The Daily - The Headlines: May 25

Episode Date: May 25, 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: DeSantis’s Entry into the 2024 Race Goes Awry With a Twitter Meltdown, with our national political correspondent Shane GoldmacherAnti-Kremlin Fighters Take War to Russian Territory for a Second Day, with our Russia and Ukraine War reporter Valerie HopkinsRemembering Tina Turner, with our critic Wesley MorrisWe'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 of our audio journalism, including exclusive new shows. Free for Times news subscribers. Download it at nytimes.com/audioapp. 

Hey, it's Michael. Every day this week, we're bringing you something extra, a new show called The Headlines. It's a short show with three top stories that go beyond what we're covering on The Daily. In fact, the shows are designed to go together. So try it out. And after this week, you can only get The Headlines

in our new app, New York Times Audio, where you can find the shows you already know and love, like The Daily, This American Life, Serial, The Run-Up, and discover a bunch of new shows that you can't get anywhere else, like the headlines. You can find the app at nytimes.com slash audio app, or search for NYT Audio in the App Store. Okay, here's the headlines. in the App Store. Okay, here's the headlines. Well, I am running for president of the United States to lead our great American combat.

We've all been watching for the last 15 months as Russia invaded Ukraine. But this week we saw something very new. Widescale attacks on Russian soil. Even if you never saw her, you can hear her moving in the music. Tina Turner just seems like she is in motion, in song. And that power was new. From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Annie Correal. Today's Thursday, May 25th. Here's what we're

covering. All right, sorry about that. We've got so many people here that I think we are kind of melting the servers, which is a good sign. This is Shane Goldmacher. I'm a national political correspondent for The New York Times. And this has been a very big week in the 2024 Republican presidential primary. All right, I'd like to welcome Governor DeSantis for this historic... We're just trying to get it going. On Wednesday, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who for months has appeared Donald Trump's biggest rival, formally entered the race.

Are you there? Can you hear us? I'm here. I know. I think you broke the internet. And it was a pretty rocky start. He held his kickoff event on Twitter, and it was a glitchy mess. It was 25 minutes of whispers and hot mics and people trying to solve things on the fly. It showed more than a half million people had tuned in, but they actually had to cut the plug and start over because the whole system wasn't working.

By choosing to start on Twitter, he was trying to make a big splash. But for Ron DeSantis, this was really an awkward beginning for a candidate who's trying to take on the daunting task of taking down Donald Trump. It's not how you start, it's how you finish. And I think that's finished really strong. So I think this is great. And we'll make sure that we come back and do it again. This is a great platform. I would like to see other platforms. One of the real challenges for Ron DeSantis, though, is that he doesn't actually have a one-on-one race with Donald Trump and that other Republicans are entering, including Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina, who on Monday formally entered the race as well. He's the lone black Republican in the U.S. Senate, and he's running on a really optimistic message about the future of the country. message about the future of the country. And it's one that really feels designed to appeal to those important evangelical voters in Iowa who will pick off the 2024 nominating process. And so Tim

Scott's entrance and the entrance of other Republicans in the coming weeks that are expected, including Vice President Mike Pence, who served under Donald Trump, as well as a few other candidates, they make it even harder for Ron DeSantis to put together the math to top Donald Trump in the nominating process overall. And right now, Donald Trump isn't just the frontrunner. He's a pretty dominant frontrunner. He's ahead by as much as 30 percentage points in many polls.

But what's been clear in the months leading up to Ron DeSantis' entrance into this race is that he's the one candidate that Donald Trump is most concerned about. He's the candidate he's given a nickname to. He's the candidate he attacks on a regular basis. And he's the candidate that Trump's super PAC has already spent more than $10 million attacking on the airwaves. And so while Ron DeSantis doesn't have a one-on-one race with Trump just yet, as far as Trump is concerned, there's one candidate he's most worried about, and that's Ron DeSantis. Here's what else our reporters are covering. I'm Valerie Hopkins. I am a reporter with The New York Times covering Russia and the Ukraine war.

