On today’s show: ABC News reports new details on the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. CNN’s Clarissa Ward takes us inside a notorious Syrian prison where some of Bashar al-Assad’s critics disappeared. Sahil Kapur of NBC News details how younger Democrats are challenging elders in the House for powerful positions. Plus, a wildfire rips through Malibu, damaging homes and spurring mass evacuations. Why the federal government wants to protect monarch butterflies. And Caitlin Clark is Time’s 2024 Athlete of the Year. Today’s episode was hosted by Shumita Basu.
Chapter 1: Who was Brian Thompson and why was he murdered?
But first, we're starting to get a clearer picture of the person charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. It's only been one week, and people across the country have been quick to project their thoughts, their assumptions, motivations onto this person. Now investigators are trying to piece together his story.
Police say Luigi Mangione was apprehended with several handwritten pages on him. In it, he expressed frustration with the health care system in America, calling health insurance companies parasitic. And he was critical of corporate greed, writing that he felt he was the, quote, first to face it with such brutal honesty.
Here's NYPD Chief of Detectives Joe Kenney discussing the note on Good Morning America yesterday.
Chapter 2: What were Luigi Mangione's motivations?
Specifically, he states how we are the number one most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet the life expectancy of an American is ranked 42 in the world. So he was writing a lot about his disdain for corporate America and in particular the healthcare industry.
Chapter 3: What do we know about Luigi Mangione's background?
Mangione faces second-degree murder, forgery, and three gun charges. And since his arrest, we've learned more about his background and interactions with the healthcare industry. Mangione grew up in Maryland, spent time in California, and most recently lived in Hawaii. He was valedictorian of his prestigious private high school in Baltimore in 2016.
He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020 and went on to work as a data engineer for a car company through late 2023. His manager told Reuters Mangione had to take two months off of work in the middle of last year for health issues related to his back. The company offers insurance through UnitedHealth and other providers.
It's not clear if Mangione was ever covered by UnitedHealth, but his social media presence paints a picture of someone who's navigated the health care system for a large part of their life.
On Reddit, a user believed to be Mangione talked about a series of chronic health issues he's experienced, including lifelong back pain, which he said got worse after an injury, eventually requiring spinal fusion surgery. An X-ray of Mangione's spine post-op was the banner image for his profile on X. A friend and former roommate told Good Morning America he got the surgery in 2023.
My understanding is his spine was misaligned. It wasn't like he was always in severe pain, but it seems like certain things would trigger it.
After the surgery, Mangione reportedly ghosted a lot of the people in his life. A high school classmate told ABC that his family was reaching out to friends in recent months, asking if anyone had heard from him. According to the San Francisco Standard, his mom filed a missing persons report with police in San Francisco in mid-November.
For many, the news of his arrest was the first update they had gotten in months. His family said in a statement they were shocked and devastated. Mangione appeared in court in Pennsylvania yesterday, where he's being held without bail. His defense team is fighting his extradition to New York. It could be weeks before he returns to New York to face the murder charge against him.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Bashar al-Assad's fall?
His lawyer says he plans to plead not guilty. Let's turn now to the latest in the aftermath of the fall of former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Questions are swirling over what the end of Assad's decade-long rule and the Syrian civil war will mean for the region. Over the past few days, Israeli forces launched multiple strikes across Syria, targeting military installations and airports.
Images show charged ships floating in ports and other smoldering wreckage. Israeli troops have also been sent into and beyond a demilitarized buffer zone along the Syria-Israeli border. Israel said it's destroyed Syria's navy and that the strikes are preemptive, meant to keep abandoned weapons out of the hands of rebel groups, though these operations have drawn international criticism.
We managed to reach CNN's chief international correspondent, Clarissa Ward. She's in Syria now.
We have heard Israeli airstrikes throughout the night, almost every night since Bashar al-Assad fell. Israel has taken more territory along its border with Syria, they say, to create a sort of buffer zone, a security zone. But that has raised concern and some anguish here, of course, in Syria, too. I think it's also very difficult to predict what the region will look like going forward.
Meanwhile, for Iran, a close ally of the Assad regime, his ousting comes as Iran's proxies have seen considerable losses at the hands of Israel.
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Chapter 5: How has the region responded to Assad's ousting?
