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Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Friday June 3rd. 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.
President Biden demanded Congress take some action to prevent mass shootings in an address last night. At times, he sounded exasperated.
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President Joe Biden: Over the last two decades, more school-age children have died from guns than on-duty police officers and active-duty military combined. Think about that. More kids than on-duty cops killed by guns. More kids than soldiers killed by guns, for God's sake. How much more carnage are we willing to accept? How many more innocent American lives must be taken before we say enough? Enough.
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He talked about his recent visits to Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York.
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President Joe Biden: We spent hours with hundreds of family members who were broken. Whose lives will never be the same. They had one message for all of us: Do something. Just do something, for God's sake. Do something.
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Here's what Biden is saying he wants done: he called for Congress to ban assault weapons or, at the very least, raise the minimum age to buy them from 18 to 21. He called for expanded background checks and increased liability for gun manufacturers that would allow for them to be sued for gun violence. Soon after Biden's evening address, a man in Iowa shot and killed two women in the parking lot of a church, before turning the gun on himself. Another shooting yesterday in Wisconsin left two people injured.
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It might feel unsatisfying to hear the president, the person who holds the highest office in our country, saying something must be done. If not him, who's he calling on? "NPR" has this explainer on all of the political hurdles, and it's a good reminder that gun safety legislation can't be broadly enforced with the president's executive power alone.
Let's start with what the president can do. Past presidents have taken action on guns. For example, after the 2017 shooting in Las Vegas, President Trump banned bump stocks, that's a gun attachment that lets semi-automatic weapons shoot almost as fast as a machine gun. President Obama used executive power to add more regulations around gun purchases. And so far, President Biden has signed several executive orders tackling ghost guns and braces on AR-15s. But experts tell "NPR," realistically, these presidential orders have done little to curtail gun violence.
The real action has to come from Congress. Last night, the House Judiciary Committee advanced the "Protecting Our Kids Act," which, among other things, would raise the purchase age of an assault weapon from 18 to 21 and attempt to crack down on large-capacity magazines and ghost guns. But it got no Republican support and it likely won't pass the Senate. Here's Democrat Eric Swalwell speaking during that House committee session, and the response from Republican Louie Gohmert.
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Eric Swalwell: To my Republican colleagues, I ask, who are you here for? Are you here for our kids? Or are you here for the killers? Because if you were here for the kids, you would do all you could to protect the next school shooting that's about to happen. And we know it's gonna happen in America.
Louie Gohmert: "Who are you here for? We must be here for the gunman," is an outrage. How dare you? You think we don't have hearts?
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Next, let’s talk about the Supreme Court. A lot falls into the Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment. And in recent decades, the Court has ruled to expand gun rights. An upcoming opinion has the potential to broaden that interpretation even more. The Court will decide whether to strike down a New York state law that places restrictions on carrying concealed handguns in public.
"NPR" goes on to talk about other political barriers to change, like lobbying from pro-gun rights organizations, but here’s an interesting one that they listed, a culture of hopelessness. One gun control advocate told "NPR," the U.S. has started to see gun violence as a norm, which gets in the way of change.
Now there is something that disrupts that culture of hopelessness. In the days after these types of shootings, the public's support for gun reform goes up. "FiveThirtyEight" crunched the numbers on this. There tends to be an uptick in the number of people who want to see some kind of action on guns in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting, especially among Republicans. But as media coverage tapers off, so does support. Politicians who want to see gun violence prevention laws know that their window of opportunity is small, and it's closing. That’s why many of them keep saying the time to act is now.
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Today marks 100 days since Russia invaded Ukraine. The war has devastated dozens of Ukrainian cities, displaced millions of people, mostly women and children, and caused insecurity around the globe. In response, a number of Western countries imposed what they hoped would be devastating sanctions on Russia.
But "Bloomberg News" has a surprising explanation of what's happened over the last few months, and it boils down to these two seemingly contradictory things being true at the same time: sanctions are hurting Russia, and Russia is raking in enormous profits while waging war.
You see, Russia is considered a commodity super power. It provides the world with vital resources from oil and gas to wheat, nickel, aluminum, and other metals. Because of Russia's war in Ukraine, the prices for everything are way up, including those commodities. In other words, the rest of the world is helping to pay for Putin's war.
