Trump said in a social-media post that Putin has “gone absolutely CRAZY,” after Russia’s latest attack on Ukraine. Reuters reports. Police in New Orleans relied for years upon a live-facial-recognition program, an unprecedented surveillance method in the United States. The Washington Post’s Doug MacMillan explains how it worked and the controversy around it. For some 2025 grads, commencement ceremonies have become a place to protest the war in Gaza. CNN and The Guardian have the story. Plus, a car drove into a parade marking Liverpool’s Premier League soccer title, why the head of a U.S.-supported Gaza aid program resigned, and the older film titles breaking new holiday records. Today’s episode was hosted by Shumita Basu.
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Good morning. It's Tuesday, May 27th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, some college students are using commencement as a last effort to protest university leadership, how police used facial recognition technology to secretly surveil New Orleans, and the not-so-fresh names breaking box office records.
But first, Russia's war in Ukraine took dramatic military and diplomatic turns over the weekend. Russia struck Kiev and launched its largest combined aerial attack since the start of its full-scale invasion in February of 2022, killing at least 13 people. In response, President Trump came out attacking Russian President Vladimir Putin.
I'm not happy with what Putin's doing. He's killing a lot of people, and I don't know what the hell happened to Putin. I've known him a long time, always gotten along with him, but he's sending rockets into cities and killing people, and I don't like it at all.
Later on social media, he said Putin had gone, quote, absolutely crazy. But he also took aim at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, saying he was doing his country no favors. Trump's unpredictability with Russia has left analysts, allies and enemies alike searching for a strategy.
He has, on the one hand, denounced the democratically elected Zelensky as a dictator and suggested Ukraine is at least partly responsible for the war. On the other hand, Trump has, with some caveats, allowed military aid to continue flowing into the country and signed a minerals deal that could tie the two countries closer together.
Meanwhile, his latest outburst comes just a week after he celebrated a, quote, very good call with Putin. Now relations appear to have gone cold again, with Putin's spokesperson describing this as a moment prone to emotional overload. Given the ambiguity of the administration's diplomacy, it can be difficult to know what to pay attention to and predict where things might go next.
But one place to look might be to those who did this for a living and who worked for the Trump administration in his first term. Here is retired Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, Trump's former national security advisor, speaking to CNN last week as Trump was preparing to call Putin.
Even though he would make statements at the time when I was national security advisor that I found unseemly about Putin, he took strong action against him. And I think what's going to happen here is that President Trump is going to be faced with the decision to either accommodate Putin or put a hell of a lot more pressure on him.
And I think really the path that he'll ultimately take is to put a hell of a lot more pressure on him.
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