The Headlines - Biden’s Cancer Diagnosis, and Why Ukraine is Seeing a Surge of Violence

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

Plus, one school district’s big A.I. experiment. On Today’s Episode:Biden Is Diagnosed With an Aggressive Form of Prostate Cancer, by Tyler Pager and Gina KolataAs Trump Prepares to Speak With Putin, Here’s Where Ukraine Cease-Fire Talks Stand, by Anton Troianovski, Andrew E. Kramer, Marc Santora and Paul SonneRussia Beefs Up Bases Near Finland’s Border, by Jeffrey Gettleman, Amelia Nierenberg and Johanna LemolaKey Panel Approves Trump’s Megabill, but Conservatives Hold Out for More Cuts, by Catie EdmondsonWhat to Know About the Tornadoes That Ripped Through the Central U.S., by Rachel NostrantSuspect in Palm Springs Bombing Died in Blast, Officials Say, by Laurel Rosenhall, Shawn Hubler, Jesus Jiménez and Maggie MilesHow Miami Schools Are Leading 100,000 Students Into the A.I. Future, by Natasha SingerTune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. 

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Monday, May 19th. Here's what we're covering. Former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer, according to his office. In a statement released yesterday, the office said that on a scale measuring how aggressive prostate cancers are, Biden's is a 9 out of 10. The cancer has also spread to his bones. Prostate cancer experts told the Times that means it cannot be cured, but there have been significant medical developments in recent years that have improved the prognosis for

people with Biden's condition. Experts say that in the past decades, survival rates have almost tripled. One doctor told the Times that with treatment, Biden, who's 82 years old, could still live for five to 10 more years or even potentially longer. Because prostate cancer is fed by testosterone, treatment typically includes both injections and pills to eliminate the hormone from the body. Some men also go on to have chemotherapy or radiation. In the statement, Biden's office said he and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians. This morning in Washington, President Trump is expected to have a phone call with Russian

President Vladimir Putin about ending the war in Ukraine. Trump said that after he talks to Putin, he'll also speak with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, and he posted on social media that he hoped it would be a, quote, productive day that would lead to a ceasefire. Trump came into office promising to quickly stop the fighting in Ukraine, where over a million Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have been killed or injured. But so far, the White House has been unable to negotiate a wide-scale truce, even as there's been a flurry of discussions, including the first in-person talks between Ukrainian and Russian diplomats that took place on Friday.

All of this diplomatic activity is happening against a backdrop of escalating violence. My colleague Mark Santora is in Kyiv and has been reporting on the war since it started more than three years ago. With each round of intense diplomatic activity in this war, there's been a corresponding rise in violence. Ukrainian and Western officials see a pattern where Russia tries to use the violence as a means to intimidate both Ukraine and its allies at critical diplomatic moments. This week we saw the largest drone strike aimed at Ukraine of the entire war, more than 270 basically long range exploding drones packed with you know, really powerful explosives and then on the front line you have Stepped up assaults by the Russians ahead of what many Ukrainian and Western officials believe will be a large-scale Offensive effort this summer. So you see this continuing trend line over the last three years where last year was

Deadlier than the first two years combined and then the first three months of this year are deadlier than any other three month period in terms of casualties of soldiers. Meanwhile, a Times analysis of satellite imagery shows that Russia has been beefing up military bases along its border with Finland. The images show recently installed rows of tents, new warehouses, and renovations to hangars for fighter jets. The 800-mile border is the longest line of contact between Russia and the NATO alliance. And while officials from NATO and Finland say they don't see the buildup of infrastructure

as an immediate threat, it does suggest that Russia intends to boost its military presence in the Arctic region, which has become increasingly contested. Finnish defense officials told the Times they expect to see Russia significantly boost the number of troops there in the next few years, and that if the war in Ukraine does wind down, thousands of Russian troops from that conflict will likely be redeployed to the Finnish border. Now three quick updates from around the U.S. this weekend. The eyes have it, the motions agree to, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is ordered. Late last night in Washington, D.C., the group of hardline House Republicans who had been

holding up the budget mega bill that's key to President Trump's agenda agreed to let it move out of committee, despite their ongoing critique that it doesn't do enough to rein in the country's growing deficit. But the legislation's path to getting passed in the full House still looks rocky. The GOP holdouts have indicated they'll continue to push for more reductions in health and environmental programs, which could potentially sink it altogether. Also, in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic... The roof fell off the whole building and the walls came crashing in.

It's bad. We need help. A series of deadly storms and tornadoes killed at least 28 people and injured dozens more. Most of those killed were in Kentucky and Missouri. The mayor of St. Louis called it one of the worst storms in the city's history, estimating that 5,000 buildings there were damaged. The storms came as the National Weather Service has been struggling to keep some of its offices

staffed. The union that represents federal meteorologists said the weather office in eastern Kentucky no longer has a permanent overnight forecaster and had to scramble on Friday. It's one of several offices that's lost staff in the wake of cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency. One union official said, quote, For most of the last half century, NWS has been a 24-7 operation. Not anymore. And in Palm Springs.

What I can say is this is probably the largest bombing scene that we've had in Southern California. Investigators say a bombing attack on a fertility clinic this Saturday was carried out by a 25-year-old man who died in the blast. Authorities called the attack, which injured four others, an act of terrorism, saying the suspect had, quote, nihilistic ideations. They're investigating a link between the bombing and an obscure movement that discourages the creation of new life and promotes death.

Ahead of the bombing, audio was posted to a website related to the movement, featuring a man who said he was going to bomb an in-vitro fertilization clinic because he was angry at his own existence. Sources tell the Times investigators are trying to verify whether the recording was made by the bomber. And finally, across the country, schools are wrestling with how to handle the rise of artificial intelligence. There's been concerns about cheating, about chatbots spewing false information, even about teachers letting chatbots write their syllabus. Many districts have responded by banning the technology. But Times reporter Natasha Singer recently went to Florida to see what it

looks like when a district goes all in on AI instead. Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the third largest US school district, is in the middle of this staggering effort to roll out AI chatbots for all teachers and also for more than 100,000 high school students. Natasha says that while Miami-Dade did initially restrict the technology, it then made a U-turn. I went into an English class where the students were reading Oedipus Rex, the Sophocles play, and that's about free will. Do you believe people have control over their own destinies?

And their teacher, Mr. Reno, had asked the students to write a paragraph about free will versus fate. Take a clear position and support your claim. And once they had written this paragraph, they then pasted it into the Google chatbot, along with a grading rubric that the English teacher had written that basically said, you know, give students one point if they wrote a good thesis sentence and give students two points if they used really good examples to back up their claim. And so the English teacher was asking students to get feedback first from a Chatbot before

they got feedback from her, and then they handed them into her. So it's not like she is delegating the actual final grading to a bot, but it was an interim thing that could be done quickly in class and help some students sharpen their writing. I think we're really at a critical moment with these new artificial intelligence tools in schools. And there's a lot of hope that they could be very, very helpful. On the other hand, Daniel Matteo, the assistant superintendent of Miami Dade schools, who is in charge of this AI rollout, said to me, we are looking at AI as if it is not some kind of magical, transformative, world-changing platform. We're treating it like just another tool

in the arsenal of education. We have to have guardrails in place. We have to vet it. But we also have to show teachers and students how to use these tools that are gonna be part of their lives. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, how Donald Trump and his MAGA movement took up the cause of white farmers in South Africa.

That's next in the New York Times audio app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.