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Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to USA Today's The Excerpt ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. This episode of The Excerpt is brought to you by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Stay tuned after the show to learn more. Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson. Today is Monday, May 27th, 2024. This is The Excerpt.
Today, dozens have been killed in Israeli airstrikes on Rafah. Plus, Vietnam War activists speak out amid this year's college protests. And we've got answers on why orcas keep ramming boats.
Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 35 Palestinians in Rafah and injured dozens, according to Palestinian health and civil emergency service officials. Israel's military said its air force struck a Hamas compound in the southern Gaza city and that the strike was carried out with precise ammunition and on the basis of precise intelligence. Israeli officials said the strike took out Hamas's chief of staff for the West Bank and another senior official behind deadly attacks on Israelis.
The strike took place in a neighborhood where thousands were taking shelter after fleeing other parts of the city where Israeli forces began a ground offensive over two weeks ago. Officials in Gaza say women and children are among the victims.
Yesterday, Hamas launched missiles at Tel Aviv, setting off sirens in Israel's financial center for the first time in four months. The Israeli military said eight projectiles were identified crossing from the area of Rafah. In a statement on its Telegram channel, the Hamas al-Qassam brigades said the rockets were launched in response to Zionist massacres against civilians.
Amid the spring's protests on college campuses against Israel's war in Gaza, some former Vietnam War activists are looking back on their own strategy decades later. I spoke with USA Today Congress campaigns and democracy reporter Carissa Waddick for more. Carissa, thanks for hopping on. Yeah, of course. Happy to be here. So Carissa, you spoke with several folks who protested the Vietnam War generations ago. Tell us about one of them here at the start, Michael Ansara and his story.
Ansar actually started protesting when he was 13 years old, protesting the civil rights movement and then the Vietnam War. He got involved with the group Students for a Democratic Society when he went to Harvard University. And SDS was a leftist group at the time.
in the 60s, that they were kind of at the forefront of protesting the Vietnam War. So when he was at Harvard, he confronted the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. He led sit-ins against a recruiter for Dow Chemicals who made the weapon napalm. And he continued in the anti-war protests for many years after he graduated college in 1968.
Like a lot of students today, Ansara back then didn't vote in the 1968 presidential election because of his anger towards the way politicians, and particularly the Democratic presidential nominee at the time, Hubert Humphrey, were responding to the Vietnam War. So that election was between, like I said, Humphrey on the Democratic side and Richard Nixon on the Republican side. And
Ansara and a lot of the people that he protested with at the time, a lot of the young people, they saw Nixon and Humphrey as kind of two evils. And they kind of equated them. They didn't see much difference between the two of them. He said, you know, one of the chants at the time was, vote with your feet, vote in the street. And that's what he and a lot of other protesters did. They didn't go to the ballot box. They said that we're going to let our opinions be known with the anger that we show towards how politicians were responding to the Vietnam War.
There's also Mark Nason in this piece. He protested on campus at Columbia University back in the 60s. What did he say about his experience and what he's seeing in this moment as students at his alma mater took to protesting this spring? My colleague Savannah talked to Mark, who is now he's a professor of history at Fordham University. And when he was at Columbia in 1968, he was
Part of the protest kind of urging the university to end its connections to military research in support of the Vietnam War and to cease construction of a gym that they were building that the protesters believed promoted segregation. And so, as you might imagine, today, he said he had deja vu watching the protests unfold across the country, but particularly at Columbia University.
And particularly, he said, you know, the students taking over Hamilton Hall was very reminiscent of when Vietnam War protesters did the same thing at Hamilton Hall in 68. He says that, you know, students today aren't likely to support Biden because of his response to the Israel-Hamas war. He knows that as kind of a professor talking to these kids.
But he said that he expects people that he protested with back in the 60s to support the president this year. Kind of a difference of generations a little bit. And Carissa, you spoke with Jan Barry. What did he say about seeing himself in the protesters and how young people view the Biden administration's handling of the Israel Hamas war?
He fought in the Vietnam War in the early 60s, and he joined the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He said that if he didn't have handicaps currently, he's in his early 80s, that he'd be out there right now with the protesters. Barry has some health conditions related to exposure to Agent Orange in the Vietnam War currently, so he can't be out there. But like many of the young protesters today, he doesn't agree with the way Biden is handling
handling the war in Gaza. You know, we've seen Democrats across the country vote uncommitted in Democratic primaries to protest Biden's response to the war. And in the June 4th primary in New Jersey, Barry said that he's going to do the same thing. He's going to cast a ballot uncommitted to vote against the president. When it comes to the November election, he said that
There really isn't an option. He's going to have to vote for Biden because he doesn't want to see Trump in the presidency again. Chris, really, how do young Americans feel about Biden and his handling of this war? A lot of young people have said that they are disillusioned with the way Biden has handled the Israel Hamas war. We saw it in the protests on college campuses, worried about the civilian lives in Gaza. You know, Mark, who my colleague Savannah spoke with, he said that a lot of these young students are
calling the president Genocide Joe, and that they don't want to vote for him in November because of his response to the war and his support of Israel in the conflict. You know, many of the folks you spoke with, Carissa, said they're hesitant to be too prescriptive with their advice for younger Americans in this moment.
What do they say about advising the younger generation right now? These old Vietnam War protesters, they're now in their 70s and 80s. But when they were younger, they were progressives and they still are. Most of them that I talk to, there's this common phrase of people get older, they become more conservative.
