The Daily - The Headlines: May 26

Episode Date: May 26, 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: Oath Keepers Leader Is Sentenced to 18 Years in Jan. 6 Sedition Case, with our courts and criminal justice reporter Alan FeuerLeaders Let Problems Mount at Brutal SEAL Course, Navy Finds, with our military correspondent Dave PhilippsAirlines and F.A.A. Try to Head Off Summer Travel Meltdowns, with our business reporter Niraj ChokshiWe'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. The prosecutors have been arguing that American democracy was really on the line here

and that the judge needed to send a message. The Navy has released a scathing report that detailed problems within training for the elite Navy SEALs. Nearly every major airline and even the air traffic control system has had some kind of severe meltdown. And now we're headed into a really busy summer.

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Annie Correale. Today's Friday, May 26th. Here's what we're covering. I'm Alan Foyer, and for the last two-plus years, I have been covering all of the criminal cases stemming from the January 6th attack at the Capitol. And I just stepped out of the courtroom in Washington

where we saw the longest sentence issued so far in any of the more than 1,000 cases connected to January 6th. On Thursday, Stuart Rhodes, the leader of the right-wing militia the Oath Keepers, was sentenced to 18 years in federal prison for his role in the attack on the U.S. Capitol. He was found guilty of organizing the Oath Keepers to use physical force that day to try to stop the transfer of power. So over the course of almost three and a half hours, there was quite a bit of drama at the hearing. Rhodes, wearing his orange prison smock

and his trademark black eyepatch, got up to the podium in the courtroom and addressed the court and essentially tried to present himself as the victim here. He compared himself to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet-era dissident, and said that he was like the main character of Kafka's novel, The Trial. At one point, he said, I am a political prisoner. Now, the judge in this case, Amit Mehta, did not take kindly to that description. And at one point, he looked down from the bench at Rhodes saying, you, sir, present an ongoing threat and a peril to this country,

to the republic, and the very fabric of our democracy. So look, the prosecutors went into this hearing asking for an even higher sentence. They wanted Rhodes to serve 25 years in prison, and their arguments were simply that there needed to be accountability for the violence at the Capitol, and that really American democracy itself was on the line in terms of how Rhodes was sentenced. Now, they did not get the full 25 years they requested, but 18 years is still an incredibly significant penalty. Rhodes is one of several Oath Keepers to be sentenced this week. One of his deputies, Kelly Meggs, was also sentenced Thursday to 12 years. And hearings will continue today. Here's what else we're covering. On Thursday, the Navy released a report that detailed in pretty scathing language problems at the Navy SEALs elite selection course.

My colleague Dave Phillips covers the military. Last year, his reporting revealed serious safety concerns at a Navy SEALs training course. Days after his reporting came out, the Navy ordered its own investigation. What I uncovered and what the Navy's review also found is that over time, this course grew brutally hard and led to the death of a sailor in the course. The Navy SEAL selection course is really seen as a gold standard of how to train special forces, not just in the United States, but around the world. The training course culminates in something called Hell Week, which is several days of constant grueling exercise and physical and mental tests with almost no sleep, oftentimes with prolonged periods in frigid water in the Pacific, and very few people make it through.

In recent years, that already hard course became even tougher when a new Navy leadership team came in and decided that they needed to push even further. All of a sudden, classes started getting very little rest, spending more time in the frigid Pacific, and doing multiple reps of exercises that were already designed to take people to the limit. That creep in intensity in the course reaches breaking point in February of last year when Kyle Mullen, a former football player from Yale who was in that course, died at the end of Hell Week.

He had been suffering for days with obvious breathing problems and other ailments that turned out later to be a very serious case of pneumonia. When other students wanted to call 911 because he was having trouble breathing, the doctor on duty dissuaded them twice from doing so, saying that it would interfere with his training. When Kyle Mullen died, all of the problems that had been brewing in the months before were revealed. Now the Navy has laid out all those problems in pretty extensive detail and is now proposing some fixes.

Eight sailors in charge of training and medical care were transferred out of the program, and a number of them have been referred to Navy legal officials for possible punishment. The Navy's also talking about doing better training, better communication, better documentation of injuries, better oversight to make sure that this course doesn't drift again into dangerous waters. But fundamentally, there's still this larger problem that if you have this type of very physically demanding training, there's going to be

inherent risk. And it's very difficult to manage a program like that without people getting hurt. And finally, today kicks off one of the busiest travel weekends of the year. The TSA is predicting that as many as 10 million passengers will fly in the next few days, the start of what they expect to be a record-breaking summer. The surge is coming in a year when the airline industry has been plagued by massive disruptions and widespread flight cancellations. The industry as a whole is really under the microscope. My colleague Neeraj Chokshi covers aviation for The Times. The consequences of getting it wrong aren't lost

on the airlines or the FAA. They've been doing a lot of work to try to avoid any major problems this summer. The airlines have been staffing up. They've been trying to pay a little bit better attention to early signs of disruptions. And they've even started flying fewer flights, but with bigger planes, so they can still fly as many passengers as they want, but not have as many flights in the air. And that hopefully will provide some relief to the air traffic control centers that are short-staffed as well. Another thing that they've done, which I know sounds sort of weird, but the private space industry has really boomed in the last few years. And as a result, there have been a lot more space launches, and those launches have competed with airlines for airspace. So the FAA said, look,

we're going to take a hard look at this. We're going to make sure that these space launches interfere as little as possible when we can control that. Already, the Transportation Department is looking at strengthening the rules around when airlines are required to compensate passengers for disruptions. And if the industry doesn't get it right this summer, you could have millions of travelers reaching out to lawmakers like they did over the winter holidays, like they did in early January when the air traffic control system went down. And, you know, all of that anger and all of that frustration could end up giving momentum to stronger federal rules against the industry. Those are the headlines. This show is made by Eli Cohen, Gerard Cole, Robert Jimison, Emily Lang, Jessica Metzger, Tracy Mumford, Dave Shaw, Jan Stewart, and Larissa Anderson, and features original music by Dan Powell,

Sonia Herrero, Alicia Bietube, Isaac Jones, Sophia Landman, Marion Lozano, Pat McCusker, and Rowan Nemistow. Special thanks to Liz Davis-Morer. I'm Annie Correale. We'll be back Tuesday.