The Daily - Introducing The Headlines: May 22

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

Our new show brings you the biggest stories in about 10 minutes. It's the complement to The Daily you’ve been waiting for. This episode includes: A Group of 7 Summit Wrap-Up, with our chief White House correspondent, Peter BakerEven Flirting With U.S. Default Takes Economic Toll, with our economics reporter Ben CasselmanGreece Says It Doesn’t Ditch Migrants at Sea. It Was Caught in the Act, with our Brussels bureau chief, Matina Stevis-Gridneff We'll be sharing The Headlines every day this week, right here in your Daily feed. To get the full experience, download New York Times Audio, a new app that's home to all our audio journalism, including exclusive new shows. Free for Times news subscribers. Download it at nytimes.com/audioapp.

Hey, it's Michael. If you listened to The Daily this morning, you know what we're doing here. If not, real quick, you're about to hear our new show, The Headlines, a short show that brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times reporters in the middle of covering them. It's the perfect complement to The Daily, which is why we're sharing it with you right here every morning this week. After this week, you can find The Headlines in our new audio app, NYT Audio.

It's free for news and all access subscribers. And you can find the app at nytimes.com slash audio app or by searching for NYT Audio in the app store. Okay, here's the headlines. We've all been watching to see if negotiators in Washington Here's the headlines. authorities repel asylum seekers by abandoning them at sea. We're going to continue to provide economic, humanitarian, and security assistance to Ukraine so it can stand strong as long as it needs it. From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Annie Correal.

Today's Monday, May 22nd. Here's what we're covering. The meetings I've had with my fellow G7 leaders have left us more united, more resolved, and more determined to set up for the greater progress in the months ahead. I'm Peter Baker, Chief White House Correspondent for The Times, and I'm here in Hiroshima, Japan, where the Group of Seven annual meeting has just wrapped up, featuring President Biden and the leaders of the other major industrial democracies. We saw President Biden during this meeting offering another $375 million in arms to Ukraine, more ammunition, artillery, armored vehicles, that kind of thing. Just a couple days earlier, he agreed to train Ukrainian pilots to

fly F-16s, which will be provided by European countries in an escalation of the kind of sophisticated hardware that the West is providing Ukraine to fight off the Russians. Mr. President, thank you. You speak a lot at these summits about the power of democracies to solve big problems. But I'm curious, in these meetings with world leaders, how are you explaining the possibility that American democracy could cause a global financial crisis if the debt limit is breached next month? But the meeting here of the G7 comes at a time when all of these leaders have their own domestic problems at home.

Not one of them is especially popular. Not just President Biden, but all of the other leaders have their own domestic problems. And a recent poll found that all seven of them had approval ratings under 50 percent. Now, many of these leaders, of course, are facing similar problems at home in terms of their economies. Many of them are facing inflation. But each of them also, of course, has their own distinct issues. Emmanuel Macron in France, for instance, just pushed through very controversial law to raise the retirement age there from 62 to 64. And that's caused street protests that grew violent. Obviously, President Biden has his own issues at home, the border crisis, concern with crime, concern about his own age and capacity as he now wants to run for a second term. So each has their own distinct issues, but it's a worldwide phenomenon right now among many democracies

in which there is a sense that the system has been discredited and that the leaders are trying to prove that government can still work. All of which, of course, then makes the support for Ukraine all the more resonant because, of course, they have portrayed this battle between Ukraine and Russia as a battle between democracy and autocracy. That's the way President Biden has put it any number of times. And so the future, the fate of Ukraine, in effect, is connected to their own fate, I think, in their own way. And it's a sort of existential moment for these leaders as they're contemplating their own realities back home. Here's what else we're covering. President Biden returned from the G7 summit late Sunday night and is set to resume negotiations

over the debt limit with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy this afternoon. So we're all sitting here watching for whether we reach a deal by the X date, the date at which the government can no longer pay its bills. But the reality is we may start to feel the economic damage from this standoff well before we actually reach that point and default on any of our obligations. Ben Castleman covers economics for The Times. There are a few ways that this damage could be done. We saw the stock market fall modestly on Friday when talks fell apart. So far, that impact has been pretty modest. But if we get closer and we start to really look like there might not be a deal,

