Transcript of Syria's New Reality, Shooting Suspect's Ideology, Judges Block Grocery Merger

People in Syria are slowly settling into a new reality.

The fall of the Assad regime offers new opportunities but also creates big challenges. What's the priority for Syrians going forward? We'll hear from NPR's Ruth Sherlock in Damascus.

I mean, Martinez, that's Michelle Martin, and this is up first from NPR News. The alleged gunman's motive in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is still unclear.

I mean, we could speculate on a 100 different things.

Police have been sifting through Luigi Mangione's online history since his arrest and learn more about his ideology. We'll get an update on what they found.

And the proposed merger between 2 grocery giants hangs in the balance. Yesterday, 2 separate judges in 2 separate cases blocked Kroger and Albertsons from joining forces. Is the merger dead? Stay with us. We'll give you the news you need to start your day.

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It's been 4 days since Syrian president Bashar al Assad fled the country.

And celebrations are settling down. People there are starting to think about the huge challenges facing the war torn country.

And perhaps Ruth Sherlock is in Damascus, and she's here to tell us more. Good morning, Ruth.

Good morning. So what's

the situation there like now?

Well, you know, you might be able to hear the high caliber rounds being fired behind me. It's the rebels' testing weaponry they've acquired. But apart from these explosions, they seem to be trying to keep a pretty light touch here, Michelle. You know, they swept down from this rural province of Idlib, and they seem to be trying to show damascenes, people from here, that they can go about their business. And there's not even a lot of checkpoints, for example.

And what is quite extraordinary is they seem to now be handling a relatively managed handover of power. They formed this new transitional government. And this even includes some politicians from the old regime. They're pardoning soldiers who were conscripted into the military service, but they are dismantling the feared security apparatus, the intelligence bases of the regime, and saying that they will bring war criminals to justice. A lot of the new faces in this new government are, similar to the those in the Islamist led government in the rebel held province of Idlib that they controlled for years.

They are projecting moderate stances for now, saying women can dress as they please, for example. But, you know, many Syrians say it's still really too early to know how this will go.

So we we mentioned earlier that the city seems to be quieting down. What are you hearing about people's main priorities right now?

Well, look, a big priority here is the missing. You know, this regime ruled with fear, and rights groups estimate tens of thousands of people disappeared into prisons and detention centers of the regime's main intelligence agencies. And, under Assad, their families weren't even told, you know, where they were being held, why they were being held, or even if they were alive. So we went to Sednaya prison. That's 1 of the most feared complexes known for torture, mass executions.

And now it's just open. You can walk right in. And the prisoners were released by rebels in the first hours after the regime fell. But so many more are still missing. And now the prisoner's full of relatives.

They're searching for clues about their loved ones that were taken in jail and mainly, you know, maybe trying to find some kind of closure. 1 elderly man, Ratib Zemalkani, he was walking away from the prison as we walked up, and he had this rope tied like a noose in his hand. And he said he believed this was used to hang prisoners. He's saying, why did they have to put my son in cells underground? Where is he?

Where is he, he asks. And he tells us he took the noose from the prison to show the world the cruelty of the Assad regime. There's some really disturbing pictures coming from there. So so, Ruth, under the old regime, there was a lot of foreign involvement in Syria, mainly from Russia and Iran, but even the US had troops there. What is the latest with all these different players?

Well, Israel has carried out hundreds of air strikes in Damascus and around to stop what it calls strategic weapons from falling into the wrong hands. The Russians still have their airbase here and a naval port in Syria's Tartus, and the Americans are still here with a mission to help Kurdish allies fight the extremist group, ISIS, that is still operating in the central Syrian desert. So there are a lot of foreign countries involved here still.

That is NPR's Ruth's Sherlock in Damascus. Ruth, as always, thank you.

Thanks, Michelle.

Here's some of what we know about Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare last week on a Manhattan sidewalk.

He's a member of a prominent Maryland family. Mangione graduated top of his class from an elite prep school and received 2 degrees from an Ivy League school. He also reportedly suffered a major back injury and underwent surgery a couple of years ago. Investigators and some extremism researchers have been sifting through this picture to see whether there's evidence of a clear ideology behind the killing.

NPR's Odette Yousef covers domestic extremism, and she's here with us now to tell us more. Good morning, Odette.

Good morning, Michelle.

So you've looked at some of Mangione's social media, and you've spoken with others who have as well. What did you learn?

Well, he appeared to keep several accounts on sites, including x Facebook and Goodreads. And there are a few things that raise questions. On his Goodreads account, for example, he posted an excerpt from the writings of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. So we might wonder how that may relate to a trajectory toward political violence. Also, 1 of the pictures on, his x account banner is an x-ray of a spine with 4 large screws inserted in what looks like a major surgery.

