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Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Friday, October 20th. I'm Shumita Basu. This is “Apple News Today.” On today's show…
A day in the life of a Palestinian family…
The real and dramatic history behind the new film "Killers of the Flower Moon…"
And new research on how prehistoric women were skilled hunters.
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But first, let's take a quick look at top stories from around the world.
In Gaza, there's an agonizing wait for aid, and fear of a potential Israeli ground assault, all while Israeli bombs keep falling. One of the latest strikes damaged a historic church, where civilians had taken shelter. Israel's military says it was targeting a nearby command-and-control center that was firing rockets toward Israel, and it's investigating the incident.
President Biden says American support for Israel's fight against Hamas is vital. He addressed the nation in a televised speech from the Oval Office last night. He also stressed continued U.S. support for a Palestinian state, drawing a distinction between Hamas and millions of Palestinian civilians. Biden spoke out against hate crimes targeting Muslim and Jewish people. And he said America should support Israel and Ukraine for similar reasons.
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President Joe Biden: Hamas and Putin represent different threats. But they share this in common: They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring Democracy, completely annihilate it.
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Biden says he's requesting a major aid package from Congress, billions more for Israel and Ukraine's defense, as well as other security funding.
Now it's not clear when the House will have a speaker to consider the president's request. Yesterday, Republican, Jim Jordan, first said he would temporarily pull out of the race. This was expected to clear a path for a deal to give more power to acting Speaker Patrick McHenry for now, so House business could continue. But that plan fell apart. Jordan ultimately reversed course, saying he would keep running for speaker. But it's not clear he has the votes. The leadership battle has gotten unusually ugly, with several Republicans who voted against Jordan saying they and their families received threatening messages.
And in legal news, there's an important plea deal from one of former President Trump's co-defendants in the Georgia election-interference case. Lawyer, Sidney Powell, pleaded guilty to six conspiracy counts. She's getting six years of probation and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in the case against Trump and others. Trump has pleaded not guilty.
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Let's go back to the conflict in the Middle East and take a broader look at what life is like for Palestinians. A new book from Nathan Thrall does exactly that. He's an American Jewish writer living in Jerusalem. It's a true story, one that begins before the current war in Gaza, focusing on a Palestinian community in the West Bank. It's about one man's heartbreaking attempts to find out what happened to his five-year-old son, Milad, after his school bus was in a terrible accident.
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Nathan Thrall: The students who go to the school have all kinds of different statuses. Some come from families with blue IDs, others come from families with green IDs. And you have people with different colored IDs in the same families.
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The color of a person's identification card dictates where they can go. Blue ID holders can enter Jerusalem, green IDs are restricted to the West Bank.
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Thrall: What that meant for this school and this school trip was that they couldn't go to a nearby play area just on the other side of the wall, in a Jewish neighborhood of East Jerusalem, a settlement. And instead, they had to take a long and winding path along this imposing 26-foot-tall concrete wall to get to a distant play area that's still on the other side of the wall.
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Milad's bus passed through a check point, where it was hit by a huge truck, flipped, and caught fire. Milad's father, Abed, rushed to the site of the crash, but was slowed down by the checkpoints, separation walls, and crowded roads. By the time he got there, the children were gone. Bystanders had taken them to hospitals on either side of the wall, based on the color of their ID cards.
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Thrall: Abed, he himself has a green ID. So, he doesn't have any hope of entering Jerusalem to look for his son. So he goes to Ramallah, and he waits there trying to find information.
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The rest of the story is in Thrall's book: "A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy." I talked about it with Thrall on this week's episode of “Apple News: In Conversation,” which we'll play for you at the end of the show.
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Thrall: I've never felt such despair over the future of the place I live in.
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Thrall told me how the story of this one terrible day for this family is inextricably linked to the history of the region that brought Israelis and Palestinians to this point.
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Thrall: The aim was to explain a very complicated system through the lives of the people who are navigating it and navigating it on the worst day of their lives. Because on that day, it came into a sharp relief what it meant to have a green ID or have a blue ID and not be able to search for your child at the hospital you think he's located at.
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Martin Scorsese's new movie, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” is out now in theaters and will be streaming on Apple TV+ later on. It's about murder, greed, and exploitation of Native Americans in early 1900s Osage County, Oklahoma.
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Much of what you'll see on screen is pretty close to what happened in real life. But before you watch the Hollywood version, check out a story from “National Geographic.” It'll give you critical context that'll help you follow what you see on the screen.
Here are the main points to know: In the late 1800s, in this part of Oklahoma, a massive amount of oil was discovered under the land, which was owned and split by members of the Osage Nation. There was enough oil to make them the richest nation on Earth at the time. That drew attention from the federal government and settlers in Oklahoma, many of whom held racist attitudes toward Native Americans and believed they shouldn't have rights to the land.
Public pressure pushed Congress to give courts in Oklahoma jurisdiction over land held by Native Americans deemed "incompetent" by a judge. They would have a White guardian appointed to take over all of their financial affairs. Hundreds of these White overseers pocketed millions of dollars.
<v The legal system helped people steal from the Osage people, but some wanted more, turning to murder to gain control of valuable land. In the 1920s there was a string of suspicious deaths of Osage people>poisonings, explosions, shootings. At least 60 Osage people were murdered or went missing. People panicked, and after a long wait for help, the federal government finally stepped in. This was a time before the FBI, so a group of federal agents started an undercover search that ultimately ended in a handful of convictions. But to this day, many of the murders in Osage County are still unsolved.
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And finally, it's time to abandon a famous theory in anthropology. You've probably heard the idea that men evolved as hunters and women as gatherers, tied to distinct biological differences. It's been repeated in history lessons, in pop culture, in dating culture… for decades.
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But mounting evidence today suggests, this is wrong - that women were hunters all along. “Scientific American” looks at the growing body of new studies, and the flaws with the older research.
That old set of papers was published in 1968, was literally titled, "Man the Hunter." “Scientific American” explains that the researchers behind it often ignored evidence, sometimes in their own data, that contradicted their hypothesis. That included evidence about Indigenous women in Japan, who hunted for their communities.
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Some of the new research comes from exercise science. Experts have learned, women have clear physiologically advantages for certain types of physical activity that require endurance. Today that could help running a marathon. But in prehistoric times that allowed women to better chase prey over long distances. Researchers say, there's still much to be learned about the role estrogen plays in athletic performance, but one thing we can say is women were out there hunting with the men in early human communities.
<v There's a whole lot more to learn here and you can read the whole article in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the News app, as I mentioned, the full “In Conversation” episode with Nathan Thrall, about a Palestinian family in the West Bank, is queued up to play for you next. Or you can find it by searching for “Apple News>In Conversation” in the Podcasts app.
Enjoy your weekend, and I'll be back with the news on Monday.
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