Well, everyone I talked to said, we're not more conservative. I'm still progressive. I'm still the leftist I was. If anything, I'm just a little bit more pragmatic. They don't want to tell young people because they know that when they were in their early 20s and late 20s, that they wouldn't have listened to older people telling them what to do, how to run their protests, whether to vote or not. They saw the government as corrupt back then, and nobody could really tell them different.
So their message is kind of learn from our experience. Carissa Waddock covers Congress campaigns and democracy for USA Today. Thank you, Carissa. Thank you. Powerful storms, including tornadoes, killed at least 15 people across the central U.S. yesterday from Kentucky to Texas. At least 100 others were injured in a Texas storm and more than 200 homes were destroyed in the state, according to Governor Greg Abbott.
Indianapolis Motor Speedway officials delayed the start of yesterday's Indianapolis 500 car race because of impending inclement weather in Indiana and asked the 125,000-plus fans inside the venue to exit the grandstands for several hours. You can follow along with today's weather events on usatoday.com.
Orcas in recent years have been ramming and sinking boats, and scientists may now know why. I spoke with USA Today national correspondent Elizabeth Weiss to learn more. Hello, Beth. Hey. Thanks for hopping back on the excerpt. So what exactly is going on with these orcas attacking and sinking boats? I know we've heard about this for a few years, Beth.
Yeah, it's been going on since 2020 and it's kind of around the Straits of Gibraltar, Spain, France, Morocco, Tunisia. And basically what's been happening is orcas have come up mostly to sailboats. They ram into them and sometimes so hard that they've sunk six.
And nobody's been hurt yet. There was a sinking about a week ago now. It was the first of the season. So why is this happening? What are the orcas actually trying to do here, Beth? Nobody really knew. And the governments of Spain and Portugal pulled together this kind of August group of orca experts from around the world in Madrid in February to try and figure out what's happening, why is it happening, and how can we stop it?
There was a lot of crazy stories out last year that, you know, it was an orca mother who had seen her child be killed by a sailboat. And now this was her revenge. And she taught all the other orcas to attack sailboats. And it's not that, but it is fascinating. So what the experts think is happening is that this orca population in particular eats pretty much only bluefin tuna.
And bluefin tuna in that area of the world had been deeply overfished and so they were in danger. So the orcas had to spend all their time looking for prey. So the orcas were just really busy all the time. But we stopped overfishing the bluefin tuna. And that meant that suddenly,
This group of orcas, there's about 40 to 50 in this population, suddenly had a lot of time on their hands. Orcas are very intelligent. They have culture, they share information, they teach each other things. And you had a bunch of basically adolescent orcas who were bored. And they think that because they had all this time, that's when they started ramming rudders.
It's fascinating, Beth. So, you know, I'm curious, is this specific to this area off Gibraltar or do other orca pods around the world engage in any similar behavior? These orcas are attacking rudders and they like to ram them with their heads, break the rudder off and then play with the pieces of wood. While other orca pods don't engage in this behavior, they do engage in fat.
There was a whole group up in Puget Sound, the area I'm from, we have two main resident orca pods up there. One of them in 1987,
suddenly had this craze for taking a dead salmon and kind of perching it on their head and swimming around with it. A couple of the young orcas started doing that and like suddenly all the orcas in the pods were doing it. So they were swimming around with like dead salmon hats for the better part of a season and then they got over it and they stopped.
So it's like they are prone to fads and crazes. And the scientists think that this is just, you know, a fad. So should people be concerned about this, Beth, even if it's not necessarily malicious, as we've outlined, but how can people out on boats prepare and should they be worried at all? So the good news coming out of this meeting is they did come up with some guidelines that already seem to have actually helped a lot. They basically said, look,
we know where the orcas are we know where they tend to be during the course of especially in summer which is when all the voters are out during the period when the orcas and the tuna are in this place you basically don't want to sail straight through the middle of it it's better to sail closer into shore where it's shallower because
Orcas don't like to swim in really shallow waters. And originally, like two years ago, they were telling people if a group of orcas start to coalesce around you and maybe bump into your ship,
turn off the engines and just stop. But it turns out that didn't help because that just meant that they could get to the rudder easier. So what they're saying now is go not as fast as you can, but at a reasonable pace, head towards land, go away from the orcas because after a mile or so they kind of give up and they have find something else to play with. And hopefully they'll just forget about you and go away because you know, they're teenagers and they have short attention spans. And if anything does happen, you're closer to shore and it's easier to rescue you.
Already, mariners in that area have started to do these things and the number of attacks appears to have diminished significantly already this year. So, I mean, we'll see. Time will tell. All right. Elizabeth Weiss is a national correspondent with USA Today. Thanks as always, Beth. Always happy to be here. For more, be sure to check out my co-host Dana Taylor's deep dive episode on orcas from a few months ago. We have a link in today's show notes.
And today is Memorial Day. It's more than just a long weekend for many Americans and a chance to hit the barbecue or the beach. The holiday is meant to honor all U.S. soldiers who have died serving their country. Originally called Decoration Day, Memorial Day's history goes back to the Civil War. It was declared a national holiday by Congress in 1971, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
In 2000, the National Moment of Remembrance Act was created and encourages all to pause at 3 p.m. local time for a minute of silence. Whatever you're up to on this unofficial start to summer, take a chance to remember fallen soldiers. And thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your pods. And if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson, back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA Today.
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