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--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Thursday, June 23rd. I'm Shamita 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Afghanistan is digging out of the aftermath of a massively destructive earthquake. More than 1,000 people are dead, at least another 1,600 people injured, mostly in a remote province in the southeast of the country.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We reached out to Diyah Hadid, who's in Islamabad reporting for NPR. I think it's important to explain where this earthquake happens so you can understand the magnitude of the disaster that is unfolding before us. It's a very mountainous area. People live in little valleys. They've been long marginalized. They're extremely poor. And they've been living through the worst drought in more than 30 years. And now they've experienced this enormous, devastating earthquake.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Hadid said we still don't have an accurate death toll. It rained heavily last night, turning dirt roads into mud and further complicating relief efforts.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I spoke to one senior aid official from the Danish Refugee Council who said it could be days before they can even start digging people out, before they can start dispatching professionally trained rescue crews. And that's why we can see videos now being uploaded to social media of residents themselves just using their hands to pull dead people out.
--:-- Shamita Basu: According to Hadid's sources, in one village, 70 percent of homes were destroyed. In another, 100 percent.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now the Taliban is leading recovery efforts after this earthquake. Hadid says it's hoping to show the country and the world that it is a legitimate government.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One of the really interesting things is that the Taliban are rushing in to help and they're trying to performatively show that as well. So we can see them flying in with helicopters to extract injured people and send them to hospital. They've been helping dig those mass graves alongside residents.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Since the United States pulled out of Afghanistan last summer and the Taliban took over, international aid has dried up. Afghanistan is now facing economic collapse and a humanitarian crisis. Millions of people are going hungry.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Hadid was in Kabul just a few weeks ago. We saw babies so malnourished and so hungry that they were nothing more than sticks. And I remember one of the women was cradling her son Ibrahim and she said he shrivel up and die
--:-- Shamita Basu: Hadid told us for Afghanistan a country that has seen so much turmoil and so much suffering this earthquake is an added tragedy It's really hard to fathom, as a person, as a journalist, how much suffering one country has to bear.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Today, the Supreme Court handed down decisions in some of the biggest and most consequential cases from its docket.
--:-- Shamita Basu: First, a major decision on guns. In a 6-3 ruling, the court struck down a New York state law that placed restrictions on who can carry a gun outside the home.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The law required gun owners to show proper cause to carry a handgun in public for self-defense. This is one of the most significant rulings on the Second Amendment since the court's 2008 decision affirming the right to bear arms.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it could have huge implications for concealed carry laws in several other states.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Here's Joan Walsh from The Nation speaking to Brian Lehrer on WNYC radio just as the news broke.
--:-- Joan Walsh: Justice Thomas, he's really making a case that carrying a gun is one of the core elements of being an American. You shouldn't have to have special circumstances to get a concealed carry license.
--:-- Joan Walsh: Mark Joseph Stern covers the court for Slate. He calls this decision a revolution in Second Amendment law and says the Supreme Court has effectively rendered gun restrictions presumptively unconstitutional.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Here's New York Governor Kathy Hochul responding to the decision.
--:-- Kathy Hochul: This decision isn't just reckless, it's reprehensible. It's not what New Yorkers want. and we should have the right of determination of what we want to do in terms of our gun laws in our state.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This comes amid a wave of gun violence, including the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, just a few weeks ago.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The court also handed down a ruling on Miranda rights, that is the right to remain silent and consult with a lawyer when confronted with law enforcement. This was another 6-3 decision.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The justices ruled that if a police officer fails to read a suspect their Miranda rights, and the government then uses the suspect's statements against them in court, the suspect cannot sue for violating their Fifth Amendment rights.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This reverses a longstanding procedure, one that was first established by the court more than 50 years ago.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We're still waiting on several more decisions from the court, including a case that could impact the federal government's ability to create environmental regulations, whether Trump's remain in Mexico policy is legal, and of course, a decision that will determine the fate of abortion access in this country.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Ever since the Supreme Court leak last month when we got a good sense of how the court will rule on abortion rights, it's been a race against the clock for doctors in training.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Abortion providers are moving as fast as they can to train the next generation of specialists in their field. If abortion procedures are outlawed in a given state, then abortion training will be very hard to find in that state and perhaps impossible.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's Washington Post reporter Nick Anderson. He spent some time with Dr. Aaron Campbell, the director of the Knoxville Center for Reproductive Health in Tennessee.
