Reuters World News - Gaza aid pier, Trump’s DOJ plans and AI in soccer

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

The US completes a floating pier to deliver aid into Gaza. Former president Donald Trump plans to stack the US Department of Justice with loyalists if he makes a return to the White House. And English soccer teams use artificial intelligence to pinpoint future stars. Follow the Reuters Econ World podcast. Sign up for the Reuters Econ World newsletter here. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, the US completes a floating pier off a Gaza beach, but can it change age reality on the ground? Donald Trump's plan to stack the Department of Justice with loyalists if he returns to the White House, and how soccer teams in England are using AI to net future stars. It's Friday, May 17th. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes

every weekday. I'm Tara Oaks in Liverpool. The US has anchored its multi-million dollar floating pier to a Gaza beach to start the desperately needed flow of aid into the battered enclave. Now comes to hard part, actually getting this aid to the hundreds of thousands of Gazans facing an imminent famine. Michelle Nichols covers the UN. Michelle, what happens now or what is supposed to happen now? A thousand US troops involved in constructing and will be involved in operating this pier, which is costing about $320 million.

They are not allowed to set foot onshore in Gaza. That is a pledge that President Joe Biden has made. So the aid will get to the end of the pier, and then a third-party contractor will pick it up and drive it a short distance, and then a UN contracted third party will, it'll be offloaded onto their trucks, and then it'll be sent off throughout Gaza to wherever the UN thinks it's most needed at that point. The Israeli military will be providing security and logistics support for the peer. So one of the UN concerns has been maintaining its neutrality.

So they will not have any contact with the Israeli troops, and they will be a bit of a distance away from them. And what are the challenges of getting the aid to the Gazans themselves? So there's a lot of challenges that the UN has spoken about, which the US is now facing with, because they obviously don't want all this aid to just pile up on the shore when it comes off the pier. So some of the challenges that the UN faces every day in distributing aid in Gaza

is just the fact that they're operating in a war zone. It's very difficult. it's dangerous. There's been occasions where aid trucks will get looted. And then there's also, at the moment, a big problem with fuel. So the UN has said that while they welcome extra aid coming in via the maritime route and off the US-built pier, they said that this is no substitute for land access. Vladimir Putin, pledging the Russia-China Energy Partnership, will grow,

even further. The Russian president making those remarks from Harbin in China's northeast on the border the two countries share as he wraps up his state visit. Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping signed a joint statement on Thursday, welcoming a, quote, new era in the Moscow-Beijing relationship. Slovakia's interior minister, confirming that the suspect in the assassination attack, of the Prime Minister has been charged with attempted murder. Robert Vizzo remains in a serious but stable condition after he was shot multiple times.

French police reinforcements have started arriving in New Caledonia. It's part of an operation to regain control after rioting began earlier this week, when French lawmakers passed a bill that will allow French residents who have lived on the Pacific Island for 10 years to vote in provincial elections. Now, there have been a series of unprecedented and, frankly, unfounded attacks on the Justice Department. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland taking aim at House Republicans. The comments came after he rejected their request for audio recordings of a special

council interview with President Joe Biden. The DOJ has said that the Biden administration was using executive privilege and will not disclosed a president's interview with Special Counsel Robert Hurd over his retention of classified records. China is making a big move to shore up its housing market. Kamel Krimmins is here to explain more. Kamel, what exactly are they doing? Beijing is saying it will allow local governments to buy homes at what it describes as reasonable prices, so they'll step in to buy up unsold apartments.

It's unclear how much they will buy and how they will fund it. Local governments were already deep in debt in China and there's a huge quantity of unsold apartments out there. But the market is hoping that by stepping in to try and soak up some of that stock, Beijing can draw a line under its property crisis. You can hear more about the state of the Chinese economy next Wednesday when we launch our new weekly pod and newsletter, Econ World. The first episode is looking at protectionism and what it means for China.

You can sign up for the newsletter on roiders.com and keep an ear out for the first episode on the Reuters app or your favourite podcast player. Yesterday, we discussed Trump's plans to contest any election loss. Today, we have reporting about how Trump plans to politicize the Department of Justice, turning the nation's top law enforcement body into a political attack dog for conservative causes. Graham's lottery covers the Trump campaign. He and Justice Department reporters have been speaking with people involved in this planning.

Graham, walk us through this proposed overhaul. Essentially, there are two main themes. He wants to stack the Justice Department with loyalists who are unlikely to say no to even controversial orders. And he wants to essentially eliminate a lot of the independence that's currently enjoyed by the Department of Justice and particularly the FBI, which is a key component by really concentrating a lot of key decisions in the hands of administration loyalists rather than civil servants or career bureaucrats, as he might say. And how might this kind of overhaul transform the department? By modifying its structure, by stripping away a lot of the department's independence, by making it a more political body,

it'll give the administration more leeway to more effectively use the Department of Justice to pursue controversial or partisan causes that could involve and likely will involve radically changing the way the department places civil rights. So, for instance, we can expect a Trump Department of Justice to be less interested in protecting minority rights and more interested in protecting the rights of, for instance, white people or men. If that independence is taken away or curtailed to a significant degree, then it raises questions about whether the Department of Justice can really do its job. Why do Republicans feel such animosity towards these institutions? They feel that there's just been a lot of bias against them in terms of the way federal law enforcement directs its attention. The big examples would be the

FBI and DOJ probes into Trump's 2016 campaign with respect to the campaign's contacts with Russian officials, and just the degree to which the FBI and DOJ dedicate resources to investigating and prosecuting people who are involved in the January 6th attack on the Capitol. As AI becomes more and more part of our everyday lives, it's no surprise that the world of sport is looking for ways to utilize it. In London, the Heads of England's Football Association, that's footballers in soccer for our American listeners, are working with the national teams and ways to harness the power of artificial intelligence.

For the men's team, this summer's euros may be too soon to reap the benefits, but they're hopeful it could help England's future generations. Ian Akson on our London sports desk has been finding out more. Well, I think it's still at a very early stage of development, but last week, Gareth Southgate, the England manager, said that they are increasingly using AI. And at the moment, I think the Football Association, the people who oversee the game in England, are using it as part of their scouting data, their scouting report.

So they're trying to collate a lot of information that they have about hundreds, thousands of players at all levels of the game in England, and then putting that all together, crunching numbers, and then coming up with very easy to use data about individual players and their potential going forward. So it's not yet being used to pick the team, for example? Well, sadly not. I think this is much more at a grassroots level, I think looking further ahead to the future. But I guess at some point, technology is being used more and more in sport, more and more in football. It may even help inform those kind of decisions about who the best player is for which particular team you're playing in a tournament or which particular stage of a tournament that you're at. That's it for your Friday update.

We'll be back on Monday with our daily headline show. But before then, be sure to tune in for this weekend's special episode with everything you need to know, head of South Africa's election, as the country decides whether to hand another majority to the ruling party which has been in power since the end of apartheid 30 years ago. Listen out for that pod on Saturday. And to make sure you never miss an episode, subscribe on your favourite podcast player or download the Reuters app.