Up First from NPR - Gaza Humanitarian Crisis, Steve Scalise Wins GOP Vote For Speaker, AI In Science

Episode Date: October 12, 2023

Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza following the weekend attack by Hamas fighters has plunged the area into darkness. How are civilians trying to survive? House Republicans in an internal vote picked Louisiana Congressman Steve Scalise to serve as the next House speaker. But he doesn't have the required votes in the full House. Scientists from various disciplines will meet in Washington today to discuss the use of artificial intelligence. Want more comprehensive analysis of the most important news of the day, plus a little fun? Subscribe to the Up First newsletter. Today's episode of Up First was edited by Krishnadev Calamur, Arezou Rezvani, Amina Khan and HJ Mai. It was produced by Mansee Khurana, David West and Lilly Quiroz. We get engineering support from Stacey Abbott. And our technical director is Zac Coleman.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza following the weekend attack by Hamas fighters has plunged the area into darkness. Israel also cut off food and water supplies. How are civilians in Gaza trying to survive this siege? I'm Michelle Martin, that's A. Martinez, and this is Up First from NPR News. In an internal vote, House Republicans picked Louisiana Congressman Steve Scalise to serve as the next House Speaker. We have a lot of work to do, not just in the House for the people of this country. But Scalise doesn't have the required votes in the full House, so what's next? Scientists from various disciplines will meet in Washington today to discuss the use of artificial intelligence. NPR's Jeff Brumfield recently visited a lab where AI is already being used to examine the technology's potential benefits.

Stay with us. We've got all the news you need to start your day. Now Our Change will honour 100 years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad. From the skies to Our Change, this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. Gaza has plunged into darkness. The 139 square mile enclave is home to more than 2 million Palestinians. It's been under a land, air and sea blockade that has restricted the movement of people and basic goods for some 16 years now, but the territory is now completely blocked off.

Israel has cut off food, fuel, water, and electricity from entering. The power plant is no longer operating. And this while Israeli forces are continuing airstrikes that have so far killed more than 1,200 Palestinians and wounded 5,800 others, this according to the Gaza Health Ministry. All this is retaliation for the massive and unprecedented attack Hamas launched on Israel Saturday that also killed at least 1,300 people. A ground invasion also appears to be in the works. For more on this, we're bringing in our co-host

Laila Fadl, who's on the line from Jerusalem. Laila, what do we know about what's happening inside Gaza right now? Yeah, I've been calling people overnight and this morning inside watching the videos that are coming out. And it's not homes reduced to Rebel A there, it's entire blocks. And among those killed in the airstrikes are entire families. Palestinians in Gaza I've been speaking with say they've been moving from one neighborhood to the next looking for a place to be safe. But they say there's nowhere safe, they can't find a place. Even UN schools where Palestinians typically flee for safety have been hit. 11 people from the UN Palestinian Refugee Agency have been killed. The crossing into Egypt is closed and has been struck at least three times. And remember, Palestinians can't just leave because there's a siege.

So they're trapped trying to survive. I spoke to a mother who's giving her baby only half the amount of milk because food is running out. I'm going to play you a bit of a conversation I had this morning with our own NPR producer, Anas Baba, who lives in Gaza. I was forced to leave my job, to leave my work, okay, and to go to my family in order to evacuate them. I started just to think, where am I going to take them? Where am I going to hide them? Where am I going to hide them? Is there any safe place in Gaza? So I took them to another place, which was dangerous, and I transferred them to another place, which was more dangerous. So after that, I took them to one of my friend's houses just to spend the night. And now I took them back

to my own house, to the previous one, to the original. So as you can hear there, people are giving up on trying to find somewhere safe. And just six days into this war, Gaza is already in a deep humanitarian crisis. And with no electricity, it's got to be a lot harder, maybe even impossible really to reach anyone in there. Yeah. I mean, people are charging their phones in their cars. If they have fuel left, they're afraid they'll soon be cut off from the world, which would mean an information blackout. And this is happening at a time when Palestinians inside Gaza are saying the airstrikes are coming with no warning. Any sign, Leila, that this is going to let up at all?

No. In fact, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says this is just the start. The Israeli army says it's preparing for a ground invasion, which many are speculating means a reoccupation of Gaza. And Palestinians tell me there that they've never seen anything like this. And remember, they've lived through four Gaza wars before this. And just for context, they've also lived under a 16-year blockade. But this time they say it's different. People are saying they fear that they won't survive, and they feel the international community just doesn't care about their lives.

Here's how Palestinian journalist Wajah Abu Zarafa, who lives and works inside Gaza, put it. We are human. We are part of this world. Don't forget us. Why you allow the Israelis to kill us every day without any reasons? We are innocent people. So why is Israel destroying our homes? Why is Israel closing the border and not allow anybody to help us? They are punishing the Palestinian people. They are not punishing Hamas. They are killing the civilians. And this is what I heard in one phone call after the next. Please, for help.

