endorsed by the Chinese
government and that the Chinese Communist Party has ultimate control
over the firm. Sugan, a state controlled supercomputing company that
is on the US government's export blacklist, is an investor,
and Goalaxy was founded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences,

(25:41):
a state owned institution. According to Goalaxy's website and the documents,
the company publicly says they are developing generative AI capabilities
for national strategic missions, said Jimmy Goodrich, a China researcher
and senior advisor to the RAND Corporation for Technology analysis.
Quote this is an extension of a state institution unquote.

(26:07):
In a statement, Golaxy said that it was a quote
purely independent commercial enterprise that is not affiliated with any
government agency or organization unquote. During China's COVID lockdown, Goalaxy
tried to amplify Elon Musk's praise of the Chinese government's
pandemic policies to rebut Western criticism and boost public support

(26:31):
for Beijing's zero COVID policy. According to the documents, those
efforts used fake Facebook accounts, much like Russian troll farms,
It did not seem to have made much difference. Public
opposition eventually forced the Chinese government to change its policy.
The firm also tracked people in Hong Kong as it

(26:52):
sought to counter opposition to the twenty twenty Hong Kong
National Security Law. According to the documents, Galaxy dentified some
one hundred eighty thousand different Twitter accounts, then pushed out
narratives that minimized the public's dissent over the law, which
expanded Chinese control of Hong Kong and eroded civil rights

(27:14):
for China. The next intensive information battle came in the
twenty twenty four Taiwanese election, when China sought to undermine
Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party, which Beijing saw as pro independents.
In December twenty twenty three, Golaxy recommended specific messages that
the company or others could push to exploit differences in

(27:37):
Taiwanese public opinion. According to the documents, the effort appeared
to be a way to mobilize resources to mount specific
information campaigns. According to the documents, it is not clear
from the documents whether Golaxy used go pro to automatically
generate and distribute targeted propaganda. Former officials and experts were

(27:59):
divided over whether the effort was effective. The Democratic Progressive
Party remains in control, but its position was weakened. The
documents also briefly mentioned that the firm collected information about
US Navy warships near Taiwan, but there are no details
and the information could simply have been called from social
media and other data available to the public. The question

(28:23):
is whether the Chinese can actually do the things they
say they can. Mister Malvenon said information operations are harder
than they sound. There are not a lot of good
examples of success. That's a quote. Now a story headlined
a zoo in Denmark, What's to feed your pets to

(28:44):
its predators? It's by Alexa Roeblisgill and Emily Anthus, a
zoo in Denmark is asking pet owners to donate their
animal companions, their guinea pigs, rabbits, chickens and eve, and
small horses to feed its predators. In a Facebook post

(29:05):
last Thursday, the Allborg Zoo noted that it welcomed animals that,
regardless of circumstance, might be nearing the end of their lives.
These animals would be gently euthanized by trained employees and
then used as food for the zoo's predators. Like its
European links, the zoo notes on its website lions and

(29:26):
tigers are also part of the zoo's predator exhibits. The
donations would help the zoo mimic the natural food chain
by feeding whole prey to its predators, the post said,
quoting this way nothing goes to waste and we ensure
natural behavior, nutrition and well being for our predators. The

(29:49):
post linked to the zoo's website, which described the process
for donating horses as food, quoting our needs vary throughout
the year, and there may be a way to the
site explains for horses, certain conditions must be met, including
the horse not having recently been treated for an illness.