--:-- Nick Anderson: He is trying to continue to provide abortions for patients in Tennessee who need them. And he's also trying to train medical residents and medical students who desire that training. because, as he told me, you can have all the state laws concerning abortion that you want, but if you don't have trained providers, you don't have choice.
--:-- Nick Anderson: Dr. Campbell has a tattoo on his arm of a wire clothes hanger. It's a reminder of what could happen if abortions are illegal.
--:-- Nick Anderson: A recent study out of UCLA and UCSF found if Roe is overturned, 44% of OBGYN residents across the country won't get the training they need.
--:-- Nick Anderson: That's because they won't be able to observe the procedure in their state the way that a medical student or resident normally would. And that could have serious consequences for women's reproductive health.
--:-- Nick Anderson: Many doctors told me that miscarriage situations and other types of pregnancy situations where you have potentially high risk or complicated pregnancies, it is perhaps useful to have performed the abortion procedure enough times to understand how to use that procedure after a miscarriage or in another pregnancy kind of situation where there might be a need to terminate the pregnancy.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What's expected to happen if Roe is overturned at the federal level is some states will continue to provide full access to abortion training for medical residents and others will have virtually no access.
--:-- Shamita Basu: While some students might be able to travel for training, Anderson told us the doctors he spoke to said hands on regular practice is what makes the difference.
--:-- Shamita Basu: These doctors are telling me there's no substitute for it. You've got to do it dozens and dozens of times in order to feel comfortable and to have a comfort level that you can sustain professionally.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Knoxville Center for Reproductive Health tells me it's been around for 47 years. And they are literally making plans right now to close if the Supreme Court decision overturns Roe v Wade they see no way forward with their work
--:-- Shamita Basu: Today marks 50 years since Title IX was signed into law. The legislation made it illegal for schools receiving federal funding to discriminate on the basis of sex.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it was revolutionary. It changed the playing field. I mean, literally. for girls and women.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But Rachel Axon from USA Today says a lot of colleges are still falling short.
--:-- Rachel Axon: They certainly have not, you know, in many cases lived up to the letter or the intent of the law yet.
--:-- Rachel Axon: An analysis of more than 100 public and private schools that competed in the highest level of college football last year found that nearly 90 percent of them are not offering athletic opportunities to women proportionate to their enrollment.
--:-- Rachel Axon: And schools typically spend way more on sports for men than they do on sports for women.
--:-- Rachel Axon: As an example, let's take Louisville basketball. We found that in the two-year period we looked at, the school spent 13 times the amount of money on equipment for the men's team as it did for women.
--:-- Rachel Axon: In one purchase, they spent more than $2,500 on socks for the men's team. That amount represents more than 10% of what the women's team spent on all equipment, period, over two years.
--:-- Rachel Axon: That's a lot of money on socks. Men's socks.
--:-- Rachel Axon: Another example, the University of Indiana, which is a huge basketball school, spent six times more on recruiting for its men's team.
--:-- Rachel Axon: And that includes more than $660,000 on things like chartered flights and car services.
--:-- Shamita Basu: For months now, Axon and her colleagues at USA Today have been looking into Title IX abuses and failures.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When you hear the stories of, you know, the women who came before us who, you know, are playing softball in parking lots or washing their own laundry or, you know, all the stories from the 60s and 70s really put into perspective just how far we've come.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But what motivated this project is, you know, in all our reporting, we've been told over and over, like, nobody's complying. Nobody's complying. Like, we all know nobody's complying and nobody's going to do anything about it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We'll link to some of their reporting on our show notes page. And if you'd prefer the TLDR version, I'll also retweet Axon's really illuminating Twitter thread on this. It's what caught our team's attention in the first place.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all the stories that we talked about today in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Also, we're expanding our local coverage. As of this week, we're now offering quality local journalism from news outlets in Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's on top of what we already offer in areas like New York, San Francisco, D.C., Miami, Charlotte, and many more.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Just search Local News in the app to check it out.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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