The Headlines - Israeli Soldiers Open Fire Near Aid Site, and Coffee’s Link to Healthy Aging

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

Plus, The Times’s summer book picks. On Today’s Episode: Israeli Soldiers Open Fire Near Gaza Aid Site. Gaza Health Officials Say 27 Are Killed, by Patrick Kingsley and Rawan Sheikh AhmadTrump and Allies Sell Domestic Policy Bill With Falsehoods, by Linda QiuAfter Staff Cuts, the National Weather Service Is Hiring Again, by Judson JonesHe Built an Airstrip on Protected Land. Now He’s in Line to Lead the Forest Service, by Hiroko TabuchiThe U.S. Lit a Beacon for Science. Under Trump, Scientists Fear It’s Dimming, by Kate ZernikeThat Cup of Coffee May Have a Longer-Term Perk, by Alice Callahan31 Novels Coming This Summer, by Miguel Salazar and Laura Thompson21 Nonfiction Books Coming This Summer, by Miguel Salazar and Laura ThompsonTune 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 Tuesday, June 3rd. Here's what we're covering. This morning in Gaza, the Israeli military said its soldiers opened fire near crowds of Palestinians walking toward a new food distribution site. According to Gaza health officials, at least 27 people were killed and dozens were injured. The Israeli military said it fired at people who strayed from the designated route, saying they posed a threat to soldiers, but a

military spokeswoman declined to offer details. A doctor at a nearby hospital a few miles from the site told the Times most of the victims they received there were children aged between 10 and 13, many with gunshot wounds to the head or chest. He said their bodies were carried much of the way to the hospital because ambulances could not safely reach the area where the shooting occurred. It's the second time in three days Israeli soldiers have opened fire near the aid site. Palestinian officials said 23 people were killed there Sunday. This president, we're kicking off the June work period today. It's going to be a busy month. We have a lot to get done.

In Washington, senators are back from recess and will soon take up President Trump's massive domestic policy bill, the so-called Big Beautiful Bill. The package, which already passed the House, slashes multiple federal programs in order to offset the costs of the president's priorities, including tax breaks and increased immigration enforcement. There's been intense pushback, even from some Republicans, about the scale of the planned cuts. And the Times has found that Trump and his allies have been using falsehoods and inaccurate claims to try and promote the bill to the public. We are not cutting Medicaid in this package.

There's a lot of misinformation out there about this, Jay. In one case, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Trump have both said the bill contains no significant cuts to Medicaid. We're not doing any cutting of anything meaningful. The only thing we're cutting is waste, fraud and abuse. But the bill cuts hundreds of billions of dollars of Medicaid spending and will leave an estimated 10 million people without coverage over the next decade. And when it comes to the bill's impact on the federal deficit, White House Press

Secretary Caroline Levitt said it would bring the country's debt down. ...by carrying out the largest deficit reduction in nearly 30 years with $1.6 trillion in mandatory savings. The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan federal agency, disagrees. Analysts there estimated the bill would actually add almost $4 trillion to the deficit, even after they factored in economic growth. Leavitt accused the office of using quote, shoddy assumptions, but its projections have historically been more or less accurate, and several other budget models have made similar predictions about the bill.

Now, three more updates on the Trump administration. After losing nearly 600 employees to the recent federal staffing cuts, the National Weather Service is now trying to hire to, quote, stabilize the department. Some forecasting offices no longer have enough staff to operate overnight, when they used to be 24-7. Others cut back on critical data collection that fed forecast models. The agency now plans to hire more than 100 people to try and fill those gaps, just as forecasters are gearing up for hurricane season in the Atlantic, which started Sunday.

On that topic, the acting head of FEMA told staff he didn't know the U.S. had a hurricane season. Two staffers told the Times didn't know the U.S. had a hurricane season. Two staffers told the Times it was unclear if he was serious. The agency has said he was joking. Also, a Senate committee will hold a confirmation hearing today on President Trump's pick to lead the U.S. forest service, Michael Boren. He's the founder of a billion-dollar tech company and a Trump donor who has clashed with the service for years.

He's been accused of putting a cabin on federal land, flying a helicopter so close to a crew that was out building trails that officials sought a restraining order, and building a private airstrip without a permit in a national recreation area. While Boren owns a large ranch in Idaho, he has little experience in public lands management. If confirmed, Boran would be charged with carrying out the president's executive order to increase logging in national forests. And across the country, scientists are increasingly concerned that American research labs may no longer be able to attract the world's best and brightest under the Trump administration.

Federal science budgets have been slashed, grants have been frozen mid-experiment, and stricter immigration policies have targeted many international students. It's not that uncommon to go into a scientific lab in the United States and find that there are more students from China working there as graduate students and post-docs than there are American-born citizens. My colleague Kate Zernike has been talking with researchers who say America's status as an international science mecca was carefully and intentionally cultivated going back to the 1950s.

Now, the system that delivered breakthrough after breakthrough in tech, physics, healthcare, you name it, is under stress. That talent is going to either be forced to go home or they're just going to look elsewhere for jobs. In France and Germany, some of the most prominent institutions of science are already adding extra money to their budgets and saying, if you've lost your grants, come work with us. We have money for you. China is also on a hiring spree.

And so what researchers I've talked to are really concerned about is that the United States will actually increasingly be isolated from the rest of the scientific community and ultimately lose its preeminence in science. For anyone drinking coffee right now, prepare to be validated. A new study found that coffee may help with healthy aging on top of that caffeine fix. The data was presented yesterday at the annual meeting for the American Society for Nutrition. It hasn't been peer-reviewed yet, but the study was rigorous and extensive. It followed more than 47,000 female nurses starting in the 1970s. Over several decades, they were asked questions about their diets, like how much coffee, tea,

or soda like Coca-Cola and Pepsi they drank. Ultimately, the group who consumed the most caffeine had 13% higher odds of healthy aging than those who consumed the least. The study defined healthy aging as no cognitive impairment and no cancer, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, or other chronic diseases. They did not find the same association between healthy aging and drinking tea or decaf coffee, and drinking cola was associated with significantly decreased odds of healthy aging. The findings add to a large body of evidence linking coffee consumption with longevity,

though some studies suggest that benefit can disappear if people regularly add more than half a teaspoon of sugar or about one tablespoon of half-and-half to their coffee. And finally, it is summer book season, and the editor of the Times Book Review, Gilbert Cruz, has narrowed down his list of recommendations to just a few favorites. The first is called King of Ashes. This is by S.A. Cosby, a crime writer who's written for a crime novel set in the South in Virginia. And in this new one, a finance manager named Roman has to come back to his small town after his father is in a terrible accident, discovers that his brother, who's sort of a screw up, has gotten them all involved with the local crime gang and he has to figure

out how to extract his family from this very dicey situation. As with all of Cosby's books, it has a gripping plot. It's pretty violent. It's very dark and If these are the kind of things that you're into I can attest that it is very very entertaining The next one is a nonfiction book the conceit of which has obsessed me. It's called a marriage at sea It's by Sophie Elmhurst and it's about a married couple who in the 1970s they say we've been together for quite a while. Let's do something crazy Let's sail around the world and they start to do that and then when they are in the great expanse of the ocean a whale Bumps into their boat. They have to jump into a life raft where they have to survive for a hundred and seventeen days or something like that

So it's about their journey. It's about their attempt to survive and I just want to know how a married couple does it in a life raft for a hundred and seventeen days You can find more summer reading recs from Gilbert and the whole books team at NY times comm slash books Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, what a new Times analysis of voting records from every county in the country found, and why it set off alarm bells for Democratic strategists. 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.