(30:09):
The horse will be delivered alive to All Board Zoo,
where the horse will be euthanized by a zoo keeper
and a veterinarian and then slaughtered. The zoo website says
the zoo also accepts chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs during
weekdays between ten am and one pm, but no more
than four at a time. That's a quote. The Facebook

(30:31):
post attracted swift backlash, with one commenter describing a terrible
trend of indifference with animals in Denmark. Another commenter wrote
that feeding pets is absolutely unacceptable. In an email press statement,
pa Neilson, a spokeswoman for All Board Zoo, said that
for many years its employees have fed our carnivores with

(30:53):
smaller livestock. Animals that need to be euthanized for various
reasons can be of use in this way. She added,
many of our guests and partners appreciate the opportunity to contribute.
Sandrine Camou, a spokeswoman for the European Association of Zoos
and Aquarium of which the Auborg Zoo is a member,

(31:14):
said in an email that zoos typically purchase meat for
their animals from licensed suppliers, similar to how people buy
meat from a butcher, but where alternative sources of prey,
such as roadkill, become available. Miss Camu added zoos may
consider using these as feed for carnivores, provided all welfare

(31:35):
and legal conditions are met. While such cases are rare
and handled with great care, using them for feeding avoids
unnecessary waste and supports a more naturalistic feeding regime for predators,
Miss Camu added. Other commenters on Facebook praised the initiative
and even requested more details about how to donate their animals.

(32:00):
Described her own experience donating a rabbit as a super
nice and professional experience. Signi Flyholme, who lives in Denmark
and has visited Alborg Zoo for the past forty years,
said that the social media post made her want to
donate her horse she could make a difference by being

(32:21):
used as food. Miss Fleckholm said she is a very
loved horse. Miss Fleholm said her horse it needed to
be put down because the cartilage in its hoofs was
turning into bone, but the horse, which weighed over two
thousand pounds, was too big for the zoo, she said. Instead,

(32:42):
Miss Flholme decided to donate her horse to a different
organization that will use the animal for biofuel or fertilizer production.
It's not the first time Denmark's zoos have come under
fire for their unvarnished approach to death. Twenty fourteen, the
Copenhagen Zoo euthanized a healthy, young giraffe named Marius because

(33:06):
his genes were already well represented among the captive giraffes.
The zoo invited members of the public to watch the
giraffe's autopsy as an educational opportunity, and then fed Marius's
remains to some of its big cats, including its lions.
Weeks later, the zoo euthanized four of those lions, two

(33:27):
cubs and their parents. The zoo said the lions were
killed to prevent the male lion from breeding with his
daughters and to prevent a newly arrived young male lion
from attacking the cubs. The deaths prompted an outcry from
animal rights activists, but also reflected a transatlantic philosophical divide

(33:48):
towards zoo management. American zoos often lean heavily on contraception
to prevent zoo populations from booming, whereas European zoos often
allow their animals to breed, arguing that it is good
for the animals to be able to engage in these
natural behaviors, and later euthanize surplus animals. Our next story

(34:12):
has headlined Kennedy's crusade against food safety rule threatens supplement industry.
It's by Jane Black. In his first weeks as Health Secretary,
Robert F. Kennedy Junior declared war on an obscure regulatory
process that many argue has been exploited by the food
industry for decades. The pathway allows companies to introduce new

(34:36):
ingredients or chemicals into food products without a Food and
Drug Administration review, as long as they self certify them
as generally Recognized as Safe or GROS for short. The
designation has allowed new chemicals to be viewed as innocent

(34:57):
until proven guilty, leading to thousands of ingredients flooding the
American food system. Mister Kennedy said at his confirmation hearing
in January. It needs to end, and I believe I'm
the one person who's able to end it, he added.
In March, mister Kennedy directed the Food and Drug Administration
to revisit the GRAS rule, describing it as a loophole

(35:20):
that needed to be eliminated. Food companies and ultra processed
snacks may be the target of mister kennedy'sire, but the
elimination of GRAS would also be a significant setback for
the growing, multi billion dollars supplement industry, which has regularly
used the pathway to quickly bring new ingredients to market

(35:41):
with little oversight. Mister Kennedy's announcement has rattled the industry,
prompting concerned calls from supplement makers and intense lobbying in
Washington by the trade associations that represent them. Since March,
leaders of four dietary supplement trade as associations have meant
multiple times with FDA officials to lobby the agency on

