The Headlines - D.C. Shooting Kills 2 at Jewish Museum, and Trump’s Uncomfortable Oval Office Meeting

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

Plus, breakfast cereals are getting less healthy. On Today’s Episode: 2 Israeli Embassy Aides Are Fatally Shot Outside Event in Washington, by Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush and Chris CameronTrump Lectures South African President in Televised Oval Office Confrontation, by Erica L. Green and Zolan Kanno-YoungsHouse G.O.P. Presses Ahead on Tax and Spending Bill, With Votes Uncertain, by Catie Edmondson and Michael GoldU.S. Formally Accepts Luxury Jet From Qatar for Trump, by Eric Lipton and Eric SchmittJustice Dept. to End Oversight of Local Police Accused of Abuses, by Jacey Fortin, Devlin Barrett, Ernesto Londoño and Shaila DewanAmerican Breakfast Cereals Are Becoming Less Healthy, Study Finds, by Andrew JacobsTune 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 is Thursday, May 22nd. Here's what we're covering. At approximately 9 or 8 p.m. tonight, we received multiple calls for a shooting in the area of Third Street and F Street Northwest. Officials in Washington, D.C., say that two people who worked at the Israeli embassy were shot and killed last night outside an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. We believe the shooting was committed

by a single suspect who is now in custody. Prior to the shooting, the suspect was observed pacing back and forth outside of the museum. According to law enforcement, a suspect was detained shortly after the shooting. He told police where the gun was and shouted pro-Palestinian slogans. The suspect chanted, free, free Palestine while in custody. The suspect has been tentatively identified as Elias Rodriguez of Chicago, Illinois.

The event at the museum was a gathering for young Jewish professionals. The Israeli ambassador to the U.S. said the victims were a couple who were about to get engaged next week in Jerusalem. The Israeli embassy where the victims worked has been a particular focus of protests amid heightened tensions over Israel's military campaign in Gaza after the October 7th attack by Hamas. What I do know is that the horrific incident is going to frighten a lot of people,

and I want to be clear that we will not tolerate this violence or hate in our city. DC's Mayor Muriel Bowser denounced the shooting as terrorism and said the community would stand together against anti-Semitism. President Trump also posted on social media, quote, hatred and radicalism have no place in the USA. In response to the shooting, the prime minister of Israel,

Benjamin Netanyahu, has ordered increased security for Israeli diplomatic missions around the world. At the White House yesterday. We're going to be discussing some of the things that are taking place in South Africa and see if we can help. President Trump hosted the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, for a meeting that started cordially. Well, thank you very much for welcoming us to this reformed White House.

Ramaphosa brought two prominent South African golfers along with him, a nod to Trump's favorite sport, and said he hoped to talk trade, among other things. But hanging over his visit were Trump's recent repeated claims that white farmers are being discriminated against in South Africa, Trump's even fast-track white farmers are being discriminated against in South Africa. Trump's even fast-tracked allowing some Afrikaners to enter the U.S. as refugees. The president has insisted that there are mass killings of Afrikaner farmers in South Africa and that the government is seizing their land.

Both of those claims are not supported by any evidence that President Trump has presented, but he has insisted on those over and over. My colleague John Eligo covers South Africa and was in the Oval Office for the meeting. He says Ramaphosa tried to refute Trump's claims of white genocide. And then right after that is when sort of like, no, no, wait, things completely change. We have thousands of stories talking about it. We have documentaries, we have news stories. Is Natalie here? Somebody here to turn that?

I could show you a couple of things. President Trump said, turn down the lights. And I looked over my shoulder and there was a White House aide, she was opening up a laptop right there and about to cue something up. The lights dim and all of a sudden you hear the TV start to play. -"Soot, tee, namazah!" A video mashup then played in the Oval Office, including footage of people calling for violence against white farmers.