For Iran, the fall of Bashar al-Assad is a devastating blow. It comes on the heels of Hezbollah's leadership in Lebanon being decimated by Israel. And really, it signifies the end of this Iranian project that we saw across the so-called Shia crescent.
Within Syria, Ward says that citizens seem to oscillate between hope and uncertainty when it comes to the future.
The Assad family ruled Syria for more than 50 years, and it was a brutal, totalitarian police state. Even before the civil war began, uprisings like one in the city of Hama were crushed with brute force. There was no political freedom. There's definitely a mixture of emotions, excitement, jubilation, trepidation, as everyone waits to see what this new chapter will bring.
Many Syrians have loved ones who had been jailed indiscriminately during Assad's reign. Ward visited one of the most notorious prisons, where many people have gathered in recent days, hoping to see a familiar face.
The Sednaya prison is really synonymous with Assad's brutal regime, with its industrial scale mechanisms of forcible, arbitrary detainment and torture and killing. It was dubbed by human rights groups as a slaughterhouse where people vanished, never to be seen again.
When we arrived at the Sednaya prison, we saw thousands of people pouring in from all over the country, desperately looking for their loved ones. Despite prisons being emptied, for some, their questions may never get answered. Is my son dead or alive? Is my sister or brother in this prison or that prison?
The cruelty, the agony of not knowing, of not having that closure is something that will live on here for many years to come.
It's no secret that Congress is old. You can see it pretty plainly on both sides of the aisle. In the last Congress, the median age in the Senate was 65. In the House, it was 58. And now, in the face of a new Republican administration with the oldest president in U.S. history, some Democrats are wondering if they should shake things up and give younger lawmakers more opportunities.
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Chapter 6: What are the emotions of Syrians in the aftermath of the Assad regime?
We called up Sahil Kapoor, senior national political reporter with NBC News, and he told us about one corner of Congress where this fight is brewing behind the scenes. Challenges for top committee roles, like the House Oversight Committee, where New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is 35, has thrown her hat in the ring to lead for her party.
She's up against 74-year-old Jerry Connolly, who has esophageal cancer and was recently elected to his ninth term.
Younger Democrats are less inclined to accept this deeply entrenched system of seniority, this culture that exists within the House Democratic Caucus, where people who have been there longer, people who have seniority on a panel, typically get the jobs they want.
Similar challenges are taking place in the Natural Resources Committee and the Agriculture Committee. Kapoor explained why we're seeing this trend.
Chapter 7: What happened to those imprisoned during Assad's rule?
There have been various instances in recent years that Democrats I've talked to have pointed to as examples of where deference to elders has not paid off for them.
Some Democrats felt burned by having to pressure President Biden to drop out of the presidential race over concerns about his age. Kapoor also mentioned Senator Dianne Feinstein, who died in office in her 90s.
And the final aspect of this is former Speaker Nancy Pelosi holding that top job in the Democratic conference for about two decades, which is really extraordinary. There was a lot of tension simmering just underneath the surface.
If Ocasio-Cortez succeeds in her bid for this role on the Oversight Committee, she would play a prominent role investigating the Trump administration. Even more so if Democrats retake the House in 2026. It's a huge level up in power for someone who's only been in office for six years.
And it bucks the longstanding norm within the Democratic Party that leadership roles go to the people who are most senior. To get here, Kapoor says she has had to compromise a bit with the establishment. But overall, he says she's mostly held firm to her progressive platform.
I think she sees her role as being progressive, but also somewhat pragmatic, not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, saying no when she feels the need to, but also compromising in certain spaces when it does move the ball forward, even if it's just a little bit.
House Democrats are expected to start selecting new committee leaders next week. Before we let you go, a few other stories being featured in the Apple News app. Emergency responders in Malibu, California, continue to fight a wildfire that erupted in the affluent seaside city yesterday. Officials say thousands of people were evacuated while firefighters struggled with the blaze.
Thousands of acres are already affected, including parts of Pepperdine University, where students were told to shelter in place as flames could be seen from the campus. Stretches of the scenic Pacific Coast Highway were also closed to traffic, and some homes and other structures are reported to have burned. This is a fast-moving story, and you can follow along for updates in the Apple News app.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to protect the monarch butterfly, a beloved species known for its epic migration through North America whose numbers are declining. The agency on Tuesday moved to designate the monarch butterfly as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, which carries with it specific protections.
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