That's NPR's Laila Fadl in Jerusalem. Laila, thank you. Thank you. House Republicans nominated Louisiana Congressman Steve Scalise to serve as the next Speaker of the House. Scalise won an internal GOP election against House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, but he does not have the votes to be elected by the full House of Representatives, and so the House remains frozen. Even with bipartisan calls to pass legislation supporting Israel and its war against Hamas,

nothing can happen until a new Speaker is elected. Here's NPR's congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh. Deirdre, what is the holdup here? He's still significantly short on the votes to win. Scalise is still facing a lot of resistance from fellow Republicans. As you said, he won the internal vote. He had 113 votes to 99 for Jordan, but Scalise needs 217 to be elected by the full House. Jordan quickly got behind Scalise after he won the internal vote, but some of Jordan's supporters say they still want to vote for him on the floor. Scalise can only afford to lose a handful of votes. There are 221 Republicans if they all

show up to vote. There's significantly more than a few Jordan backers are just not budging. People like Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia, Chip Roy from Texas, Lauren Boebert from Colorado. But what Republicans really want to avoid is another big public messy scene on the House floor when they need multiple rounds to elect a speaker. Scalise has been meeting one-on-one with these holdouts, but that could take a while. The list of Republicans still opposing him includes people with different concerns and demands, and it's really unclear what it could take for him to win them over. So if Scalise, though, became Speaker, what would be his most immediate challenge off the bat? I mean, he has that razor-thin House majority,

the same issue McCarthy had. Also, just the last week of chaos without a speaker has a lot of Republicans worried they look like they just can't govern right now. The House can't vote on anything. This comes at a time when Israel is dealing with that surprise attack from Hamas. Scalise made it clear his top priority would be to bring up a resolution supporting Israel. We have a lot of work to do, not just in the House for the people of this country, but we see how dangerous of a world it is and how things can change so quickly. The other big challenge for the next speaker is the federal government is still operating under a temporary funding bill, and that runs out November 17th.

So the next speaker still has just weeks to avoid a government shutdown and would have to negotiate a compromise with the Democratic Senate and President Biden. Tell us about Steve Scalise. He was McCarthy's number two. What else about him, though, did he pitch to get this nomination? Well, his experience in leadership, he's been part of the leadership team for about a decade. He argued he could bring unity after a really divisive week following McCarthy's ouster. He's more conservative than McCarthy, but just like McCarthy and Jim Jordan, Scalise voted against certifying the 2020 election results.

One of Jordan's supporters, South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace, said she's not going to vote for Scalise, citing on the fact that he met with the group of white supremacists that happened back in 2002 when he was a state representative. He later apologized. Personally, Scalise has gone through a lot. He was a victim of a mass shooting in 2017, and he almost died. Recently, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma blood cancer, but Scalise says he's doing well. He's up to the job as speaker. NPR's Deirdre Walsh, thanks for sorting this out. Thank you. All right.

Scientists are talking about their plans for artificial intelligence. Today, researchers are meeting at the National Academies here in Washington, D.C., the topic AI for scientific discovery. Join us now to discuss how researchers think AI can help is NPR science correspondent Jeff Brumfield. So, Jeff, this meeting in D.C. is open to scientists from all fields. What are they going to be talking about? Yeah, they're going to be talking about using artificial intelligence for everything from climate studies to cosmology. And the ultimate goal here is to actually make little AI scientists. I spoke to a researcher named Yolanda Gill from the University of Southern California. And she thinks eventually AI might be able to run an entire laboratory setup and run its own experiments. But if you're a first listener who's also a scientist, I know they're out there,

don't worry. There are so many questions in science, she says. The amount of work is infinite. There's not enough humans to go around to do all this work. And her hope, and the hope of a lot of researchers, is that AI can pick up the slack and make science better. But to do that, they also have to think about bias, of course. AI is encoded with all the bias that humans carry with us. And so for things like medical research, you have to be very careful about that. Yeah, there you go. Now, Jeff, I know that you recently visited a lab where scientists are using artificial intelligence. What did you see? Yeah, I went to the University of Washington's Institute for Protein Design in Seattle. And what they're doing there is designing these proteins that do everything in biology. You know,

they make up our muscles, they help our immune systems and help us digest food. These researchers want to make new ones that can do new kinds of stuff. And it was a really interesting lab. Half the lab was like test tubes and beakers and all that. And the other half was computers. So what kind of things do they want to do? I met a graduate student named Susana Vasquez-Torres. And she wants to make proteins that can basically counteract snake venom. But here's the thing. Finding the right protein has taken a lot of trial and error in the past.

And using AI has really sped up that process. I think it's just like crazy or revolutionary that we can come up with a therapeutic in a couple of months now. Whereas in the past, it might have taken years. Yeah. So how does the AI work? Yeah. In this lab, it's actually the same AI technology used in image generation. So I don't know if you've seen DALI or MidJourney, these programs that can make these amazing images. And they work by studying millions of images and then learning to make their own.

This program works by studying a bunch of proteins and then using that knowledge to try and make new ones. It's called deep learning. David Baker heads this lab, and he says a big part of why it works so well is that this protein program has had a ton of data to learn from. Our ability to design new proteins using deep learning rests entirely on the work of 40 or 50 years of graduate students and postdocs and scientists. And, you know, this is the thing about AI. We sort of have this impression it can do absolutely anything, but it needs a lot of human data to actually do its work. Now, not all fields of science have this much data, and the data isn't always as well organized. So it may not work for everyone, but it's bound to work for a lot of different fields. That's NPR science correspondent Jeff Brumfield with a really cool

assignment today. Jeff, thanks a lot. Thank you. And that's Up First for Thursday, October 12th. I'm E. Martinez. And I'm Michelle Martin. Today's episode of Up First was edited by Krishna Dev Kalamur, Arzu Rezvani, Amina Khan, and H.J. Mai. It was produced by Mansi Karana, David West, and Lily Quiroz. Our team in Israel includes Nina Kravinsky and Taylor Haney. We get engineering support from Stacey Abbott, and our technical director is Zach Coleman.

Start your day here with us tomorrow. And are you ready for more NPR news? I know that you are. There is a radio show for that. You can find NPR's Morning Edition on your NPR station at stations.npr.org. And for podcasts, local news, and the latest headlines, take NPR everywhere with the NPR app. Find that, of podcasts, local news, and the latest headlines, take NPR everywhere with the NPR app. Find that, of course, in your app store.