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Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Wednesday, March 29th. I'm Shumita Basu. This is "Apple News Today." On today's show, Mike Pence is told to testify before a grand jury about January 6th, understanding why the AR-15 is such a deadly weapon and how student athletes are at risk as legal sports betting booms.
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But first, let's catch you up on the latest developments in some big stories.
Starting with the fire at a migrant detention facility in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. At least 38 people are dead, and dozens are injured. Surveillance video from inside appears to show guards walking away from the blaze, making no apparent attempt to let the detainees out. The country's prosecutor general is investigating.
Mexico's president says the detainees started the fire as a protest after learning they would be deported. Most people killed in the fire came from Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela and El Salvador. Facilities like these typically house migrants who are hoping to enter the U.S. And many of these centers have been overwhelmed recently as the U.S. made it harder to get asylum. Journalist James Fredrick covers migration issues. He talked with "NPR" from Mexico City.
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James Fredrick: Cities like Ciudad Juárez are temporary homes to thousands of migrants at any one time. It's put a huge strain on shelters and the humanitarian sphere in the city. It means that lots of migrants are living in the street right now. It's very visible. So, migrants are very desperate. And so, when the president describes migrants protesting, angry that they're going to be deported, I'm not surprised to hear it because that's the state of migration in Mexico right now. It's a really, really desperate situation.
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Turning now to Washington. Mike Pence must testify to a grand jury about his conversations with Donald Trump leading up to the January 6th attack on the Capitol. "CNN" and other media outlets report that in a sealed ruling, a federal judge largely rejects Pence's claim that he shouldn't have to testify because he was presiding over the Senate that day, and the Constitution protects lawmakers from being questioned about their legislative activities. The judge says Pence will not have to answer questions about his own actions on January 6th, but he must testify about his earlier conversations with the former president. The ruling is a win for the special counsel investigating Trump's actions around the insurrection and efforts to overturn his election loss.
In other legal news, Adnan Syed's murder conviction has been reinstated, in the 1999 killing of Hae Min Lee. This case got international attention through the podcast "Serial." Syed was released last September, after spending two decades behind bars, when prosecutors asked a judge to vacate his murder conviction, citing new evidence. But now, a Maryland appeals court says the judge violated the Lee family's rights by not giving the victim's brother enough time to attend the hearing in person. Syed's attorney disagreed with the ruling and promised an appeal. He was not immediately sent back to prison following the latest ruling.
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A warning: this next story has graphic descriptions of gun violence.
What happens to the human body when it's shot with an assault-style rifle?
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Dr. Lillian Liao: High-velocity firearms create devastating wounds. Not just a small bullet hole.
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Dr. Lillian Liao knows too well. She's a trauma surgeon in Texas, and she spoke to "The Washington Post" about what it was like to treat the victims of two mass shootings, at Robb Elementary in Uvalde last year and at Sutherland Springs church in 2017. She says these powerful rifles do an unbelievable amount of damage.
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Dr. Lillian Liao: They create cavities, holes in body parts. Well, if you're talking about a group of small children… Right? These are all elementary school age children. A small hole is not small in their body part. Right? And they don't have that much blood to bleed out before they completely lose all of their blood volume, and then they're dead.
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Ten of the deadliest U.S. mass shootings since 2012 have involved AR-15-style firearms.
"The Washington Post" is out with a series that's all about the AR-15, why so many civilians in America have one and how destructive these guns are. Reporter Todd Frankel told us why they decided to make this series, which, I should say, came out before this week's deadly school shooting in Nashville.
Todd Frankel: I mean, the "Post" made a conscious decision to sort of look into this because it's something that's so rarely part of the coverage we do in these mass shootings. I mean, it's gruesome. It's something you want to turn away from. And so, we decided, you know, we would look at the autopsy reports, we would talk to the trauma surgeons, we would talk to the medical examiners and find out really what is different and what do these injuries look like.
They also spoke to families of victims to get their permission to use autopsy reports to create graphics that explain exactly what happens to a body when shot with one of these weapons. What the "Post" found is, there is no comparing the damage caused by a handgun to the damage caused by an AR-15. A round fired from an AR-15 can cross six football fields in just one second.
Frankel: It can pulverize bone; it can blow open flesh. It just causes devastating injuries.
And these assault-style rifles don't need to be reloaded as frequently as other firearms. In 2017, over the course of just 11 minutes, a gunman killed 60 people at a concert in Las Vegas and injured hundreds more. Frankel says the AR-15 appeals to criminals.
Frankel: Sort of almost like these mass shooters are seeking them out. In fact, the mass shooter who shot 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo specifically said, you know, he chose the AR-15 because it is a particularly deadly weapon.
<v As we mentioned yesterday on the show, President Biden has called on Congress to ban assault weapons like the AR-15. The "Post" looks at one particular gun safety intervention that experts say could make a big difference>limits on how many rounds magazines can hold. If a person had to take time to stop and reload more frequently, they wouldn't be able to kill as many people so quickly. At the moment, most states don't limit magazine sizes. But the "Post" reports, within the past year, a handful of states have created new caps. Fewer bullets fired could mean more lives saved.
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We are in the middle of March Madness, and people are betting billions of dollars on these games. The expansion of legal sports gambling in America is creating a growing business and a growing risk.
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"PBS" and the University of Maryland's journalism school partnered up to investigate how the growth in gambling threatens student athletes in particular, many of whom are under the legal betting age themselves. Criminals may try to pay them to fix games. And even those who play clean can face threats and false accusations of rigging games if they have a bad performance. University of Cincinnati compliance official Trever Wright explains how fans who lose bets can take it out on innocent players.
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Trever Wright: Irrespective of gambling, the pressure on these kids to perform is immense. I'm really worried that now because it's legal in Ohio, and students of the university and general public are gambling on the University of Cincinnati basketball and football games and other events, that now they're publicly going to come out via social media or just in the crowd in general and say, "You cost me money."
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Earlier this year, the men's basketball team at the University of Dayton lost a game after holding a big lead at halftime. Unfounded accusations that players intentionally threw the game followed. Coach Anthony Grant said that gamblers attacking student athletes made him sick.
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Anthony Grant: It could really change the landscape of what college sports is all about.
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Ohio's top gambling regulator now says that anyone who threatens or bullies athletes could get a lifetime ban. But that may be little comfort for young players. Tens of millions of Americans are placing bets on their performance, and many losing gamblers are acting out in dangerous ways.
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You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the News app right now, stick around. We've got a narrated article from "WIRED" about how a tiny village in Scotland is considering what it would mean to become a hub for commercial space travel. But placing a spaceport in this delicate ecosystem carries a lot of risk.
That story is playing for you next, and I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
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