--:-- Mark Garrison: Good morning. It's Tuesday, May 31st. I'm Mark Garrison, and 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.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Memorial Day weekend is a time that's meant to honor lives lost at war. But in Texas, the long weekend was about remembering the 19 children and two teachers killed in last week's school shooting.
--:-- Destiny Esquivel: She didn't deserve it, but I just know in that moment she was brave. She was telling people where to hide. But I hope the governor, the president, they learn. Because they wouldn't want it to happen to their kids, so why would you let it happen to others?
--:-- Mark Garrison: There's been growing criticism over the lack of initial action from law enforcement. We learned through reporting that authorities waited an hour before sending a team in to stop the gunman, and that officers restrained parents on site who wanted to go in themselves. Now the Department of Justice is reviewing the police response.
--:-- Mark Garrison: In the wake of the tragedy, lawmakers seem as divided as ever over what to do to prevent the next one. The Washington Post reports there have been 15 mass shootings since Uvalde. Over the weekend, President Biden said he's limited by the Constitution, and without Congress, there's only so much he can do on his own.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Meanwhile, the Texas Tribune has a story that gives a deeper understanding of the debate around guns. It goes back decades, long before Columbine and the mass shootings that make headlines today.
--:-- Mark Garrison: In central Texas, scenes from a massacre, the deadliest mass shooting in American history. That was 1991, when a gunman killed 23 people at Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas. Susanna Hupp's parents were both killed. For the next three decades, she became a gun policy activist. But she chose a different path than many other shooting survivors. She fought for dropping gun restrictions, not making new ones, and she was very successful in Texas, where she served in the state legislature.
--:-- Mark Garrison: She also became a hero for the firearms lobby nationally. Gun advocates used her story to argue the way to prevent mass shootings isn't more gun restrictions, it's more guns and easier access to them. Today in Texas more than a third of households have a firearm. You can carry a gun without a permit, and cities are restricted from passing stricter gun laws.
--:-- Mark Garrison: The Texas Tribune story traces how that 1991 shooting was a surprising turning point in the debate over guns. Now, data shows Republican-controlled states are more likely to loosen gun laws after mass shootings, not tighten them.
--:-- Mark Garrison: You can read the whole Texas Tribune article in the Apple News app, along with much more coverage of the Uvalde shooting.
--:-- Mark Garrison: There is a special kind of dull rage that you feel when you sink a lot of time into something that should have just taken five minutes. That sense of being held hostage by some bureaucratic process, that is how Wall Street Journal tax columnist Laura Saunders felt this month when she lined up in an IRS office to get some help.
--:-- Laura Saunders: I got there early because I wanted to be at the front of the line. I got there at 8:30 in the morning in Harlem in New York City. And I was number 48 in line. The line had started forming at 6:30. By nine o'clock, there were 100 people in line and none of them, just like me, none of them had been able to call the IRS.
--:-- Mark Garrison: She's a journalist, so of course, she's asking questions to people in line. She learned many of them were there for the same reason as her. They had to verify their identity so the IRS would pay their refunds. And like her, a lot of them tried calling first, but just couldn't get through. So they headed down to the office and that long line.
--:-- Laura Saunders: We were all ranged down an entire city block. We thought maybe the line would move quickly at nine o'clock when the office opened, but our hopes were dashed. A supervisor came out and said that for all about a hundred of us, there were five people working and 12 seats in the office.
--:-- Mark Garrison: She ended up waiting about five and a half hours. The irony was that once I got upstairs and once I actually saw the IRS employee, she was very helpful. She was very courteous. And she solved my problem in less than 10 minutes. And that was true for most of the people who waited in that long line.
--:-- Laura Saunders: As the journal's tax columnist, Saunders has reported on the IRS customer service problems. But this was personal. It is like a second job navigating all this. I had to give up an entire Saturday.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Part of the problem is the pandemic because Congress kept giving the IRS more and more to do changing the tax law in the middle of tax season. And that has made enormous amounts of extra work. And so they're playing catch up now.
--:-- Mark Garrison: What Saunders just said about stuff like this being like a second job, if that's resonating with you, we've got another article for you. It's one we talk about on the team a lot from Annie Lowry at The Atlantic on what she calls the time tax. It looks into how certain government programs make us spend a lot of our own time doing admin work to get the benefits we are entitled to as taxpayers.
--:-- Mark Garrison: It's a sharp and provocative argument about the unfairness of the system, one that'll probably stick with you for a while. We've curated the piece for you on the Apple News app.
--:-- Mark Garrison: We are supposed to spend a big chunk of our lives asleep. But there's plenty of evidence that we are doing a bad job of getting enough rest, and it's hurting our bodies and minds. One in three of us don't get enough sleep. Stress and digital distractions can be a part of that. But a new study points to something else keeping us up.
--:-- Zoya Tierstein: This is a phenomenon that's part of the climate crisis. It's obviously getting hotter during the day. That's what we notice. But nighttime temperatures are rising faster. And so what you have is people going to bed and having a hard time falling asleep because it's so hot out.
--:-- Mark Garrison: She spoke with us about the largest study ever done on the relationship between climate and sleep. Researchers looked at 10 billion sleep observations from wearable devices. They found higher temperatures are cutting back 45 hours of sleep per person per year. The heat makes us fall asleep later and wake up earlier.
--:-- Zoya Tierstein: It adds up to 10 or 11 extra nights of bad sleep each year. The study found people in low-income countries, women and the elderly, are getting the worst of the sleep disruptions from climate change.
--:-- Mark Garrison: As far as what we can take away from this research on a personal level, Tierstein left us with this: Have you ever flipped over your pillow to the cold side and rested your head on it? It is just that feeling that coolness. There's a reason we like that. There's a reason that's a thing that people do.
--:-- Zoya Tierstein: We enjoy humans, myself included, enjoy sleeping in cooler temperatures. The problem with climate change, of course, is that you can't just flip over the pillow. So this affects all of us.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Top Gun Maverick broke Memorial Day box office records, bringing in 156 million dollars over the long weekend. It's not all fighter jets; it's a Tom Cruise movie. So there has to be scenes of Tom Cruise running. That's because in virtually all of his movies, at some point, he runs.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Running blogs count that he runs in 44 of his 52 movies. Maybe you remember him running in a business suit with a briefcase in The Firm. Or sprinting through Shanghai in Mission Impossible 3.
--:-- Mark Garrison: ESPN decided to answer the most ESPN question possible on Cruz: Is he any good at running? They pulled together a panel of elite track athletes, including three-time Olympic gold medalist Jackie Joyner-Kersee.
--:-- Jackie Joyner-Kersee: Tom Cruise can run, and his form has actually gotten better over time. The athletes say early in his career, his hands are balled up, tense, but in recent years, his palms are open, slicing through the air.
--:-- Mark Garrison: A track coach tells ESPN that's good because open hands can help sprinters relax, which actually helps them run faster. The elite runners are especially impressed that he has to do something they don't: run in suits and regular shoes across multiple takes.
--:-- Jackie Joyner-Kersee: But one tip they have for him, they think he can be even faster if he would just lean forward a bit when he runs. But Joyner Kersey concedes that directors probably tell him to stay upright, since it looks better on film.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Tom Cruise turns 60 this year, but he's literally not slowing down. The new trailer for the Mission Impossible movie out next year confirms he will keep on running.
--:-- Mark Garrison: 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 Plus partners.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Shamita is back with us tomorrow.
