--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Wednesday, May 21st. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, big cuts at federal emergency planning agencies as severe storm season arrives, why students in Oklahoma will soon be instructed to look for 2020 election discrepancies, and the NBA's age of chaos. But first, to an issue that abortion rights activists have spent years warning about.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Laws that restrict abortion or give legal rights to fetuses can lead to scenarios where the rights of the person who is pregnant get pitted against the fetus they're carrying. We're seeing this play out in Georgia right now, where over the last few months, a hospital has been keeping a brain-dead pregnant woman alive so she can carry her pregnancy to term.
--:-- Adriana Smith's Mother: They gave us some medication, but they didn't do any tests. They didn't do any CT scans. If they did, they would have caught it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old mother and nurse, went to a hospital in February when she was eight weeks pregnant with an intense headache. Her mother told the local NBC affiliate, Eleven Alive, what happened next.
--:-- Adriana Smith's Mother: What doctors had seemingly missed were blood clots in her brain. She was discharged. But just one day later, she woke up gasping for air, and she was rushed to a different hospital.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Her blood clots were diagnosed, and within hours, she was declared brain dead. But Smith's family says that doctors at Emory University Hospital have told them they cannot stop or remove the devices that are allowing Smith to continue breathing because of Georgia's abortion law.
--:-- Adriana Smith's Mother: The law includes an exception if an abortion is necessary to save the life of the woman. But in this case, the family says that doctors are claiming Smith's life is not at risk.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So the rights the state affords to fetuses take precedent. Georgia's attorney general released a statement saying that Georgia's law does not require medical professionals to keep a pregnant person alive on life support if they are brain dead.
--:-- Adriana Smith's Mother: As of now, the hospital plans to keep her on life support until August, when doctors intend to deliver her baby via C-section.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Emory Healthcare said it couldn't comment on the individual case for privacy reasons and that it seeks input from clinical and legal experts to make decisions.
--:-- Adriana Smith's Mother: Smith's mother told the local NBC affiliate she believes it ultimately should have been up to the family to make this decision. And I just want to be clear on something. We want her to have her baby. We want her life to continue throughout her children.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But at the same time, to see her lay there like that, for that length of time, the grieving process for us, it can't even start.
--:-- Adriana Smith's Mother: And she says doctors have told them the baby has fluid in the brain. My grandson may be blind, may not be able to walk, will chip out. We don't know if he'll live once she has him.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The family has decided to name the baby Chance. The director of the Maternal Fetal Medicine Division at George Washington University told the Washington Post the odds of the baby being born healthy by the end of this are quote very very small.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We are in the middle of severe weather season. The U has seen over 850 tornadoes this year, much higher than the usual number for this time of year, which is around 600, according to the National Weather Service.
--:-- Carrie Davis: There's a trailer behind us that's on top of my house, a whole trailer, and it blew out the cars and my neighbors were terrified.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Carrie Davis from London, Kentucky, showed Fox News the wreckage of her home.
--:-- Carrie Davis: She, He got two broken legs and she had a big laceration on her face, but she lived her whole life. And this has never happened in this area.
--:-- Shamita Basu: With the frequency and severity of major storms on the rise, this has raised questions about how well-equipped federal agencies like FEMA and NOAA are to prepare for and respond to severe weather events.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Both have recently been subject to deep cuts by Doge. Since returning to office, President Trump has threatened to disband FEMA entirely, and he fired the acting head after he said he disagreed with that plan.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The agency's preparedness plans, along with billions of dollars in disaster assistance and grant funding, have been stalled. The administration stopped approving new money for a federal program that has historically supported disaster-prone states like Florida, Oklahoma, California, and Missouri.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The administration also halted federal programs to reduce wildfire risk in the western U.S. About a third of FEMA's permanent full-time workforce has been fired or accepted buyouts.
--:-- Shamita Basu: At the National Weather Service, which falls under NOAA, fewer weather balloons are being sent into the air.
--:-- Seth Borenstein: Normally, the Weather Service puts out 100 balloon launches twice a day. So since this has happened, about 17 different stations are not launching either at all or just once a day.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Four years ago, that was only nine stations. It means all the information that goes into your forecast, which goes into your apps or your television forecast, all that information is just a little bit poorer, forecasts a little weaker.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Weather Service has been hit by staffing cuts, too. According to an AP analysis, almost half of all National Weather Service forecast offices nationwide have a 20 percent vacancy rate.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's double the rate from four years ago. And the Union for the National Weather Service workers says for the first time in decades, not all forecast offices have 24-7 staffing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We saw some of these effects in Kentucky over the weekend. A local weather office that serves the eastern part of the state, which saw the highest number of fatalities, had lost employees to federal cuts.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They had no meteorologists left working overnight. And USA Today reports that the office had to scramble to call in workers to help fill the gaps.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Kentucky's Democratic Governor Andy Beshear said that while he was worried about the cuts more broadly, he didn't see any evidence that they impacted the agency's response.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The National Weather Service is just an amazing organization. I work with them every day every week in this job. They work so hard.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And if you look especially at the flooding disasters on a couple of them they gave us a week a week worth of notice.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Earlier this month, five former National Weather Service leaders published an open letter warning about the potential for needless loss of life if forecasting offices are fully staffed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Proposed budget cuts to NOAA have led a number of Republican lawmakers from high-risk states like Oklahoma and Louisiana to speak out and encourage the administration to change course.
