--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Tuesday, December 17th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, why so many Americans distrust food policy experts. Rethinking what we feed livestock to reduce global warming. And TikTok makes one last pitch to avoid being banned in the U.S. But first, another community in America is living through the nightmare of a school shooting.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In Madison, Wisconsin, yesterday, a 15-year-old girl shot and killed a fellow student and teacher and wounded six others at Abundant Life Christian School, a private K-12 school with around 400 students.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The shooter, identified by police as Natalie Rupnow, who went by Samantha, was pronounced dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Police said as of last night they had not identified a motive.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Officials say a teacher and three students were treated for non-life-threatening injuries.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As of yesterday evening, two students were in critical condition with life-threatening injuries.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The shooting happened inside a classroom with students from mixed grades.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Here's Madison Police Department Chief Sean Barnes at a press conference last night detailing the moment police were alerted to the incident.
--:-- Sean Barnes: At 10.57 a.m., a second-grade student called 911 to report a shooting had occurred at school.
--:-- Sean Barnes: Don't let that soak in for a minute. A second-grade student called 911.
--:-- Sean Barnes: Police say they're talking with the parents of the shooter who are cooperating.
--:-- Sean Barnes: They also searched the family's home.
--:-- Sean Barnes: Barnes said they don't know how the suspected shooter got the handgun found at the scene.
--:-- Sean Barnes: How does any 15-year-old get a hold of a gun, or anyone for that matter?
--:-- Sean Barnes: You know, you get into the philosophical question about guns and gun safety, something that we all should be talking to our loved ones about.
--:-- Sean Barnes: That's something that will be a part of this investigation.
--:-- Sean Barnes: Barnes says they will eventually question students who witness the shooting when they're ready.
--:-- Sean Barnes: That will give us an idea of not only what unfolded, but it could answer the question to motivation.
--:-- Sean Barnes: Because, again, the students who unfortunately had to witness this.
--:-- Sean Barnes: But that's not something that we want to rush.
--:-- Sean Barnes: We're not going to interrogate students.
--:-- Barbara Wears: The students handled themselves magnificently.
--:-- Barbara Wears: They were clearly scared when they realized when we practice, we always say this is a drill. It is just a drill.
--:-- Barbara Wears: When they heard lockdown, lockdown and nothing else, they knew it was real.
--:-- Barbara Wears: But they handled themselves brilliantly.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Wisconsin is a state that permits both open carry and concealed carry.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And like most other states Wisconsin has a preemption law that means local municipalities cannot have gun regulations that are more restrictive than the state at large
--:-- Shamita Basu: The fact that the shooter was female is rare
--:-- Shamita Basu: According to a 2023 report from the Violence Prevention Project, 98% of mass shootings were committed by men and boys.
--:-- Shamita Basu: With yesterday's shooting, that brings the total up to at least 83 school shootings in this calendar year, according to CNN, the most school shootings in a single year since CNN began keeping track in 2008.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This is a fast-moving story, and you can follow along for updates on the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's no secret. Americans, on the whole, don't trust where their food policy is coming from.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Public confidence in the government's ability to protect the food supply is at an all-time low, according to a recent Gallup poll.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That might be why Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s pledge to make America healthy again is resonating with so many people, even if they don't agree with all of his ideas.
--:-- Shamita Basu: RFK Jr., of course, is Trump's pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And he's on Capitol Hill this week meeting with senators, trying to shore up support for his confirmation hearing in January.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Jesse Newman, a food reporter at The Wall Street Journal, told us why so many people are losing confidence in the institutions that set food policy.
--:-- Jesse Newman: Consumers want to be sure that what they're putting in their bodies is, is good for themselves and their children.
--:-- Jesse Newman: And there's a sort of an increasing sense that, food companies, in fact, are putting profit above public health.
--:-- Jesse Newman: Kennedy has been a longtime outspoken critic of our food system.
--:-- Jesse Newman: And when he was campaigning for president, he tapped into this growing sense of distrust around food.
--:-- Jesse Newman: Especially packaged food and, how nutritious it is and whether it's actually hurting us.
--:-- Jesse Newman: And in fact, it sort of has amplified concerns among U.S. consumers that federal regulators like those at FDA and USDA really aren't doing enough to protect consumers.
--:-- Jesse Newman: Kennedy has talked a lot about the dangers of ultra-processed foods, which many health experts have blamed for rising rates of obesity and chronic disease in the U.S.
--:-- Jesse Newman: He says if he's confirmed to lead HHS, he'll remove ultra-processed foods from school lunches.
--:-- Jesse Newman: He can't go it alone, though. That would require coordination with the FDA.
--:-- Jesse Newman: He's also talked about SNAP, which is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, aka food stamps.
--:-- Jesse Newman: And he has talked about how he thinks that SNAP beneficiaries really shouldn't be using their food stamps to buy things like soda or processed food.
--:-- Jesse Newman: Another area Kennedy could leave a big mark, the Federal Dietary Guidelines for Americans, a cornerstone of federal nutrition policy.
--:-- Jesse Newman: A panel of experts working on the latest recommendations announced last week they will not tell Americans to consume less ultra-processed food, which has gotten a lot of criticism.
--:-- Jesse Newman: Kennedy has said the members of this panel should be prohibited from making money from food or drug companies.
--:-- Jesse Newman: He concerned with conflicts of interest in how these dietary guidelines are drafted
--:-- Shamita Basu: And there evidence to support that
--:-- Shamita Basu: In the past researchers have connected experts on these panels to prominent food companies and lobbying groups
--:-- Shamita Basu: But some of Kennedy's other ideas about what we eat and drink may involve more bureaucratic red tape, since they fall under the purview of other federal agencies.
