WSJ What’s News - National Guard Deploys to L.A. as Protests Continue

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

A.M. Edition for June 9. President Trump orders the National Guard to protect federal agents and property in Los Angeles as protests stretch into their third night. Plus, as U.S. and Chinese officials meet in London for trade talks the Journal’s Lingling Wei lays out the likely key negotiating points. And Apple tries to confront a growing list of problems, including its artificial-intelligence troubles, as it prepares for its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. Luke Vargas hosts.  Sign up for the WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The National Guard is sent to L.A. after clashes between protesters and federal officers, including immigration and customs enforcement agents. Well, we're going to have troops everywhere. We're not going to let this happen to our country. We're not going to let our country be torn apart. Plus, the U.S. and China meet for trade talks in London, and Apple kicks off its Developers Conference under the microscope over its AI progress.

If they don't talk about AI at all, they'll be seen as even further behind, but they also don't want to end up in the trap they ended up last year where they gave a big preview of stuff they're going to do and then had to backtrack that as the year progressed. It's Monday, June 9th. I'm Luke Vargas for the Wall Street Journal and here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. Protesters and law enforcement have clashed for a third night

in Los Angeles, with California Highway Patrol using flashbangs to push demonstrators off of Highway 101 and some demonstrators setting fire to driverless cars. The protests began on Friday after federal agents engaged in what appeared to be immigration enforcement and continued through the weekend. Reporter Ben Fritz was in downtown LA. I have never seen anything like this.

There's way modes are being burnt to the ground. Protesters are demanding that ICE basically leave Los Angeles. Their main argument, the signs are all about abolish ICE. Immigrants are welcome here. Late Saturday, President Trump called in the National Guard, saying the force was needed to protect federal agents and property. And by Sunday, their deployment amounted to about 300 troops of at least 2,000 sent to the city.

California Governor Gavin Newsom called the deployment purposefully inflammatory. And heard here on ABC 7 Los Angeles, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass said she was disappointed with the president's decision. I was hoping to prevent this situation from happening. I was trying to encourage the administration that if they deployed the National Guard in Los Angeles, it would create a sense of chaos. It's the last thing our city needs.

Meanwhile, the president and top officials around him are holding firm. Defense Secretary Pete Hexheth said over the weekend he was prepared to send active-duty Marines to respond to protests in California should they worsen, a prospect Trump didn't rule out. What is the bar for sending Marines? The bar is what I think it is. I mean if we see danger to our country and to our citizens, it will be very, very strong in terms of law and order. Prior to this weekend, Trump had never mobilized the National Guard without getting approval

from a state governor, though he did send federal agents to some cities, including Portland, Oregon, during protests. Delegates from the U.S. and China are set to meet for trade talks in London today, with export controls expected to take center stage as their trade war shifts focus from tariffs to access to critical products and materials. WSJ Chief China Correspondent Lingling Wei has more. Specifically the U.S. side is going to press Chinese negotiators to speed up exports of rare earths as they agreed to in Geneva last month.

And the Chinese negotiators, on the other hand, will push Washington to remove recent restrictions on the sale of jet engines and a wide variety of technology and our products to China. The stakes are really high for the global economy because those trade restrictions imposed by the two governments have been disrupting global supply chains, the flow of goods, raw materials and the components. London is a natural choice for both sides.

It's considered as a neutral place for the Chinese. In a dramatic early morning operation, Israeli forces intercepted a sailboat carrying a group of activists, including climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, as it attempted to breach the Israeli blockade on Gaza. The Israeli Foreign Ministry confirmed the ship was diverted to Israeli shores and said the activists will be returned to their home countries.

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition, which organized the voyage, said the interception occurred in international waters near Egypt's port Said, near the entrance to the Suez Canal. Colombian presidential hopeful Senator Miguel Uribe was left fighting for his life yesterday after a teenage gunman shot him in the head as he was finishing an event during the run-up to next year's presidential election. The shooting revives fears of the political violence that scarred Colombia in the 1980s and 90s, and comes as concerns mount over powerful armed militias in the country fueled by the sharp rise in the production of cocaine.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned the attack on Uribe, calling it a direct threat to democracy. Posting on social platform X, Rubio said that after years of progress, Colombia can't afford to go back to the dark days of political violence. And in business news, Apple is kicking off its Worldwide Developers Conference today. Journal Hurt on the Street tech columnist Dan Gallagher told our Tech News Briefing podcast that the event is coming at a pivotal time for the company whose stock has slid 20% so far this year, the worst run leading into the annual event since at least 2010.