--:-- Shamita Basu: All this as Atlantic hurricane season is just around the corner. It starts on June 1st, and forecasters are predicting it'll be quite active right from the start.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now to Oklahoma where beginning next school year, high school U.S history teachers will cover topics like the revolutionary war, the civil rights movement, but the state's new academic standards will also require educators to have students quote identify discrepancies in the 2020 presidential election results, or else risk losing their teaching certificate.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That is, despite the fact that claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election have been credibly and repeatedly proven false.
--:-- Beth Wallace: Things like looking at Bellwether County trends, looking at, you know, quote unquote, batch dumps of ballots, the sudden halting of ballot counting.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Beth Wallace is an education reporter with State Impact Oklahoma. She told us what these new standards, which apply to K-12 public schools, require.
--:-- Beth Wallace: Parents, educators and members of the state legislature, including a number of Republicans, as well as the governor, have raised concerns.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Oklahoma's state legislature is led by Republicans and leaders introduced a resolution to reject these standards. But there wasn't enough GOP support to pass it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Family members and educators, meanwhile, have filed a lawsuit. They argue the standards were not properly reviewed and that they, quote, represent a distorted view that favors a blatantly biased perspective.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They're being represented in court by a former attorney general for Oklahoma who is a Republican.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Part of their concerns stems from how the standards were introduced to the State Board of Education earlier this year, which Wallace says happened just before their vote on academic criteria that had been under consideration for over a year.
--:-- Beth Wallace: Those board members actually only had hours to look at these new standards that had been put in at the last minute. Many of the new members didn't even know about these additions.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They were introduced at the direction of Ryan Walters, the state school superintendent, a publicly elected official.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He's been a strong ally of President Trump and was reportedly considered for the role of U.S. Secretary of Education.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He has a state committee to specifically implement Trump policies in Oklahoma schools.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There's a video that came out a few months ago that he required schools to show students of him praying for President Trump.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So this is just kind of the next thing in a long line of overtures to President Trump that Ryan Walters has made.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some Republicans in the state have defended the standards. So has Walters, who has said he does not regret introducing them and that he believes they'll encourage critical thinking in classrooms.
--:-- Tammy Patrick: Things like late ballot counts for example are totally standard not an indicator of a so discrepancy.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Tammy Patrick, the CEO for programs at the Election Center, which is an association for election administrators, said she concerned these new standards in Oklahoma will breed misunderstanding about how elections function and erode public trust.
--:-- Tammy Patrick: That is not teaching critical thought. Teaching critical thought is to frame it in such a way that instructs the students to find something that sounds odd to them, and then to dig deeper into why is it the case that the thing that sounds strange to you when you put it into context, is it still odd?
--:-- Shamita Basu: If these standards remain in place by the start of the next school year, schools that do not comply risk losing their accreditation status.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Palestinians are still waiting for aid after Israel said it would end its nearly three-month blockade and allow basic amounts of supplies in.
--:-- Shamita Basu: International condemnation is growing. The U.K., France and Canada issued a joint statement declaring Israel's escalation in attacks and withholding of aid egregious and wholly disproportionate and threatening new sanctions against Israel.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked critical leaders, saying they were handing a huge prize to Hamas.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now to immigration news. Lawyers have accused the Trump administration of defying a federal court order claiming they're deporting Asian migrants to South Sudan, a country on the brink of civil war.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Lawyers of two men from Myanmar and Vietnam say their clients were being held in U.S. custody and were told on Monday that they would be sent to South Sudan.
--:-- Shamita Basu: By Tuesday morning, these men had been put on a plane along with as many as 10 other deportees.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A Boston judge convened an urgent hearing where the Justice Department said one man had been sent to Myanmar, not South Sudan, but would not reveal where another man was sent.
--:-- Shamita Basu: According to the Washington Post, court records show at least one individual had been sent to the African nation.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A judge ruling had forbidden the administration from sending foreign nationals to quote third-party countries without providing meaningful notice and the chance to raise concerns.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Their lawyers are asking the court to stop future flights to South Sudan and demand their return.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, last night, the NBA conference finals kicked off, which means there are just four teams left vying for the championship.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In the West, it's the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Minnesota Timberwolves. And in the East, it's the New York Knicks and the Indiana Pacers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, you might not be too familiar with some of these teams and their star players.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Three of them have never won a title, and the Knicks are looking for their first in over 50 years.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And whoever wins this year, the NBA will crown its seventh different champion in the last seven years.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Ringer has coined this time in the NBA as the Age of Chaos.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And if you're already listening in the News app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Scientific American looks into the claim that your mother maybe used to make, a little sunlight can cure anything.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Well, it turns out, maybe not anything. But scientists are trying to understand why sunshine seems to have a calming effect on certain immune system disorders.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