you could see a much bigger drop in the stock market, which of course affects anybody with money in their 401k, affects businesses, affects sort of the entire economy. There's also a risk of a sort of larger uncertainty. And this is hard to measure, but in some ways is probably the biggest impact. measure, but in some ways is probably the biggest impact. That if businesses start to get worried that they might not be able to borrow, if they start to get worried that the value of the money they're holding in treasuries isn't actually secure, they may pull back on investments. They may pull back on hiring. And eventually that means fewer jobs and less money to spend in the economy. And once that process starts, it can be hard to reverse. And so you could start to push the economy towards a recession,

even if we're able to eventually reach a deal and avoid going over the cliff. And we have some precedent for all of this. If you go back to 2011, which was the most significant standoff over the debt ceiling until now, they eventually reached a deal. We didn't default on the debt. But even so, there was a huge decline in the stock market. It wiped out something like $2.4 trillion in household wealth, which eventually rebounded, but it took a long time. It cost the government billions of dollars in extra interest payments. That's money that can't be spent on other priorities, on education, on health care, on infrastructure.

And it left lasting scars on the economy. And every indication is that this standoff could be worse, that the debt is higher now, the economy is slowing rather than accelerating as it was in 2011, and the political divisions in Washington are even greater. And so the potential damage done by a standoff is greater than ever. And that's just a standoff, right? We're not even talking here about what happens in the event of an actual default, which would, by pretty much universal agreement, be a much larger economic disaster than we're talking about here. And finally. My name is Matinus Devis-Gridneff, and one of the stories I've covered for the longest time

is migration into Europe. Greece has a special position in that migration because it's a key entryway for migrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa seeking a better life in Europe. For several years, I have heard stories about how the Greek authorities brutally repel asylum seekers by abandoning them at sea. But evidence has been really hard to come by until last month

when I received an email from someone who said he had hours of footage showing the Greek authorities doing just that to a group of 12 migrants on April 11th. And so as soon as we got that video, together with my colleagues at The Times, we went about trying to verify it. The Times, we went about trying to verify it. We used all tools available, including confirming the metadata, it's the technical digital footprint of the video, using geolocation for where the incident happened. And then we went even further. We tracked down the migrants and I got a chance to talk to them about what happened. One of the migrants was Suleyha Abdullahi, a 40-year-old widow. She comes from Mogadishu

originally, but she fled in 2013 to Yemen. The war in Yemen forced her to flee again with her six children, aged two to 17, to Turkey, but she never really intended to stay there. She was hoping to get to Europe. And last month, she attempted to get to Lesbos, the Greek island. When she arrived there, she hoped that the authorities would find them, help them, and get them to a safe place where they could apply for asylum. Instead, what she said happened is that she and her children and the other people traveling with her were confronted by masked men. At first, they claimed they were there to help them. Instead, the men stripped them of their hijabs, took their belongings, took their money, and shoved them in a white van. And then the video we got and verified

tells the rest of the story of what happened to Miss Abdullahi and her children that day. She was taken out of the van by masked men, taken out to a Coast Guard vessel, and then taken all the way to the edge of the Greek territorial waters with Turkey. And once the Coast Guard got close to the Turkish territorial waters, the migrants were placed on an inflatable raft and left adrift. The 12 people were adrift in the Aegean Sea for at least an hour until two Turkish Coast Guard vessels approached them and rescued them and brought them to land in Turkey. The migrants in the video are now being held in detention in Turkey, where Matina was able to interview them about their experience.

Matina asked Greek authorities to meet and discuss the video, but they declined. The prime minister of Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has largely been hailed for his tough stance on migrants. Greece held elections over the weekend, and as of Sunday night, Mitsotakis' conservative party was poised to maintain control of the country. Those are the headlines. I'm Annie Correal. We'll be back tomorrow.