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Duarte Geraldino, Narrating: Good morning! It's Wednesday, April 6th. I'm Duarte Geraldino.
Shumita Basu, Narrating: And I'm Shumita Basu. This is "Apple News Today." Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news, and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
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Geraldino: The U.S. and Western allies are preparing new sanctions against Russia as more details of civilian deaths emerge in Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of war crimes in a remote speech to the U.N. Security Council. He said Russian troops have tortured, raped, and killed civilians.
Basu: Reporters on the ground are documenting mass graves, and bodies in the streets. One "Wall Street Journal" report stands out because it puts a face and a name to the wave of killings. It's the story of Olha Sukhenko. She was the mayor of the village of Motyzhyn, just west of Kyiv. After Russian troops withdrew from her village, she was found dead in a shallow grave with her hands tied. The bodies of her husband and her son were alongside her.
Geraldino: The "Journal" story pieces together this woman's final days. Residents say she was vital. She held this village of some 1,000 people together. It was cut off from supplies and caught in some of the fiercest fighting. She personally delivered food and medicine, and she helped resistance fighters by sharing information about Russian troop movements. A friend urged her to leave, but she refused.
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Basu: From this article, you really get a sense of who Sukhenko was as a leader in her village. A friend of hers said the Russians "looked for the strongest people." She says the mayor was like "a locomotive who pulled everyone else behind her."
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The White House is reportedly extending the pause on student loan payments through August 31st. And while that could help a lot of Americans, new reporting from NPR finds that a federal program for low-income borrowers is failing them in many ways.
Geraldino: It's about income-driven repayment plans, or IDRs for short, and more than nine million people are in these plans. These IDR plans can allow low-income borrowers to make small monthly payments and they also promise to cancel student debt after 20 or 25 years of payments. This program, it's had problems before. In 2021, we learned that of the more than four million people who had been making payments for at least 20 years. Only 32 of them had their debt cancelled under IDR. NPR obtained documents that add important new details.
Cory Turner: The experts I spoke with all agreed that this was a failure of many parties.
Basu: That's NPR education reporter Cory Turner. He told us it's the job of the loan servicers to track payments that a borrower is making and to proactively notify them when they qualify for loan cancellation. In many cases, that never happened.
Turner: The buck stops with the Department of Education. You know, those servicers signed contracts with the U.S. government and the Department of Education, and it is the Department's job to police the servicers, and not just police them, but to give them the guidance that they need.
Geraldino: Under this program, payments can be set as low as $0 a month. Literally nothing. That should still count towards loan forgiveness, but the accounting was flawed.
Turner: Some of those payments also were not being given credit towards ultimate loan cancellation, which is a really big deal for them because folks who are paying $0 a month but getting credit, supposedly, you know, interest is accruing, driving up the balance of their loans. So if cancellation keeps getting put off because the records are shoddy, that's really gonna be hard on the borrower.
Basu: There are other problems, too. Let's say that you owe $100 and one cent, but you only pay $100. Some loan servicers might not count that as a payment. And then there's the issue of poor record keeping and confusion when a borrower's records are transferred from one loan servicer to another. The bottom line, Turner found, was that the lowest-income people are hurt the most.
Turner: They have tried to follow the rules of IDR, and many of them have simply gotten mounting interest and no real hope of debt cancellation. And I don't mean sort of broad debt cancellation for everyone, I mean the debt cancellation that lawmakers in Congress promised through these programs.
Geraldino: The U.S. Education Department told NPR it'll be making changes. It's going to try to fix things for borrowers harmed by past failures. The Biden administration, it didn't create this problem, but now it is responsible for fixing it.
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Basu: Nurses have been under incredible stress since the start of the pandemic. They've reported being overworked and understaffed, and many of them are worried and speaking out right now about the verdict in the RaDonda Vaught trial.
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Geraldino: If you haven't been following this story, let me get you up to speed. RaDonda Vaught was a nurse in Tennessee. She accidentally withdrew a powerful paralyzer from an automated medication-dispenser. She gave it to a patient who was supposed to get a sedative. She was charged with homicide after this drug mix-up killed her patient. Vaught was convicted and now she's facing up to eight years in prison.
Basu: "Kaiser Health News" reports on how nurses around the country have been closely watching this story, and many are speaking out against the verdict. Keep in mind, it is extremely rare for medical professionals to be criminally prosecuted for medical errors. Fatal mistakes are usually handled by professional licensing boards or civil courts. The American Nurses Association said in a statement that this verdict sets a "dangerous precedent" and that it is "criminalizing the honest reporting of mistakes."
Geraldino: Nurses have taken to social media to voice their anger and disappointment with the verdict. Here's a sampling from TikTok…
Unidentified Speaker: Doctors: "Oh, it's an emergency, give this med." I am not doing it, doc. Not until I see the order in there. Not until I verify it. Why? Because I am RaDonda.
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Unidentified Speaker 2: Now, do I think RaDonda should get her nursing license taken away? Absolutely. Do I think this is criminal? Absolutely not.
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"Kaiser Health News" spoke to one nurse who said after two years of unimaginable stress during the pandemic, this verdict was the last straw. Four days after the conviction, she quit. Other nurses worry that these days, in high-pressure, understaffed hospitals, they too might make a mistake. "Kaiser Health News" did find one nurse who supports punishing Vaught, but for the most part, the nurses who opened up to reporters or on social media, they were sympathetic with Vaught.
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Our final story is about a video that emerged basically by accident: footage of Prince from when he was just eleven years old.
Basu: Yeah, this is one of those stories that reminds you that there are a lot of gems just sitting around in media archives. This one came from the rock star's hometown TV station, WCCO. See, recently, teachers in Minneapolis went on strike, so the station went into its archives to find footage from 50 years ago when teachers in that same school district were on strike. The reporter interviewed some students. One of them had that familiar smirk, an expression that's a little bit playful, maybe a little mischievous.
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Geraldino: Now, the station's production manager was pretty sure it was Prince. There were a few hoops to get through to get the audio to work. Once it was restored, though, you could hear the reporter talking to the kid.
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Unidentified Speaker 3: Are most of the kids in favor of the picketing?
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Prince: [CLICKS TONGUE] Yeah, I think they should get some more money 'cause they work-- be working extra hours for us and all that stuff.
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Basu: Still, even with the audio, there was no record of the kid saying his name. So, the station tracked down old photos of Prince, they talked to a historian to verify the key details of his childhood, and they also found a childhood friend who knew Prince since kindergarten, Terrance Jackson. He saidm back then, Prince was known as Skipper. Here's the moment WCCO showed Jackson the old footage…
Terrance Jackson: It is Prince! That's Skipper! Oh, my God. Wow. Wow. I'm like blown away and flabber-- I'm totally blown away.
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[CHILDREN SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY]
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Geraldino: It's so fun to see the footage for yourself. We've got this story, and all the stories we talked about today, on the Apple News app.
Basu: And when you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News+ partners.
Geraldino: We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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