(36:05):
the designation's benefits. Supplement makers are worried they could become
collateral damage in a campaign targeting unhealthy foods. Kennedy and
his team may not have fully appreciated how it could
end up limiting consumer choice in supplements, something that runs
counter to their broader platform, said Duffy McKay, a senior

(36:29):
vice president of dietary supplements at the Consumer Healthcare Products Association.
A trade group, and mister Kennedy has indeed been an
avid supporter of supplements. In the lead up to the
twenty twenty four presidential election, he promised to end what
he called the aggressive suppression of vitamins and dietary supplements,

(36:50):
among other wellness products. Many of those close to the
Health Secretary have strong ties to the supplement industry. Doctor
Mark Hyman, a long time time friend, sells a variety
of supplements on his website CALLI Means, and adviser to
mister Kennedy, co founded Truemed, a company that helps people
buy supplements and other health products with pre tax money.

(37:15):
What happens next is unclear, but the fight highlights attention
inherent in mister Kennedy's movement as it wields power in Washington,
the desire to restrain what it sees as predatory food
and health care industries while easing the government's gatekeeping power
over alternative health practices. The GRIS designation was introduced as

(37:40):
part of the Food Additives Amendment of nineteen fifty eight,
which Congress passed to restore public confidence in food safety.
The amendment required companies to receive FDA approval before they
could use any new ingredients in food, but to keep
agency regulators from being overwhelmed, it permitted manufacturers to self

(38:02):
certify common ingredients such as vinegar or baking soda as safe.
As food processing became more common and complex, the designation
became a way to fast track many of the chemicals
and ingredients used in packaged foods. According to an analysis
by the advocacy nonprofit Environmental Working Group, almost ninety nine

(38:24):
percent of chemicals introduced in foods since two thousand have
been self certified using GROS. The loophole swallowed the rule,
said Tom Kneltner, a food safety advocate who has studied
the designation for the supplement industry, it provided a workaround
of a different sort. The Dietary Supplement Health and Education

(38:47):
Act of nineteen ninety four requires supplement companies to formally
notify the FDA about any new dietary ingredient added to
a supplement and demonstrate that it can reasonably be expected
to be safe. The process takes several months and requires
filing documents that become available to the public for review.

(39:09):
It is not technically binding. The FDA could raise questions
about a product, and it could still go to market.
But far simpler for supplement companies is to use their
route available to food companies by adding new ingredients to
a food product like a health shake and self certifying
them as safe using GRAS. Once that food product is

(39:31):
on the market, the company can legally and quickly add
the ingredient to a supplement. This process provides a way
for supplement companies to routinely and systematically bypass the official
process for clearing new supplement ingredients. Mister Neltner said companies
can notify the FDA of a new ingredient they've self certified.

(39:54):
Some prefer their ingredients undergo FDA review, but doing so
is voluntary and the FDA raises few questions during the
process compared with during the more stringent dietary notice process.
Steve Mister, the chief executive of the Council for Responsible Nutrition,
a dietary supplement trade association, said the process eliminated guesswork

(40:18):
from manufacturers. Companies weren't trying to evade oversight, he said,
but it provided the certainty and predictability that allows them
to plan. In practice, supplement makers do sometimes withdraw GRAS
notices of a new ingredient and then bring them to
market anyway. The Environmental Defense Fund reviewed forty six such

(40:42):
notices submitted between twenty fourteen and twenty twenty one and
found roughly one quarter of the ingredients were later included
in supplements. In one more extreme case, the maker of
the memory supplement prevagen Quincy Bioscience submitted a GRAS notice
for appiquorin, a synthetic version of a protein found in jellyfish.

