On today’s episode of the 5 Things podcast: Congress returns to fight over Ukraine aid and more
Congress reporter Candy Woodall breaks it all down. Plus, a Russian official warns Ukraine not to provoke WWIII, Elon Musk will buy Twitter, reporter Jordan Mendoza talks about the failed attempt to pull off a ‘plane swap’ and the Supreme Court hears oral arguments.
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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
Taylor Wilson:
Buenos dias. I’m Taylor Wilson and this is 5 Things you need to know Tuesday, the 26th of April 2022. Today, what Congress is focusing on after a return from recess. Plus Elon Musk is buying Twitter, and more.
Here are some of the top headlines:
- Beijing is conducting mass COVID-19 testing today for most of its 21 million people. Elsewhere, Shanghai remains largely under lockdown, amid China’s largest COVID outbreak since 2020.
- Israeli tanks fired into Southern Lebanon yesterday in response to a rocket fired from the country. The incident comes amid rising tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in recent weeks.
- And today marks 36 years since the worst nuclear disaster in history. A reactor at the Chernobyl power station in Ukraine was destroyed in an explosion. At least 28 people were killed instantly, though thousands more have died from cancer as a result of radiation that spread after.
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Spring break is over. Congress returns this week from recess, with all kinds of unresolved issues to tackle. Among them, how to help Ukraine, immigration at the Southern border, and yes, still COVID-19. Congress reporter Candy Woodall has more.
Candy Woodall:
There are a few things lawmakers want to address when they return from spring recess on Tuesday. One is pandemic relief money, another is Ukraine aid, and another is immigration, or the issues around Title 42. Lawmakers were unable to pass a bipartisan deal to provide the White House with 10 billion in pandemic relief money. Those talks fell apart on the Senate side. They’ll go back to the drawing board when lawmakers return this week. The White House is also asking for 800 million more in Ukraine aid. And those talks could be complicated because lawmakers on the right are trying to add amendments to force vulnerable Democrats to make a decision on Title 42. There’s no immediate deal in sight on any of these issues, and it’s complicated more by the fact that this is a midterm year. And the legislative clock is running out to the point that lawmakers will soon start focusing on their reelection campaigns.
Taylor Wilson:
Check out Candy’s full story in today’s episode description.
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Four people were killed and nine more injured yesterday in Ukraine’s Donbas region, as Russia shelled Donetsk. And the governor of Luhansk says Russia has shelled civilians 17 times in the past 24 hours. Russia has also reportedly taken over the city of Kreminna in Luhansk region. Still, Ukrainian officials say their forces have repelled six attacks over the past 24 across the Donbas. The Eastern industrial region made up of both Luhansk and Donetsk.
Meanwhile, the US this week approved a $165 million ammunition sale to Ukraine, along with $300 million in funding for additional supplies. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who visited Kyiv with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, said the US wants Ukraine to remain independent and also wants to see Russia weakened.
Lloyd Austin:
We want to see Ukraine remain a sovereign country, a democratic country, able to protect its sovereign territory. We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.
Taylor Wilson:
Austin’s remarks appear to show a shift in US strategic goals, since Washington earlier said the goal of American military aid was to help Ukraine win and to defend Ukraine’s NATO neighbors against Russian threats. In an apparent response to Austin, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said that Russia has a “feeling that the West wants Ukraine to continue to fight, and as it seems to them, we’re out. Exhaust the Russian army and the Russian military industrial war complex. This is an illusion.” Lavrov added that weapons supplied by Western countries will be a target. He also warned yesterday that Ukraine risks provoking World War III. He said he would not want to see risks of a nuclear confrontation, “artificially inflated now, when the risks are rather significant.”
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Elon Musk will buy Twitter. The Tesla CEO and billionaire will acquire the social media giant in a deal worth $44 billion. Once complete later this year, Twitter will become a private company. Musk tweeted, “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy. And Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.” Shares of Twitter rose more than 5% in afternoon trading yesterday. Analyst at investment firm Wedbush, Dan Ives, has more on the move.