One of the clips showed a row of white crosses that Trump said, incorrectly, was a burial site for white farmers. So it was this very provocative video, and then, after the video went off, Trump had a stack of papers next to him. And he said, look, all of these news articles are about people who were killed recently.

And he kept on saying, you know, this one is recent. It's death, death, death. But in fact, when you look closely at those articles, a lot of them were not about farmers or Afrikaners who were killed. They were just news stories about them in general. And at that point, you can see Ramaphosa, about farmers or Africanas who were killed. They were just news stories about them in general. And at that point you can see Ramaphosa,

he has sort of like a very exasperated look on his face. He's trying to interject, but Trump is sort of speaking over him. Trump is now completely controlling the meeting. So it was just an extraordinary session and the spectacle that I certainly did not expect. After Trump's comments, Ramaphosa did acknowledge his country has a crime problem.

And there have been killings of white South Africans, but police statistics show they're not more vulnerable to violence there than other people. Overall, the meeting underscored Trump's selective concern about human rights in other countries. On his recent tour of the Middle East, he met with the leaders of several repressive regimes but said he would not lecture them about how they treat their citizens. Now, three other updates on the Trump administration. For the second night in a row, lawmakers were up all night at the Capitol debating what President Trump calls

the big, beautiful bill, the spending legislation that's key to carrying out many of his campaign promises. Republican leadership has been waging an intense effort to win over some conservative holdouts who want more concessions. But even as the sun was rising, several GOP lawmakers were still expressing

dissatisfaction, leaving it unclear if it will pass. Of votes expected later this morning, there will be continued updates at NYTimes.com. Also, they're giving the United States Air Force a jet, okay? And it's a great thing. President Trump and the Pentagon said yesterday that the U.S. has officially accepted a luxury Boeing 747 from Qatar that will be turned into a new Air Force One. Trump has made clear that he wants the civilian jet retrofitted as soon as possible, an upgrade that could cost a billion dollars. But lawmakers from both parties have raised concerns about the plane, saying it could

pose a security risk. For example, it could have secret listening devices installed — and that Qatar might have gifted the plane to try and influence the president. And the Justice Department is stepping back from its efforts to reform nearly two dozen police departments across the country that have been accused of civil rights violations. Those efforts, known as consent decrees, came in the wake of high-profile police killings and set requirements for how police should be trained and disciplined. The head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division now says the agreements are ineffectual and a, quote, injustice against the police.

The decision to roll them back was announced nearly five years to the day after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In Minneapolis, residents and activists called the news a slap in the face. They see it as a sign that the Trump administration is not interested in the kind of changes and reforms that people clamored for during big protests just years ago. My colleague Ernesto Lundonio is based in Minnesota, where the DOJ has been working on a consent decree with the Minneapolis Police Department

after a federal report found officers there routinely discriminated against black and Native American people and used deadly force without justification. So where this leaves us now is that the city says it remains committed to the changes outlined in the Department of Justice agreement. But there's no question that as the Department of Justice takes a step back, there's one less lever hovering over the city of Minneapolis to make sure that it does in fact continue the hard, expensive,

and labor-intensive work of reforming a police department. And finally, every morning across the country, nearly a third of kids eat cereal for breakfast. What's that? They're new Food Loop super loopers. It's actually the most commonly consumed food product for children age 5 to 12. It's the perfect combination of peanut butter and chocolatey flavors. But a new study has found that breakfast cereals have been getting less and less healthy. Researchers studied 1,200 new and reformulated cereals that were launched between

2010 and 2023 and found that their average fat, sodium, and sugar content increased significantly over that time. The findings were published yesterday in the journal JAMA Open Network. One of the study's authors told the Times he was surprised by what they found, since consumers have become increasingly health-conscious and more aware of the links between eating too much sugar, salt, and fat, and serious health conditions like diabetes and cancer. He said, quote, the healthy claims made on the front of these products and the nutritional facts on the back are actually going in the opposite direction.

Those are the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford, we'll be back tomorrow.