(41:08):
The company had already failed twice to obtain an FDA
green light through the traditional process for supplements, during which
the agency expressed significant concerns through gros Quincy Bioscience self
certified Apaquorin as safe after putting it in a drink
called neuroshake, and submitted a voluntary notice. When the FDA

(41:32):
reportedly raised questions once again, the company withdrew the notice.
Apaquorin remains on the market to this day. The company
did not respond to a request for comment. We describe
it as the wild West, said Jensen Jose, the Regulatory
Council at the Center for Science in the Public Interest,

(41:54):
a food advocacy group in Washington. Quote, there's a sheriff,
There's not much he can do. Mister Kennedy hasn't announced
his next steps on the pathway, and the Department of
Health and Human Services did not respond to questions about
a timeline or potential accommodations for supplement makers. This may

(42:15):
be a good litmus test for how serious this administration
is about addressing the problems with gras, said Melanie Benisch,
the vice president for Government Affairs at the Environmental Working Group.
Supplement industry representatives said they were open to strengthening the rule.
Mister Mister's Trade Group, for example, has suggested a public

(42:39):
listing of new dietary supplements and their ingredients so the
FDA knows what is on the market, and several trade
associations for supplement makers have called for additional funding to
support agency enforcement of the current laws regulating supplements, a
challenging task given the administration's recent to the agency. Food

(43:02):
safety advocates would like Congress to go further and overhaul
the law that established the designation, or at least close
the pathway for food companies and supplement makers. At a minimum,
they want companies to inform the FDA of any new
self certified ingredients so the agency can confirm the chemical's

(43:23):
use is generally recognized as safe and make public any concerns.
In Congress, two Democratic senators this month introduced a bill
that would reshape GROS, essentially eliminating self certification and mandating
that any ingredients previously affirmed using the designation be submitted

(43:43):
for government review. A companion bill will soon be introduced
in the House. Ms. Benisch said the broader point was clear.
Gras should not exist as a backdoor to bring supplements
into the marketplace, especially when they don't have adequate safety testing.
That's a quote. Now a story headlined how Louisiana built

(44:08):
Trump's busiest deportation hub. It's by Brent McDonald, Campbell Robertson,
Zach Levitt, and Albert's son. Brent McDonald and Campbell Robertson
traveled to five cities across rural Louisiana to observe how
ice detainees were being moved around the state. Alexandria International

(44:30):
Airport has the feel of a small commercial airfield, with
a shop selling coffee and snacks and panoramic windows overlooking
the runways where a dozen American and Delta flights take
off in land. On a typical day, a few hundred
yards from the passenger gates, though is a far busier
patch of tarmac. This is where Badar Khan Suri arrived

(44:53):
on an afternoon in March. Mister Suri, an Indian citizen
who has a visa to do research Georgetown University, was
marched off the plane in handcuffs and leg shackles and
into a seventy thousand square foot detention center known officially
as the Alexandria Staging Facility. The State Department had sought

(45:15):
the deportation of mister Suri, asserting that his presence in
the country compromised a compelling US foreign policy interest. Mister
Suri's wife, a Palestinian American, had drawn the attention of
pro Israel activists for her sharp criticism of Israel on
social media and for her father's former role as a

(45:36):
government official in Gaza, and so he found himself among
thousands of foreign nationals flown to Alexandria, Louisiana after being
taken into federal custody as part of the Trump administration's
sprawling immigration crackdown. No airport has become more crucial to
carrying out President Trump's pledge to deport millions of immigrants

(46:00):
you won't even believe that something like that can exist,
mister Suri forty one said in a recent interview, recalling
days spent in windowless rooms with hundreds of men disconnected
from the outside world and not knowing where they would
be taken next. Since the beginning of the second Trump administration,

(46:21):
more than twenty one thousand people taken into custody by
US immigration and Customs enforcement agents have passed through the
Alexandria Detention Facility. More deportation flights have taken off from
there than from any other place in the United States,
and more domestic ice flights have passed through there than

(46:41):
anywhere else, according to a widely cited database of ice flights.
The database, verified by Times reporters, is maintained by Tom Cartwright,
a refugee advocate with the immigrant rights group Witness at
the Border. With eight other detention centers within one hundred
miles of alexand Andrea and more detainees than any state

