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Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Wednesday, July 20th. 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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From Europe to Asia to Africa to North America, so many parts of the world are under extreme heat right now. The U.K. broke a new heat record yesterday. Wildfires have seared through areas of France, Spain, Portugal and Greece. And millions of Americans are bracing for a heat wave this week. These are the types of overlapping crises that climate experts have been warning will happen more frequently. United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres put it in dire terms in an address earlier this week.
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Antonio Guterres: We have a choice: collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.
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But at least for now, the United States doesn't seem poised to be part of that collective action. That's because, in Washington, things are falling apart after Democratic Senator Joe Manchin recently said he will not support his party's efforts to pass a big new economic package that would've included billions of dollars to address the climate crisis. This comes after Democrats tried to tailor the package around Manchin's concerns over the high price tag. "CNN" has a good piece about Manchin's long-standing ties to the coal industry, both through his family business and political contributions from the energy industry. He's received more political contributions from oil and gas in this last election cycle than any other senator.
Now, to hear Senator Manchin describe it, he doesn't say that talks are dead. He says he's waiting to get a better understanding of how inflation is affecting people before committing to more spending. Here he is on his YouTube channel a few days ago.
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Senator Joe Manchin: I can't make that decision on… basically on taxes of any type and also on the energy and climate because it takes the taxes to pay for the investment in the clean technology that I'm in favor of. But I'm not going to do something and overreach that causes more problems.
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In Washington speak, that means the talks are stalled. Which is why "The Washington Post" says it's likely that any action on climate will have to come from the executive branch alone. Today, President Biden plans to deliver a speech on climate change, and a lot of people in his party want him to use his executive powers to declare a national climate emergency. That could allow him to do things like restrict offshore oil drilling or even stop crude oil exports. But yesterday, the White House press secretary told reporters it's not gonna happen, at least not today.
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There's a long-standing rule: the executive branch must preserve all records. And that rule extends to the Secret Service. That's why it's such a big deal that the Secret Service is saying they may not be able to recover text messages sent to and from agents around the January 6th attack on the Capitol. The Secret Service says the messages were not erased on purpose, that they got purged during a technology update. Now, the National Records Administration is demanding an explanation within 30 days. And the January 6th Committee wants answers, too. They subpoenaed the agency for these texts and other communications.
There's a lot of interest in these messages because of what Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide, recently told the January 6th Committee. She testified under oath that Trump had wanted to lead the mob that he knew was armed from the Ellipse, where he gave his speech, to the Capitol building, and that Secret Service Agent Bobby Engel refused to take him there.
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Cassidy Hutchinson: The president said something to the effect of, "I'm the f'ing president, take me up to the Capitol now." To which Bobby responded, "Sir, we have to go back to the West Wing." The president reached up towards the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel. Mr. Engel grabbed his arm, said, "Sir, you need to take your hand off the steering wheel. We're going back to the West Wing. We're not going to the Capitol." Mr. Trump then used his free hand to lunge towards Bobby Engel.
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According to "The Washington Post," people familiar with the lost text messages say they could include the real-time communications between agents who worked directly with Trump on and before January 6th. The inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security is now looking into how the agency made decisions on that day and responded to intelligence sharing requests. Tomorrow, the January 6th Committee will present another public hearing, this one in prime time. It will focus on Trump's inaction for 187 minutes while rioters stormed the Capitol.
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A warning, this next story is about sexual violence.
Today, Olena Zelenska, the first lady of Ukraine, will address Congress. It's just one stop on her trip to Washington. She's also been to the White House and met with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. This visit is about bringing attention to the humanitarian toll that the war is taking on Ukrainian people. We're hearing countless stories of women and girls in Ukraine raped by Russian soldiers. "New Yorker" reporter Joshua Yaffa spoke to some of the psychologists who are treating victims of sexual violence in Ukraine.
Joshua Yaffa: What they've described, first and foremost, have been really horrific, gruesome, terrible attacks, committed not usually by one soldier, but by groups of soldiers.
Rape is a war crime, and several psychologists told Yaffa that it's been used as a weapon by Russian soldiers.
Yaffa: The soldiers were quite explicit about what they were doing, and they weren't trying to satisfy their own sadistic pleasure as much as they were trying to inflict pain and harm, not so much on the individuals, but on the entire Ukrainian nation. The soldiers said to them, "We want you to suffer. We want you to fear us." And "you" not being individual Ukrainian women, but the Ukrainian nation.
Many of these victims are experiencing overlapping trauma.
Yaffa: In many cases, the sexual assault coincided with the killing of close relatives, the killing, for example, of a husband who was at home before the woman at home was then sexually assaulted by Russian troops. That's not to speak of the dislocation, of exile, of losing one's home, of seeing one's home destroyed, having to find treatment, not just psychological but also medical, in a new environment, trying to hold a family together, continuing to live under the threat of further Russian assault. I mean, all of these factors combine to make for a really continuing traumatic environment.
Yaffa's reporting details how, when the war began, as Ukrainians sprung into action to fight and defend their country, there was also a grassroots effort to provide mental health care for survivors of sexual violence. One psychologist said, "During war, everyone has their own front; this is ours."
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There's good news and there's bad news today when it comes to COVID. Let's do the good news first. The CDC has given the green light to the Novavax vaccine. That means it'll become the fourth approved vaccine in the United States, available to adults in the coming weeks. As "STAT" reports, there's some hope that this vaccine might appeal to people who've expressed hesitancy so far, and that's because Novavax doesn't rely on mRNA technology like the other approved COVID vaccines. Instead, it's more like the vaccines that we use for the flu.
But the bad news is, it comes as we're facing one of the most easy-to-catch variants of Omicron yet. The CDC used to say that if you got COVID, you probably couldn't get it again for at least three months. That's no longer the case. That gap is shrinking, and we're seeing more frequent re-infections. Here's how Dr. Eric Topol, a medical researcher, recently described the BA.5 variant on "PBS NewsHour."
Dr. Eric Topol: It has more mutations, which basically makes it an escape artist. That is, our immune system doesn't recognize it like we did the previous versions of the virus. And that's why some people who have had BA.1 in January, February, are getting BA.5 here in July.
As "The Wall Street Journal" reports, getting infected once is no longer the "get out of COVID card" that it used to be. The same advice, as old as it sounds, still stands: get vaccinated, get boosted and take precautions.
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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. I'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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