Hello and welcome to Background Briefing available 24-7 at background briefing.

I'm Ian Masters, and today we'll examine a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with Speaker Johnson promising the Ukraine aid bill will be on the House floor on

Saturday as the far-right Republican pro-Putin caucus intensifies their threats against him.

We'll go to Ukraine to discuss how Ukrainians feel about the small minority obstructing the flow of

desperately needed arms and ammunition, as at least 31,000 of their soldiers have died defending

their country from Putin's invasion, a death toll which US intelligence suggests is more

like 70,000. Joining us is Ilia Ponamarenko, a Ukrainian journalist known as a former

defense and security reporter at the Kiv Post and subsequently a co-founder of the Keeve Independent.

He has covered the war in eastern Ukraine since the conflicts earlier days, as well as Russia's

full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

He's also had deployments to Palestine and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as an embedded reporter with UN peacekeeping forces,

and he won the Alfred Friendly Press Partners Fellowship and was selected to work as USA Today's guest reporter at the United States Department of Defense.

We'll discuss his new book out next month. I will show you how it was the story of wartime Kyiv.

Then with two seated jurors now quitting the New York Trump trial as the criminal defendant defies the gag order,

posting wild accusations against the jurors and testing the patients of the judge.

We will speak with Scott Horton, a professor at Columbia Law School and a contributing editor at Harper's in Legal Affairs and National Security.

He serves on the American branch of the International Law Association and is represented a variety of journalists and whistleblowers. Then finally, we're looking into how Musk and Bezos,

two of the richest men in the world, along with Starbucks billionaire Schultz and the Albrecht

family that owned Trader

Joe's, are trying to destroy unions by getting rid of the National Labor Relations Board

that has protected workers since the 1930s.

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