(47:02):
but Texas, Louisiana has emerged as the busiest axis of
the national deportation machine that the Trump administration has been
trying to build at breakneck speed since the nineteen eighties.
An immigration detention system has been growing in the state,
backed by a succession of presidential administrations aiming to hold

(47:25):
and in many cases expel thousands of people who were
in the country illegally. But the scale of the system
expanded enormously after mister Trump came into the White House
in twenty seventeen and pledged a major expansion of immigrant enforcement.
A cluster of Louisiana jails and prisons, once the backbone

(47:47):
of rural towns like the mills or factories of years passed,
were reborn as low cost detention centers for ICE. Mister
Trump reclaimed this system when he returned to the President's action,
and his administration immediately put it into overdrive. With tens
of billions of dollars in additional funding now directed toward ICE,

(48:10):
Louisiana is at the leading edge of an expansive and
aggressive nationwide effort to expel immigrants, far beyond the actions
taken during the first Trump administration. Indeed, the Airport Hub,
with its network of surrounding detention centers, is in many
ways a template for what the head of ICE, todd Lyons,

(48:31):
has said. The agency must become a logistics juggernaut like
Amazon or FedEx, but with human beings. The credo that
the government should be run like a corporation is not new,
and ICE has for many years contracted with private corrections
companies and welcomed private sector expertise, even hiring mckinzian Company,

(48:53):
the consulting firm, for an organizational makeover. But the logistics
operations behind this business minded approach to detentions and deportations
are now front and center. We need to be better
about removing those individuals who have been lawfully ordered out
of the country in a safe, efficient manner, mister Lyons

(49:15):
said in an April interview with the Boston News Station,
reiterating his belief that ICE should be run like a corporation.
That's a quote, but he said, we can't trade innovation
and efficiency for how we treat the people in our custody.
Mister Lyons wasn't the first ICE official to see FedEx

(49:36):
as a model for immigration detentions and deportations. More than
a decade earlier, before the Airport Detention Center was even open,
the ICE field office in New Orleans was patterning its
system after FedEx, specifically its hub and spoke model, in
which FedEx packages are routed through its centralized Memphis hub, sorted,

(49:56):
and then distributed outward. People taken and into ICE custody
in Louisiana or one of four nearby states would be
flown or bussed to central Louisiana and then sent on
to whichever detention facility in the region had space. But
it was still expensive and complicated to carry out the
last leg, deporting people on a steakhouse cocktail napkin, as

(50:21):
one ICE official would recall, A plan was sketched out.
The air Force base in Alexandria had shut down in
nineteen ninety two, and the state was looking to make
use of the infrastructure beyond Alexandria International Airport, which opened
on the site a year later. Why not build a
detention center on the tarmac and put people on deportation

(50:43):
flights right there. In twenty fourteen, the Alexandria Staging Facility
opened under the management of the private prison company Geo Group.
There were marching bands and appearances from politicians, including then
US Senator Mary Landrew, democrat of Luis Louisiana, who helped
cut the ribbon with its four hundred beds right next

(51:05):
to a runway, The seventy two hour holding facility is
the only one of its kind. A matter of pride
for ICE officials and local officials alike. Imagine this as
a hub. They go, pick people up, bring them here,
and then sort them out, said Ralph Hennessy, the executive
director of the Economic Development organization that oversees the former

(51:26):
Air Force based property. He said in a recent interview
that he understood there was controversy around ICE's ramped up
deportation efforts, but that the agency was simply carrying out
the law. It's got to happen somewhere, he said. Louisiana
locks up more people per capita than nearly any other

(51:47):
US state, and unlike other states, a majority of Louisiana's
prisoners are held in local jails, with the state paying
local sheriffs a daily rate per inmate that can be lucrative,
but managing jails is difficult. As the prison population grew
in the nineteen nineties and two thousands, some sheriffs began