Now we don't know for certain that this is his x-ray, but there are reports that he may have sustained this injury on a surfing accident in Hawaii. But all told, Michelle, his digital footprint really doesn't clarify much, because it cut off in the spring. Here's Jared Holt of the Institute For Strategic Dialog.

And 6 months is a long time for somebody to radicalize further, for them to fly off the rails, maybe have a mental health crisis. I mean, we could speculate on a 100 different things, but there's a big, big gap in what happened in those 6 months.

Odette, you know, according to the police, he was found with a handwritten note. NPR has not obtained a copy, but other news outlets say they have, and they've printed it or portions of it. From what you've seen, does it fill in some of those gaps?

Well, from what's been shared by other reporting, this short note conveys a deep anger toward the health care industry and and a feeling that someone had to do something about it. But other than that, no. You know, if some of this ties back to a possible injury that he had and perhaps what he ran into while trying to get care, it doesn't make any of those connections. Now that he's in custody, I imagine we're gonna learn much more. But there is another part of this that's troubling, and that part is the valorization that we're seeing of the suspect within some of the mainstream public.

Can you say more about that? What does that look like?

So this killing, you know, seemed to tap into the feeling that seemingly most Americans have had at 1 time or another of frustration and helplessness with the health care industry. What really struck me, though, is that I have typically seen people who commit mass violence or political violence praised, even venerated as martyrs in really kind of dark corners of the extremist world, you know, within online communities that emulate mass shooters, for instance, or in violent white supremacist spaces. So seeing a much wider and mainstream public call this suspect a, quote, hero, is troubling. And for extremist analysts that I spoke to, you know, this really kind of speaks to how Americans have, over time, become more open minded toward political violence.

That's NPR's Odette Yousef. Odette, thank you.

Thank you.

It's the end of the grocery mega merger of Kroger's and Albertson's. Albertson's has now terminated a deal and sued Kroger after their merger was blocked by 2 separate judges in state and federal courts. It would have been the biggest grocery deal in US history. Now it's turning into a bitter divorce. NPR's Alina Seljuk has followed it all.

So what happened?

Yeah. So the $25,000,000,000 grocery merger is over. Yesterday, the deal got a double whammy of legal losses. A federal judge in Oregon and a state judge in Washington in 2 separate cases blocked the merger from going through in rulings that were about an hour within each other. And this was after 2 years of the companies trying to get this merger approved.

And they did have an option to appeal and keep fighting, but Albertsons has now walked away. Albertsons has sued Kroger, claiming willful breach of contract, failure to put in best efforts to secure regulatory approval of the merger. Now Kroger has quickly rebutted, saying it is Albertsons that's deflecting its own responsibility, so they're now in a trading blame stage.

Yeah. I mean, take us back for a second. I mean, it's been 2 years that they've been trying to get this merger together.

Yeah. Yeah. It was in late 2022 when Kroger first said it would buy Albertsons. It bid nearly 25,000,000,000 dollars, and this would have combined the 2 biggest supermarket chains in the US. And you might know these chains under different names.

Kroger runs Ralphs, Harris Teeter, Fred Meyer, King Soopers, and others. Albertsons own Safeway and Vons, they have thousands of stores, and they knew this merger would be a tough sell for regulators. And indeed, the Federal Trade Commission sued them, so did several states asking courts to block the merger. Overall, the process has been very expensive and a pretty unpopular deal. It's been criticized by Democrats and Republicans.

And, you know, shoppers use it to air grievances about expensive groceries.

Yeah. And you mentioned it was a tough sell. So what were the arguments in court?

So government lawyers argued Kroger and Albertsons often compete head to head, that they keep tabs on each other's prices, store hours, quality of products. And so putting 2 rivals under 1 roof would leave shoppers worse off, fewer choices, higher prices. Kroger and Albertsons made the case that the merger was a matter of survival, that their biggest rivals are not conventional supermarkets like themselves, but giants like Walmart, Costco, Amazon. They said only together could they compete with these companies long term, and they even argued that together, they would have had more power to lower prices for shoppers. Yeah.

Judges, though, didn't buy that.

No. They did not. The US district judge wrote essentially that she understood that competition with Walmart was real. It was tough, but it could not justify an otherwise illegal merger. And the judges also did not buy the company's plan to create essentially a new rival for themselves.

They had planned to sell stores in markets where they overlap, and the judges did not approve of that.

Alright. So it seems like this chapter is done. What happens now with Albertsons and Kroger?

Well, you know, given how much of a knockout drag out legal fight it has been so far, I feel like we could be in for a pretty bitter litigation now between the 2 of them. There is money at stake, which is the merger breakup fee. And Albertsons was the company getting acquired, so there is a chance that Albertsons puts itself back on the block again. They might try to find someone else to buy it. Now as far as shoppers are concerned, for now, they can keep going back to their familiar grocery stores.

Yep. That's NPR's Laniya Selju. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

And that's up first for Wednesday, December 11th. I'm Michelle Martin.

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