C.D.C. Loses Top Officials, and Why Israeli Reservists Aren’t Showing Up for Duty

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0:33From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Thursday, August 28th. Here's what we're covering.

0:44Over the past 24 hours, the country's top public health agency, the CDC, has been thrown into turmoil as the White House fired its director and multiple top leaders there quit en masse. Tension had been building at the agency for days, as the director, Susan Menares, clashed with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over his stance on vaccines, which he has a long history of sowing doubt about. Yesterday afternoon, things came to a head when the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, posted on social media that Menares was, quote, no longer the director, even though her lawyers said she hadn't been fired and wouldn't resign.

1:25Then, after 9 p.m., the White House put out a statement saying Menardez had been terminated and that she was not aligned with, quote, the president's agenda of making America healthy again. For the moment, Menardez is still refusing to step down. In a statement, her lawyers said that the country's public health institutions are being systematically dismantled and that, quote, the attack on Dr. Menardez is a warning to every American. Our evidence-based systems are being undermined from within. Beyond the showdown with Menardez, four other senior officials at the CDC resigned yesterday, including top vaccine experts and the CDC's chief medical officer.

2:06Together, they led the agency's response to a wide range of public health threats, including anthrax, Mpox, swine flu, COVID, and the opioid crisis. Meanwhile, the dramatic shakeup at the CDC came on the same day that the federal government put new restrictions on who can get this year's COVID vaccines over the objections of several national medical groups. Until now, all Americans six months or older were eligible to get vaccinated. Going forward, people will have to fall into one of three categories. They'll have to be over 65 or under 18, but with a medical provider's approval. Or they'll need to have at least one pre-existing condition that puts them at risk.

3:00In Minneapolis last night, thousands of mourners gathered after two children were killed and more than a dozen were injured in a mass shooting at a Catholic school. I was like two seats away from the stained glass windows. So they were like, the shots were like right next to me. Survivors told local news that the attack happened as kids and teachers had gathered for the first mass of the year at Annunciation Catholic Church, which also operates a pre-K to 8th grade school. I just ran under the pew, and then I covered my head. My friend saved me, though, because he laid on top of me, but he got hit in the back.

3:37Police say the shooter, who had a rifle, shotgun, and pistol, barricaded the church doors before opening fire through the windows. The children who were killed were 8 and 10 years old, and many others were rushed to the hospital. Authorities identified the attacker as 23-year-old Robin Westman and said she died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Westman is believed to have once been a student at Annunciation, and her mother had worked at the church before retiring. We don't have a motive at this time. Obviously, we're open to any possibilities at all. Officials are still investigating what led up to the attack, including looking into videos Westman had posted online.

4:15She'd shared dark and violent diary entries and seem to be fixated on guns, violence, and school shooters. We've got more guns in this country than we have people. And we can't just say that this shouldn't happen again and then allow it to happen again and again beyond that. At a press conference, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Fry called the shooting senseless. He also tried to head off rhetoric from conservative activists who'd quickly seized on the shooter's gender identity to try and portray transgender people as violent or mentally ill. According to court documents, Westman legally changed her name a few years ago because she, quote, identified as female.

4:57We should not be operating out of a place of hate for anyone. We should be operating from a place of love for our kids. Kids died today. This needs to be about them. Following the shooting, President Trump ordered flags across the country to be flown at half-staff.

5:25Israel is currently planning a massive attack on Gaza City. They say that they're going to need at least 60 ,000 additional soldiers. But my colleagues and I have heard over and over again that many soldiers are no longer able or willing to show up. My colleague Aaron Boxerman is a reporter in the Times-Jerusalem Bureau. He says the Israeli military hasn't shared firm numbers about the scale of the issue, and several reservists the Times talked with said their units are still highly motivated to keep fighting. But around a dozen other officers and soldiers described their units as exhausted, and some said that 40 to 50 percent of the troops in their units aren't showing up, as Israel's devastating war in Gaza nears the two-year mark.

6:11Israel's army is sort of unusual in the sense that the base of it, up to two-thirds, according to some estimates, are not professional soldiers. They're reservists who have civilian lives, who are not meant to be full-time soldiers. But many of them say that they've spent many hundreds of days in uniform in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syria, and in the West Bank. That means time away from their families, time away from work, time away from school. And that's been trying for them and has also caused this attrition that we're starting to see in the ranks of the Israeli military. There's another factor at play as well.

6:48A small but growing minority of soldiers say that they are no longer willing to go back and serve in Gaza because they believe that the war has become immoral. I spoke to one captain in the reserves who was sentenced to 25 days in a military prison because he refused to mobilize for another round of duty. He told me that he believed that the war was endangering the remaining Israeli and foreign hostages in Gaza, that it was endangering Palestinian civilians, and that it was simply no longer a just war. And so we started to see not just exhaustion over the war, although I think that is still the dominant feeling.

7:27But we've also started to see discontent and even dissent inside the ranks over how the war is being fought and perhaps its ultimate goal.

7:46And finally, across the U.S., there's been a lot of talk about how robots may one day replace people in a lot of jobs. But the Times has been looking at how, in some cases, bringing in a robot can help companies keep their workers, specifically in warehouse and factory jobs. In those industries, companies say hiring and retaining workers is one of their top challenges. The work can be grueling. Injury rates can be high. Some of the jobs have a turnover rate of 100%, leaving managers constantly trying to find and train new employees. But where factories have brought in robots, which they can rent in some cases for about$23 an hour, they specialize in the kind of back-breaking, repetitive tasks that can burn out and injure human workers.

8:33Things like stacking boxes, sorting parts, or feeding material into machines. And staffers may be more likely to stay at a job if you spare them the worst parts of the work. One company in Illinois that makes detergent pods told the Times that after renting three robots, it was able to reassign all the workers who normally would have been stacking boxes on pallets. Some were promoted to more technical jobs with higher pay. The founder of a startup aimed at building and renting out a fleet of robots said, quote, it would be more contentious if robots start taking jobs that people actually like doing.

9:13Those are the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow with the latest updates and the Friday News Quiz.