--:-- Shamita Basu: His proposal to limit fluoride in drinking water, for example, would be up to the EPA, not HHS.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And if he wants to crack down on cooking with seed oil or using pesticides in farming, he'll need to work with Trump's nominee for Department of Agriculture.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And before any of that, as we mentioned before, he'll need these meetings this week to go well, so he'll be confirmed by the Senate.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What do burps and farts have to do with climate change?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Well, it turns out, quite a bit, if they're coming from farm animals.
--:-- Shamita Basu: While we often think about carbon dioxide when we talk about global warming, there's another gas that's maybe even more critical to the problem.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Actually, molecule for molecule, methane is more potent than carbon dioxide is when it comes to its impact on warming.
--:-- Benji Jones: That's me, Benji Jones, an environmental correspondent for Vox.
--:-- Benji Jones: He tells us the bulk of global methane emissions come from human activities,
--:-- Benji Jones: And the largest single source among them is agriculture.
--:-- Benji Jones: That is, the burps and farts of farmed animals.
--:-- Benji Jones: Now, one big way to reduce those emissions would be if people cut down on how much meat they eat.
--:-- Benji Jones: But in a world where people are consuming lots of animal products, scientists are working on another way of tackling the problem.
--:-- Benji Jones: Jones recently traveled to Colombia, the country, not the university, where researchers are trying to figure out what they can feed cattle to produce less methane.
--:-- Benji Jones: So certain kinds of forage, like different kinds of grasses or legumes, are thought to be associated with lower methane production.
--:-- Benji Jones: So like literally they're burping less or their burps contain less methane.
--:-- Benji Jones: And so they're trying to figure out, okay, which grasses or which types of forage will actually lead to this reduction.
--:-- Benji Jones: In order to test this, they put sheep into metal chambers that look a lot like walk-in refrigerators.
--:-- Benji Jones: The chambers are hooked up to high-tech machines that measure gas emissions.
--:-- Benji Jones: And then the researchers feed the sheep lots of different kinds of plants to see if they can reduce that methane output.
--:-- Benji Jones: Jones explained that the food comes from a massive seed bank.
--:-- Benji Jones: I mean, it has like 67,000 samples and they're stored in like these freezing rooms in vacuum sealed aluminum bags.
--:-- Benji Jones: And I got to go into one of them.
--:-- Benji Jones: It was like negative 10 degrees.
--:-- Benji Jones: It was freezing.
--:-- Benji Jones: And so I literally only stayed in for like two minutes, but you can just see thousands of these seeds in these library-like shelves.
--:-- Benji Jones: And this room alone is just essential, not only for this project, but for like research all around the world.
--:-- Benji Jones: Lab testing is still underway, but scientists told Jones some of the early results look promising.
--:-- Benji Jones: And they say one big advantage of doing this type of research is that the solution could be fairly low-tech, which would make it scalable in low-income countries.
--:-- Benji Jones: This would just be changing the kind of forage that they use or favoring one forage over the other.
--:-- Benji Jones: They wouldn't have to buy a potentially expensive supplement that would maybe be out of their price range or increase the cost of meat.
--:-- Benji Jones: This is a pretty simple solution.
--:-- Benji Jones: And it's also really elegant in a way.
--:-- Benji Jones: It's literally just saying, oh yeah, we have control over what we feed our animals.
--:-- Benji Jones: Let's find food that just produces less of a problem.
--:-- Benji Jones: It just feels like pretty low-hanging fruit in terms of trying to fix some of the climate crisis.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories being featured in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A judge in New York has ruled President-elect Donald Trump's 34 felony convictions for falsifying records related to a sex scandal will stand for now.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Trump argued that the recent Supreme Court ruling granting broad immunity to presidents was caused to throw his convictions out.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The judge yesterday sided with prosecutors who argued Trump's crimes predated his presidency.
--:-- Shamita Basu: According to The New York Times, even if he loses in New York, Trump could ultimately take the matter to the Supreme Court, which, as we saw with the presidential immunity ruling, might rule in his favor.
--:-- Shamita Basu: TikTok is making a last gasp effort to avoid being banned in the United States.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The company asked the Supreme Court yesterday to temporarily halt a law passed by Congress earlier this year that will force Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest or be banned.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Because TikTok is a Chinese company, the DOJ says it's a risk to national security.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that's because, according to Reuters, the company has access to huge amounts of data on Americans and has the ability to manipulate the content Americans view on the app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: ByteDance and TikTok want the law halted while they appeal a lower court ruling.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, Italian officials are cracking down on so-called pasta grannies, some who have allegedly tried to pull a fast one on tourists.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In the port city of Bari, skilled pasta-making women line the streets, churning out countless pounds of orechette, little ears in Italian.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They've become a tourist attraction in recent years, But some of those grannies are accused of trying to pass off factory-made pasta as their own.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Telegraph reports authorities are introducing new hygiene regulations, telling pasta grannies that they can't work al fresco chatting to each other in the streets.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They have to move inside to a clean kitchen, which many of the grannies aren't happy about.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But perhaps most importantly, they're introducing a stamp of approval, much like other regional specialties like wine and cheese, to make sure people are getting the real deal.
--:-- 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 from the Los Angeles Times.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In 2019, the public came to learn about a big higher ed scandal.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Parents were colluding with coaches and college administrators to get their kids into elite schools.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Times spoke with a former college administrator who served prison time and says she got played as a scapegoat.
--:-- 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.