Dan Ives:
Musk owning Twitter continues to be a bit of a head scratcher, I think to many, especially trading in his Tesla stock, about 10% of it, for Twitter. It starts off with freedom of speech. I think that’s really been the starter for going after Twitter, but ultimately it’s really trying to shake up social media. I mean, he feels like it’s a fragmented platform. He could significantly improve it, but there’s growth challenges ahead.
Twitter’s been an underperforming platform for the last decade and this is definitely Musk betting 20% of his net worth on Twitter, definitely a risky move. The Twitter board started off looking at this as almost Musk antics. They weren’t even considering the bid. I’d say Wall Street assigning a 3 to 5% chance that it was even real. But ultimately, Musk detailed the financing, showed it was real. The board enacted a poison pill, a defensive measure, trying to really give them time to look for a second bidder or a white knight. That white knight never came. They were at the altar empty-handed, which is why, ultimately, over the weekend, they had to sit down with Musk and try to hash out a deal.
Taylor Wilson:
The deal comes more than three months after Musk started buying Twitter shares, growing his stake from 5 to 9% at one point. It’s also been just months since founder, Jack Dorsey, stepped down as CEO. Dorsey tweeted his approval of Musk’s takeover yesterday, but he also said that, in principle, he does not believe anyone should own or run Twitter, since the platform wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company.
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Two pilots tried the first ever so-called “plane swap” over the weekend, but they were unsuccessful. Reporter Jordan Mendoza explains.
Jordan Mendoza:
So these two cousins, Luke Aikins and Andy Farrington, their goal was to do something that had never been done before in aviation history, and that was to do a plane swap. So what the goal was, was the two were going to fly up to a really high elevation and then put their plans into a nosedive. And once their plans were in that nosedive, they were going to jump out of the plane and basically skydive into each other’s plane. And not only that, they were going to skydive into each other’s plane, but they were going to jump into the plane and gain control of it and land the plane.
It doesn’t look like it was legal. It was something that, it was a crazy idea of Aikins that he once had and they ran with it. And so they attempted it, and it almost worked. It kind of worked, but it wasn’t a completely successful mission.
The FAA is investigating it because of one reason and that one of the plans malfunctioned. While the two pilots were in the air, one of the planes, the plane that Farrington was trying to get into, kind of spiraled out of control. It was going out of control and going at a rate that was nearly impossible for them to get into. Not only that, but it wasn’t safe for them to get into. So Farrington deployed his parachute and that’s why he wasn’t able to successfully complete the stunt.
Well, the FAA, obviously, it’s a malfunctioning plane, and so they’re going to investigate what happened to it, what caused it to malfunction, what caused it to spiral out of control. And another interesting thing about what the FAA is doing is they also said that this wasn’t… technically they weren’t granted permission to do this stunt. So on Friday, the FAA like denied a request for them to have permission to do this, or have an exemption to do this. So the FAA already said that they, this wasn’t a good idea and they weren’t going to grant the permission to do it, but obviously they did it anyways and it didn’t work out, but thankfully no one was injured or severely hurt.
If they’re investigating it, there may be some ends. And there may be some penalties that are going to be enforced on the pilots and on Red Bull. And that also might play into the factor of whether they try to do this again. Aikins, after the attempt, was talking on TV and he said, “We’re going to go back and figure this out.” And so it kind of alluded to the fact that they maybe want to try this again, and they’re going to see what went wrong and possibly fix it. But if the FAA is involved and it didn’t work the first time, that might get in the way of them ever trying this again.
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The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments today over President Joe Biden’s effort to suspend a Trump-era policy requiring asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases are reviewed. The appeal brings former President Donald Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy back in front of the justices. That’s only months after a majority said the Biden administration did not properly shut down the program and ordered immigration officials to reinstate it.
Thanks for listening to 5 Things. You can find us every morning of the week right here, wherever you’re listening, right now. Thanks to PJ Elliott for his great work on the show, and I’m back tomorrow with more of 5 Things, from USA TODAY.
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism