Zelensky Brings Backup to the White House, and Why Young Firefighters Are Getting Sick

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From the New York Times, it's the headlines.

I'm Tracy Mumford.

Today's Monday, August 18th.

Here's what we're covering.

At the White House today, President Trump is hosting Ukrainian President Vlodymir Zelensky, just days after he rolled out the red carpet for Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska.

At that meeting, he greeted Putin warmly, and behind closed doors, the two discussed how to end the war in Ukraine.

Trump went into the summit, saying it was crucial for Ukraine and Russia to reach a ceasefire and pause the fighting as a step toward full-scale peace talks.

But Trump came out of the conversation, taking Putin's side on the issue, saying that wasn't necessary.

When President Trump made it clear that he had suddenly abandoned the idea of a ceasefire, it took all of his allies by by surprise.

David Sanger is a White House correspondent for The Times.

He says European leaders were caught off guard by Trump's abrupt pivot because he just agreed to the plan on a phone call with them days before.

Their theory is that a ceasefire will stop Russia from gaining any more ground or leverage while talks are underway.

Now, they're also concerned that Trump has backed Russia's proposal for Ukraine to cede a large portion of its territory as part of any peace deal.

David says that against that backdrop, at least six European leaders are also flying to Washington to meet with Trump, basically to back Zelensky up.

That includes the British prime minister, the German chancellor, and the head of NATO.

While they won't say so in public, all of them are trying to figure out whether President Trump has aligned himself too closely with President Putin.

And part of the reason you're seeing this trip to Washington is the European leaders trying to make sure they can pull the alliance together so they don't have a different strategy than Washington does?

They've just got to make sure that all of the major allies are singing from the same hymn book here, because every time they think they have their lines together with President Trump, something goes awry.

David says that according to one senior European diplomat he spoke to, there's also another top concern.

Making sure that there's no repeat of Zelensky's last visit to the Oval Office back in February, when Trump berated him in front of the cameras for not being grateful enough for U.S.

support.

Over the weekend, the Trump administration announced that it has stopped issuing visas for people from Gaza after right-wing outcry over the program.

The visitor visas had been a pathway for a small number of Palestinians, including children, to get medical care in the U.S.

In the past few weeks, several young children were brought into the country on those visas after being injured in Gaza.

A video of some of them arriving seems to have kicked off the backlash.

The right-wing activist Laura Loomer, who has a history of anti-Islam rhetoric, shared a video of people cheering as Palestinian kids landed at the San Francisco airport.

It was originally posted by the nonprofit group HEAL Palestine, which arranged for some of the kids' travel.

Loomer claimed that the group was connected to Hamas.

She went on to call other recent flights with Gazans on them a national security threat and tagged state and federal officials in her posts.

She also said she spoke personally to Secretary of State Marco Rubio to alert him to what she called the threat of an Islamic invasion.

We had outreach from multiple congressional offices asking questions about it.

Rubio then announced the policy change, saying he'd been given evidence that some of the organizations arranging the travel had, quote, strong links to terrorist groups.

And so we're going to reevaluate how those visas are being granted, not just to the children, but how those visas are being granted to the people who are accompanying them.

On social media, Loomer celebrated the move, taking credit for the fast response.

Over the course of the Trump administration, she seemed to have a tremendous amount of sway with the White House, considering she has no official government position.

For example, multiple high-ranking officials that she singled out as, quote, disloyal to the president have gone on to be fired.

In terms of the visas, a former State Department official who worked on Israeli-Palestinian affairs in the Biden administration told the Times that any Gazans coming to the U.S.

could only get visas by undergoing background checks and that they would have had to be cleared by Israeli forces to even leave Gaza in the first place.

He added, quote, from what I saw, any insinuation that we were taking an unusual security risk in these cases is baseless.

I spent a lot of time going to the parts of the country where wildland firefighters tend to live.

I spoke with more than 250 firefighters, and what I found was that a lot of these people were very sick.

I was talking to people in their 40s who are being told that they need to get double lung transplants, people in their 20s who have very serious cancer diagnoses, people who have had to leave this work because their lungs got so damaged that they could barely walk up a flight of steps.

It's just this wide variety of damage that's really permanent and disabling.

Hannah Dreyer is an investigative reporter at The Times who has been looking at the crippling health issues facing the crews who fight wildfires in the U.S.

She says that decades of research have shown links between the smoke that firefighters are exposed to and a range of serious health conditions.

But unlike regular firefighters who would never rush into a burning building without a mask, the wildfire crews are often just wearing cloth bandanas for protection or nothing at all.

Again and again, the Forest Service asked its own researchers to investigate how to keep their workers safe.

And the internal recommendation came back, we need to find a mask for these guys.

Instead of providing masks, the Forest Service then just asked for more research.

And so more reports came back, always saying, we really need to find a way to give these guys respiratory protection.

And instead, the Forest Service did nothing.

Hannah says the Forest Service told her it wants to protect its crews, but it argued that masks are too risky.

They could cause firefighters to overheat.

So it's gone as far as banning firefighters on the front lines from wearing them altogether, even if they wanted to.

Internal records suggest, and people have told me, that the reason that the Forest Service has been so resistant to masks is that requiring them would mean admitting that smoke is truly dangerous.

That could then be hugely costly for the agency.

It could mean that the Forest Service would be on the hook for all of these medical conditions associated with

The Forest Service might have a harder time recruiting people for these very low-wage jobs.

And they might also have to hire more workers to allow people to take breaks periodically from the smoke.

What a lot of these guys have told me is they really see themselves as public servants.

They take huge pride in having gone out there and put their own lives on the line to protect other people and protect communities.

And now they feel like they really weren't protected.

You can find the full investigation into the dangers facing wildfire crews at nytimes.com.

And finally, I will cancel any home insurance and use SafeU instead.

There's an actor out of Dallas, Texas, a guy in his 50s named Scott Jackman, who gets hit up every week or so by friends who say, hey, I saw you in an ad on TikTok.

Knowing your birth date's meaning can help you understand yourself better.

They see him pitching insurance, a horoscope ad.

Sometimes in Spanish.

But he doesn't speak Spanish, and his voice and gestures seem kind of off in all the ads.

That's because he didn't record any of them.

Instead, he licensed his likeness to TikTok last year, and now his digital avatar is out there, available for advertisers to use him to pitch anything they want within TikTok's guidelines.

For companies, it's way cheaper and easier than doing a full ad shoot themselves, and they can choose from more than a dozen avatar options of different ages, genders, and ethnicities.

The end result is what looks like a testimonial video from a real person.

There's a small label that says AI generated.

He says he got a one-time payment of $750 for the deal.

Now that he's seen himself, or some Twilight Zone version of himself, out there in the wild, he says he has regrets.

He wishes he'd negotiated for more money and for some guardrails around how his likeness could be used.

Another performer the Times talked to said he regretted licensing his likeness after his avatar appeared in ads stating certain sexual preferences.

Other people who did similar deals also had regrets, saying they didn't totally understand just how widely their faces would travel.

But another performer the Times talked with said she was okay with it, even if she admitted that it was, quote, kind of creepy to sometimes be scrolling through the app and stumble across a video of herself saying words that never actually actually came out of her mouth.

Those are the headlines today on the daily.

It's good for America that we have Republicans and Democrats that can spend an hour and a half in a room together and yeah, there's some shouting and yelling, but I got the chance to say what I wanted to say and they got the chance in their eyes to hold me accountable.

A conversation with one of the few Republican congressmen who's been willing to hold an in-person town hall recently against the advice of GOP leadership.

You can listen to that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Tracy Mumford.

We'll be back tomorrow.