(52:08):
outsourcing state prisoners to private companies, including Geogroup and LaSalle Corrections.
In twenty seventeen, the state's governor, John Bell Edwards, a Democrat,
successfully pushed through legislation aimed at reducing the prison population,
and the number of state prisoners fell by more than
eight thousand over the next five years. At the same time,

(52:32):
immigration arrests were ramping up sharply under the first Trump administration,
and ICE needed thousands more beds for private corrections companies
in Louisiana, where the demand for state prison space was falling.
This presented a new revenue opportunity at just the right time.
The immigration crackdown was prompting resistance elsewhere, including bands and

(52:55):
other states. On privately run immigration detention centers in the
wad Louisiana, there was hardly any friction. This remains true
with cheap labor and real estate. The daily cost of
holding an ICE detainee in the region is roughly a
third of the average daily cost elsewhere. The highest court

(53:16):
in the region, the Federal Appeals Court, based in New Orleans,
is particularly Trump friendly, and the state's top elected officials,
all of whom are Republicans, have put up no opposition.
In the rural parts of the state where the detention
centers are, local officials from both parties welcome the jobs
the center's bring. Immigration lawyers, however, point out that the

(53:40):
remote locations of the centers mean meetings with clients require
hours of driving. Between twenty sixteen and twenty twenty, as
jails and prisons around the state were repurposed into federal
detention centers, the number of beds for ice detainees in
Louisiana more than tripled, and very little had to be

(54:02):
built same private prison companies, a lot of the same staff,
same infrastructure, same buildings, said Sarah Ducker, a lawyer at
the nonprofit organization Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and a
co author of a twenty twenty four report on Louisiana's
detention centers. The Richwood Correctional Center, which is managed by

(54:22):
LaSalle Corrections, as one such location. Local prison rather turned
ice detention center. Once a farming community, Richwood, Louisiana, is
a town of three thousand, eight hundred people, many of
them older and living on fixed incomes. When it housed
state prisoners, the correctional center was the source of local

(54:43):
employment and troubling headlines. In twenty fifteen, one inmate was
killed by another, who in turn died after being beaten
by corrections officers. In twenty nineteen, two supervisors pleaded guilty
to a cover up after officers lined up, handcuffed inmates
and pepper sprayed them in the face. That same year,

(55:05):
Lasal entered a contract to hold a minimum of six
hundred seventy seven immigrant detainees. Within months, a Cuban man
being held in solitary confinement died by suicide. The mayor
of Richwood, Gerald Brown, a Democrat in a town where
more than ninety percent of voters cast ballots for Kamala Harris,

(55:26):
said he understood the concerns about immigrant detention, but he
said the people running the Richwood facility became more engaged
with the local community after the site transitioned to an
ice detention center, taking part in town parades and inviting
him to visit the facility. The employees there earned significantly
higher wages than before, he said, and the fees that

(55:50):
Lasal Corrections paid to the town to operate the prison
more than tripled to nearly half a million dollars annually.
The detention center is now the largest source of annual
revenue in Richwood's one point seven million dollar budget. We've
been able to invest a lot more in our police department,
mister Brown said. The Town hired more officers, bought more

(56:14):
police cars, and outfitted the vehicles with new technology. It
opened up a lot of things. Also in Today's New
York Times, in Business, one hundred billion dollar Apple pledge.
President Trump and Tim Cook announced the tech giants added
US investment from the Oval Office. Top chef for welders.

(56:37):
The reality shows unusual aim elevating US manufacturing and increasing
the appeal of the skilled trades. In international news, statue
divides French Town. An effort to remove a monument to
a general accused of torture reignites a debate about colonialism.

(57:01):
This concludes the reading of The New York Times for today.
Your reader for today has been Scott Johnson. If you
have any questions, comments, or suggestions concerning this program, please
feel free to call us at eight five nine four
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two two six three nine zero. Thank you for listening,

(57:25):
and i'll please stay tuned for continued programming on Radio
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