In the last few days, what we've been witnessing is actually really remarkable. It's the most sustained fighting on Russian soil since this war began. Early on Monday morning, reports started emerging that Belgorod was under attack. That's a region along Russia's border with Ukraine. And some hours later, videos started emerging of ethnic Russian fighters who were aligned with Ukraine, who said they had staged an incursion into Russian territory and had actually penetrated about six miles into Russian territory and were holding it and fighting off Russian border police

and soldiers and members of the intelligence. A pipeline was blown up near the border. A number of settlements were shelled and people had to be resettled. Somebody was killed. Thirteen people were wounded. And it was shocking for many people in the Russian public to see this because there have been a number of incidents, even a drone over the Kremlin, but there hasn't been sort of sustained fighting inside the borders of Russia.

There's a lot that's unclear about this attack, but two groups have emerged to take responsibility for it. And they are the Free Russia Legion and a group called the Russia Volunteer Corps. In very carefully curated social media posts, representatives of these groups talk about being Russian citizens, wanting to come home, wanting to reach Red Square and the Kremlin and to liberate Russia from Putin. Meanwhile, the Russian government has tried to ignore their messages about Russia and paints them as just being part of the Ukrainian army and even refers to them as Ukrainians. But Ukraine itself has denied planning or organizing the attack and has tried to cast this as an internal dispute among Russians.

As of Wednesday night, the Russians were able to push the members of these groups across the border. But the fact that this could happen actually creates a whole new set of challenges for Russia. One is that the Russian army may be forced or may feel compelled to pull troops from its front line and improve its protections along its border. And that could really spread its defenses thin ahead of a Ukrainian counteroffensive that's expected in the coming weeks or months. is possibly a political cost for Vladimir Putin because the fact that it took more than two days to fight off a group of partisans makes the army and the government and all of the institutions that are supposed to protect Russian territory look weak.

It's unclear what might happen in the future. One member of one of the groups involved sent a text message to my colleague saying that this was only the first operation on Russian territory and the scale of their actions would only increase. But it is clear that these forces want the Russians to feel that they could attack anywhere along the border at any time. They want the Russians to feel that they could attack anywhere along the border at any time. And they want Russians to feel the visceral panic that many Ukrainians feel of not feeling safe in their own homes. And finally. I'm a critic at the New York Times, and I just found out that the incomparable, unconquerable, unstoppable, untoppable, peerless, triumphal Tina Turner died. She was 83. You know, she grew up dirt poor in Tennessee, had a very complicated life. And that's before she met Ike Turner, another architect of American rock and roll. They marry, have a really pretty successful

career together. You know, there's a whole band. There's Tina and the Ikeettes. Ike was the guitarist. And they just burnt every house down they played in. I mean, Proud Mary is like a quintessential example of that. The song is operating at this half-tempo chug. And you can hear Ike doing his accompaniment in the background, that baritone of his. And then the song starts.

And it's just electrifying because she just sounded strong in a way that Oh my God. I mean, it just leapt out of the speakers in this new way. So, this is 1971 when Proud Mary happens, and they could go on like this, but she's in an abusive marriage with Ike Turner.

And she manages to get out with her name, by the way, I should say. It's very important. She kept Tina Turner the name because that's hers. And she worked hard for it, she says. And the problem, of course, is that she doesn't have anything to do with that name. And she has to struggle to get club dates, to get people to come to these shows. And that could have been it. But Tina Turner, she records this album called Private Dancer. It comes out in 1984. And the biggest single off the album is called

What's Love Got To Do With It. It's a cover, by the way. Somebody originally sang that song, and nobody knows who that is, because it's Tina Turner's song now. It's a song that somehow manages to be about Tina Turner in the Ike and Tina days, but it also is just this anthem of liberation. Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken? There is so much experience in the singing of that song. You know, she...

Tina Turner is a one-of-a-kind, one-of-a-kind, once-in-a-lifetime person. And I think the thing that makes her, that made her life so exciting was that it had so many chapters to it. It was such a story of survival, of odds beating, of winning, of being proud to have won, that it was, you know, it was the life that many of us, nobody wants the life she had. Everybody wants the life she fought for and i just feel like

i don't know it just seemed like a life like that just would never ever end Those are the headlines. I'm Annie Correal. We'll be back tomorrow.