They're facing this challenge of tariffs and this trade war between the US and China. And China is still where most of their products are made. They're also facing the risk that there's been these legal cases that are threatening fees from their app store, the commission they get, plus the payments they get from Google. Those are all very important contributors to their profitability. Now specifically to this conference, Apple is seeing this now trailing behind where it should be in AI.

There was some thinking that they would take their time, do it right. And their business is different than when you look at like Microsoft, Google and Amazon that run these giant cloud computing businesses with huge networks. Apple has a very different business model. It's still very hardware focused. They had to figure out a way to bring AI to their devices to get them in front of customers. So a lot of companies have struggled with this on-device AI concept, but everybody thought, okay, if a company can do it, Apple can. That hasn't proved to be the case yet. And you can hear more from Dan on today's episode of our Tech News Briefing Podcast. Coming up lately, China has gone all in on promoting homegrown technology and reducing

its foreign dependence, but it is making a major exception for American medicine. Reporter Stu Wu tells us why after the break. At Desjardins Insurance, we put the care in taking care of business. Your business, to be exact. Our agents take the time to understand your company so you get the right coverage at the right price. Whether you rent out your building,

represent a condo corporation, or own a cleaning company, we make insurance easy to understand so you can focus on the big stuff. Like your small business. Get insurance that's really big on care. Find an agent today at Desjardins.com slash business coverage. We've recently reported how China is racing toward economic self-sufficiency by weaning itself off of American technology.

However, there's one critical exception Beijing is making around buying American medicine. As journal reporter Stu Wu discussed with our Kate Bullivant, US drugs are part of China's drive to raise healthcare standards to match those of wealthy nations by the end of the decade. Stu, what type of American-made drugs are we talking about here? And how much is China actually buying from the US? Yeah, so China quietly released some exemptions to tariffs from stuff imported from America. So this included a bunch of medicines, many of which are common things like cough suppressants,

as well as vaccines. But they're also not tariffing some of the more advanced medicines like you might see for cancer or HIV treatment. And that's because they're really making this push to improve health and livelihoods of people in China, even if it means pushing back their goals for self-sufficiency. Can you give us a sense of the scale of this? How much is China actually buying from the US? Yeah, so if you look at customs data, data from the UN, China imported $52 billion worth of pharmaceuticals from other countries last year and about $7 billion a, data from the UN, China imported $52 billion worth of pharmaceuticals

from other countries last year and about $7 billion a year comes from the United States. So you report that China's life expectancy has risen in recent years to roughly 79 years old and that's on par with the US today. So given that, why does China feel they need to make this exemption as they drive to become more self-sufficient? So, about 50 years ago, life expectancy was just 60 years. But as China got more wealthy and its economy improved and infrastructure improved, there were more doctors and hospitals, that has steadily creeped up.

So about nine years ago in 2016, China's Communist Party said, okay, we're going to unveil this new plan. And our goal is by 2030 to raise life expectancy by three more years, from 76 to 79. China's Communist Party said, have were these advanced cancer drugs. And if they wanted to meet those goals, they thought, okay, let's let in the foreign technology. Let's give our people access to the most advanced drugs in the world so we can meet these goals. China is a manufacturing powerhouse. So why can't they produce these drugs themselves instead of relying on American drug producers? Yeah, it has to do with the economics of making advanced drugs. You need a lot of money and investments and you need a big wealthy market to pay for these

innovations. What country can do that? Well, the United States can do that. But China, even though it has 1.4 billion people, doesn't have this population of wealthy individuals who are willing to pay a lot of money for these really expensive cancer drugs that could cost tens of thousand dollars per treatment. So while they're really good at making a generic pharmaceuticals, they're in the really early stages of making these advanced innovative drugs for cancer and things like that. And what did US businesses tell you about their experience of selling to

China? Yeah, so if you look at some of the American drug companies that have entered China over the past nine years, they said China has made it a lot easier. There used to be a lot of bureaucracy to get something from clinical trials to the market in China. They said China's made it a lot easier. There used to be a lot of bureaucracy to get something from clinical trials to the market in China. So companies including Gilead and Eli Lilly said, China's really made this easy. And Gilead, for example, believes that China is a really important market

for the future of the company. Gilead makes a lot of HIV treatments and cancer treatments. So is this reliance from China on the US for pharmaceuticals going to continue? So that's a really interesting question. So if you look at the past few years of trade data, about $7 billion of American drugs have gone from the US to China. The thing is though, not a lot of people expect this to last. Because China's innovating really quickly, China's going to figure out how to make their own

advanced drugs that are just as good as American ones or European ones, but maybe at a fraction of the cost. Stu, thanks so much for your time. Great. Thank you for having me. And that's it for What's News for this Monday morning. Today's show was produced by Kate Bullifant. Our supervising producer was Pierce Lynch. And I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with a new show. And until then, thanks for listening.