Also, while Russian oil is being sanctioned by the U.S., a lot of other countries are still purchasing it. Though, that could start to change. This week EU leaders agreed on a partial ban. Here's European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, at a news conference on Tuesday.
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Ursula von der Leyen: Council should now be able to finalize a ban on almost 90% of all Russian oil imports by end of the year.
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Just to give you a sense of what's at stake here with oil dependence, Russia is expected to bring in about $285 billion dollars this year from oil and gas revenue alone. That's a fifth more than it did last year. Now, all of this doesn't mean that sanctions aren't working. Here's "Bloomberg" reporter Julian Lee on "Bloomberg TV."
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Julian Lee: Sanctions will certainly have an impact, they're not going to cut it to zero, in any sense. I don't think we should write sanctions off as a failure, simply because they don't cut Russia's export earnings to zero. They will have an impact.
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Sanctions are having a chilling effect on Russia's economy in general. Dozens of companies have pulled out of the country. Industrial production and retail sales are suffering. GDP contracted 3% in April. And Russia's on track to enter a deep recession. But for now at least, rising commodity costs are putting money in Russia's coffers and cushioning the blow that sanctions were meant to deliver.
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A warning that this next segment is about a difficult topic: suicide among young children.
On April 14th of 2021, Andrew Solomon attended a funeral for a boy named Trevor Matthews, who Andrew's son had gone to school with.
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Trevor died by suicide. He jumped off the roof of his family's apartment building in New York City, just a few months after his twelfth birthday.
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Andrew Solomon: Here was a child who was receiving treatment, who had adoring, loving, supportive parents who had enormous academic success at school, who had everything going for him and still, this was the way that his life ended and at this early an age.
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Solomon is a writer and professor of clinical medical psychology at Columbia University. In his latest piece in "The New Yorker," he writes about Trevor and the overall rise in youth suicide in the U.S.
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Andrew Solomon: The rate of suicide has been steadily increasing, really, for a long time, probably at least since the 1950s, but certainly over the last decade. And the age of suicide gets to be younger and younger.
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In 2020, according to the CDC, suicide was the second leading cause of death for young adults, ages 15 to 24, making it as common a cause of death as car crashes. Solomon explains that youth suicide is such a painful topic, most people find it hard to acknowledge the extent of the problem, much less how to address it. It's an emotional and academic blind spot.
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Andrew Solomon: One of the things that is completely shocking is that there is a terrible dearth of child psychologists and psychiatrists in this country. Children who have really serious depression are often, therefore, missed or even if the parents think there's something wrong, they can't get help.
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I sat down with Solomon to talk about his reporting. You can hear that on our next episode of our weekend podcast, "In Conversation." We talk about the complex nature of this problem, the signs of depression and suicidality that are often missed in children and ways for adults to talk to young people about mental health. You can find this episode in the News app over the weekend, or by searching for Apple News In Conversation in Podcasts.
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Some of you may have been watching the first game in the NBA Finals last night but, I'm going to go ahead and say it, there was an even better sporting event on TV. The Scripps National Spelling Bee. And last night, things got intense. For the first time ever, it went to a spell off.
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Unidentified Speaker: Maieutic, maieutic.
Harini Logan: M-A-I-E-U-T-I-C.
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Unidentified Speaker: Chalicothere.
Harini Logan: C-H-A-L-I-C-O-T-H-E-R-E.
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That's fourteen-year-old Harini Logan. She was ultimately crowned the winner in what will go down as one of the more dramatic nights in Bee history.
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<v Okay, let me explain what a "spell-off" is. You see, typically, the winner is decided when there are two competitors left and one of them correctly spells two words in a row and the other doesn't. Except last night, neither of the finalists were getting it. So they went to a spell-off>that's 90 seconds to spell as many words as possible. Harini, who's an eighth-grader from Texas, clinched the win when she got 21 words, compared to the runner up's 15 words. Both of the kids spelled so fast that the judges had to go to video to determine a winner.
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Unidentified Speaker: That means that Harini, you are the 2022 Scripps National Spelling Bee Champion.
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You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And when you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News+ partners. We'll be back with the news on Monday.
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