Axios Re:Cap

A federal judge in Texas last week blocked DACA, the Obama-era program that provides legal protections to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children. The ruling puts more than 600,000 Dreamers in a new state of legal limbo, and stops new applicants from being approved.

Dan talks with Axios politics reporter Stef Kight about what comes next, both in the courts and in Congress. 

On our latest installment of our Hard Truths series, we go inside the fight to build a $2.4 billion telescope on the highest mountaintop in Hawai'i. For astronomers it would mean the chance to answer deep questions about the universe. But for indigenous Hawai'ians, it would mean the desecration of sacred land.

Guests: Aurora Kagawa-Viviani, post-doctoral researcher and scientist at UH-Hilo Hawaii Cooperative studies unit at the University of Hawai'i Hilo and Axios' Miriam Kramer.

Credits: "Axios Today" is brought to you by Axios and Pushkin Industries. This episode was produced by Nuria Marquez Martinez and edited by Alexandra Botti. Alex Sugiura is our sound engineer. Dan Bobkoff is our executive producer. Special thanks to Axios space editor Miriam Kramer, Executive Editor Sara Kehaulani Goo, and Hard Truths Editor Michele Salcedo.

Two weeks ago today, the Champlain Towers South condo building in Surfside, Florida collapsed. 54 people are confirmed to have died, while 86 remain missing. The collapse has begun to spark a broader conversation about aging condo buildings, which house around one out of every five Americans. 

Dan talks to Peter Coy of Bloomberg Businessweek about the fundamental flaws of condo management and the conflict surrounding owners and maintenance.

The Chinese government is going after its own Big Tech companies, with new rules around cybersecurity and listing shares on foreign exchanges. It’s also banned many of them from app stores, including ride-hail giant DiDi, which last week went public in New York.

Dan talks with Rui Ma of China Tech Buzz about what’s changed in just the past few days, what it means for companies like DiDi and parallels to last year's fight between Trump and TikTok.

Richard Branson is scheduled to blast off this Sunday on a suborbital space flight with his company Virgin Galactic, just days before Jeff Bezos plans to ride aboard a Blue Origin spaceship. But a lot more is riding on these rockets than ambitious billionaires.

Axios Re:Cap speaks with Axios Space editor Miriam Kramer about what Branson and Bezos are actually doing, how it’s different from what SpaceX is doing, and the risks these missions could pose for the future of space travel.

Americans spend billions of dollars on July 4th food, but what we eat is changing as health and sustainability become bigger factors in our diet decisions.

Axios Re:Cap goes deeper with Ethan Brown, founder and CEO of Beyond Meat, to learn more about changing consumer tastes and what it means for the future of meat.

It’s almost certain that America won’t meet President Biden’s goal of having 70% of all American adults at least partially vaccinated by the Fourth of July. To understand why, it’s crucial to understand who hasn’t gotten vaccinated, where they are, and why. 

Dan digs into these questions with Otis Rolley III of the Rockefeller Foundation, which recently released research with Dalberg that breaks down which groups and places in the U.S. have fallen furthest behind on vaccinations.

Most small business stories from the pandemic are about about pivoting or perishing, but there's also been an unexpected surge in new small business creation. One example is Agua Bonita, a canned beverage company that launched last year after both of its co-founders were laid off.

Dan talks with Agua Bonita co-founder Kayla Castañeda and Techstars founder David Cohen about what it was like for startups over the past 14 months and what recovery means for businesses that didn't even exist before COVID-19. Plus, a conversation with Wall Drug proprietor Rick Hustead.

Note: This episode first aired 5/28/21. Due to platform issues that blocked it from some listeners' feeds, we are rerunning it for all listeners.

The Pacific Northwest is experiencing record-high temperatures due to a “heat dome” that should be a once every-few-thousand-year event — but which could occur more often and with more severity due to climate change.

Dan digs in with Axios climate reporter Andrew Freedman, to better understand this weather event's science, the dangers posed to human health and infrastructure, and how the definition of a "normal climate" is changing.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that there were 4% fewer U.S. births in 2020 than in 2019, an acceleration of a long, slow decline. The report keeps getting picked up in the news, in part because conventional wisdom has generally been that it’s important for generations to replenish themselves.

Dan discusses this report, how we think about birth rates and the economy, and whether a country can sustain its economy without sustaining its birth rate with Axios business reporter Hope King and with report coauthor and CDC statistician and demographer Brady Hamilton.