The Headlines: May 23

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to his dealings in foreign countries going back to 2017.

could be the biggest water crisis facing America.

they were going to place their bets and fight it out.

I'm Annie Couriel.

Today's Tuesday, May 23rd.

Here's what we're covering.

into former President Trump.

And on Monday, we got a little peek into one of those investigations, the one which touches

on Trump's handling of classified documents after he left the White House.

What we learned on Monday was that the office of special counsel Jack Smith issued a subpoena

to the Trump Organization, President Trump's business, for records relating to his dealings

in foreign countries going back to 2017, when President Trump was sworn into office.

Now, we don't know exactly why Jack Smith's office wants to figure out sort of, you know,

gaining insight into Trump's ventures overseas.

But in context, it would suggest that there is an effort afoot to connect Trump's deal-making

in foreign countries with the classified documents that he took with him when he left the White

House.

So there are a couple of details that may prove to be instructive in all of this.

The specific countries that the special counsel's office mentioned in its subpoena were places

like China, France, Turkey, and then several Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi

Arabia and Oman.

Separately, we know that some of the documents that were found in Trump's possession had

some relation to Middle Eastern countries.

We also know that when the FBI searched Trump's private club and residence in Florida, Mar-a-Lago,

they found some documents related to a briefing about President Emmanuel Macron of France.

We don't know if there's a direct connection between the request for foreign business dealings

about these countries and these documents that at least seem tangentially to be related

to those countries, but those connections could prove to be relevant to what the special

counsel's office is looking for.

Now, that said, there is no evidence to date that prosecutors have found any connections

of that nature.

But the point of all of this appears to be an attempt to divine a motive for why Trump

took certain documents with him.

The grand jury investigation that this subpoena we just learned about is part of is coming

to an end.

The testimony and the subpoenas, you know, we believe that that phase of the investigation

is wrapping up.

And what that would suggest is that special counsel's office would then sort of begin

the process of deciding whether or not to bring charges, and if so, what charges to

bring.

So all of this kind of investigative fodder will have a little more clarity about where

it's all headed in the weeks to come.

of the most important river systems in the country and probably the area where America

is most vulnerable right now to the effects of climate change.

effort to keep the Colorado River from going dry.

It's been called the lifeblood of the Southwest United States, and that's probably fair.

It provides drinking water for 40 million or so Americans.

It provides hydroelectric power to millions of homes and businesses.

It's really hard to imagine how Arizona and Nevada and California in particular would

survive in their current form if the Colorado were to dry up.

Climate change has meant the flow of the river has decreased significantly by roughly one-third

in recent years compared to historical averages.

That change became a crisis last summer when it looked as though the two reservoirs on

the river could get so low that the turbines creating power, especially at the Hoover Dam,

would no longer have enough water to generate that electricity.

And since then, the Biden administration and the states that draw from that river have

been wrangling over what to do about it.

And Monday's agreement reflects those states and the government finally reaching a position

they can all agree to.

This is a complicated deal, but the top line takeaway is that the federal government is

doing two things.

First, it's spending $1.2 billion to compensate water users that voluntarily reduce the amount

of water they use from the river.

And then on top of that, the government has got an agreement from Nevada, California and

Arizona that among themselves, those three states will find a way to achieve the additional

cuts required.

And together, those two things on paper will stop the Colorado system from collapsing at

least until the end of 2026.

This deal isn't perfect by any stretch.

This deal relies significantly on federal money, and it's unclear how long federal taxpayers

will still be willing to pay water users in the Southwest to use less water.

But the biggest challenge is the deal only lasts for the next three and a half years.

And by the end of 2026, there's supposed to be a new agreement in place, and that new

agreement will be almost certainly harder to negotiate than this one, because as climate

change keeps getting worse, the amount of water in the river will keep going down.

And over time, it'll be harder and harder for states to find a way to cut their water

use that doesn't meaningfully impair their economies or their population growth.

So Monday's announcement maybe is best seen as a precursor and a preview to that next

round of really tough negotiations that will then determine the future of the Southwest.

and watching this battle play out below, I mean, it was almost like a panoramic view

of this level of violence that I had never seen before in my life, just unprecedented

levels of destruction.

city that became the site of the longest-running sustained fight in the war.

On Monday, a top Ukrainian official essentially acknowledged that the city had been lost.

My colleague Thomas Gibbons-Neff has reported from Bakhmut several times since the war began.

In his early visits there last year, he saw the city before it became a major focus of

the fighting.

by salt mines, and most of the world had never heard of Bakhmut.

I have this fond memory of these shawarma stands in the middle of town that would just

have lines of soldiers lined up each day, and some would be coming off the front and

others would be going to the front and they'd be grabbing food there and sharing stories

and you could just kind of hear off in the distance the dull thud of artillery.

As the weeks went on, it kept getting louder and louder until the eastern part of the city

was under heavy shelling and apartment buildings were getting hit.

By the late fall in November, artillery was hitting the city center, it was hitting around

the hospital, windows were shattering, places that had been shelled before were being shelled

again.

It was kind of like a slow-moving storm that just kept getting closer and closer and closer

until there were parts of the city you couldn't go anymore, parts of the city that were destroyed.

No matter how many troops the Ukrainians poured in, new American weapons, the Russians

just kept getting closer and closer until just this weekend when the last couple buildings

that the Ukrainians were fighting from gave out and retreated.

It's always an unknown what battles are going to be the big one, how wars kind of move and

evolve and where armies decide to meet on the battlefield and Bakhmut and its strategic

significance was this kind of phrase that was tossed around for months by analysts and

military officials and Pentagon spokespeople was that Bakhmut wasn't important because

it wasn't on a rail line, it wasn't near a supply line, it was on low ground.

But it didn't really matter because both militaries and their leadership had decided this was

where they were going to place their bets and fight it out and either hold it or take it.

At the battle's end, it easily joins this pantheon of other battles, whether it be Fallujah,

Iwo Jima, Gettysburg, they're all kind of a part of this list of places that maybe before

these battles occurred were not that well known.

And because of the incredible amount of human life invested and lost, now becomes something

kind of larger than itself.

And for the people and the soldiers there, I mean, the soldiers are reckoning with, you

know, was it worth it?

And the civilians there will be picking up the pieces for decades.

I'm Annie Correal.

We'll be back tomorrow.