--:-- Shumita Basu: Good morning. It's Wednesday, September 4th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shumita Basu: On today's show, the Florida Republicans who want to protect abortion access, why it's so hard to make football safer for kids and adults, and a Paralympian who meddled twice without really meaning to. But first, it's back to school week for many kids across the country. And in at least eight states, things will be pretty different because of new policies that either ban or limit the use of cell phones during school hours.
--:-- Laura Meckler: That's Laura Meckler, a national education writer at The Washington Post. She's been tracking changes in cell phone policies over the last year in Indiana, Louisiana, South Carolina, Nevada, and more.
--:-- Shumita Basu: It started with Florida, which passed a law requiring public schools to ban student cell phone use during class and block access to social media on the school Wi-Fi. Since then, Meckler and her colleagues found at least seven of the 20 largest school districts in the country have banned cell phones during the school day, and several others are considering policies to limit them.
--:-- Laura Meckler: The pressure is coming from a lot of places. Government officials, parents, school administrators. Top of the list is teachers. Teachers who are concerned about distractions in school.
--:-- Shumita Basu: A 2023 survey by Pew found 72% of high school teachers say phone distraction is a major problem for students. So major that one teachers union in Cleveland even made a ban a condition in their new contract.
--:-- Laura Meckler: Parents largely agree that phones are a problem. In a survey by the National Parents Union, 70 percent of parents said kids should not be allowed to use phones in class.
--:-- Shumita Basu: But more than half of them also said there should be wiggle room during other parts of the day, like lunch or recess. And in some cases, parents have pushed back on phone bans, saying they need a way to communicate with their kids in an emergency.
--:-- Laura Meckler: From students, what you'll often hear is that they can learn to use it responsibly. Many school districts are trying to find a middle ground on restrictions, like in Hillsborough County, Florida, which Meckler highlighted in her reporting.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Kids there in middle school and elementary school have to put away and mute their phones during school hours. But once they hit high school, they can use their phones at lunch.
--:-- Laura Meckler: We still don't know very much about the long-term impact of cell phone bans in schools. One study from 2022 following college students concluded that taking away phones could potentially improve learning comprehension and anxiety for younger students.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Other global studies have offered mixed results on how phone bans impact school performance and cyberbullying.
--:-- Laura Meckler: One principal of a high school told Meckler his observation. He's noticing kids talking more, using the library more, and just being kids, which he says has been nice to see.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Let's turn now to the topic of abortion on the ballot. The issue will be put to voters in 10 states in November. In Florida, a small but growing movement of Republican women are publicly pushing for a measure to change the state constitution to overturn the state's six-week abortion ban.
--:-- Laura Casisto: I think really what they say motivated them are these really what they think of as traditional Republican values. Things like a love of freedom, limited government, and a feeling like their party has just veered too far to the right on this issue and abandoned those values in heavily restricting this procedure.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Some of them recently held local office as Republicans. These are people who are actively involved in the party, who have been elected to office as Republicans, who have worked as party officials, who have been appointed to positions by Republican governors.
--:-- Laura Casisto: I think it really does show the kind of crisis that the party is in about this issue right now. The current sort of approach is kind of alienating a meaningful constituency.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Former President Trump, who's taken credit for appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, has struggled to land on a clear abortion message throughout the campaign.
--:-- Laura Casisto: What you see is Trump being pulled by two different forces. There's concern that supporting restrictive abortion policies could be bad for Republicans in the fall.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Last week, Trump seemed to acknowledge those concerns by suggesting he would support the Florida ballot measure, saying he feels that the six-week ban is, quote, too short.
--:-- Laura Casisto: But after pushback from anti-abortion advocates, he flipped his position a few days later.
--:-- Shumita Basu: I think that Trump and other Republicans are genuinely right now fumbling towards a position on this issue and just not sure where to land.
--:-- Laura Casisto: Since 2022, ballot measures supporting abortion access have passed with strong support, even in relatively red states like Ohio and Kansas.
--:-- Shumita Basu: But Casisto says the measure in Florida will be the most difficult test yet for the abortion rights movement. They need 60 percent support for it to pass.
--:-- Laura Casisto: That means they need to get a very significant number of Republicans to vote for it. By some estimates, about 40 percent of Republicans are going to need to vote for it to pass.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And so I do think that that's a reason why you see quite an organized effort to get Republicans on board in Florida to make this measure feel very bipartisan to speak in a language that going to appeal to conservative voters
--:-- Shumita Basu: As we head into this school year, there is an alarming trend in youth football. At least seven teenage football players died in the month of August.
--:-- Ryan Craddock: You're in disbelief. You wish it was a bad dream that you could wake up from. It's agony inside that I just can't put words to it. It's terrible.
--:-- Shumita Basu: That's Ryan Craddock, the father of 13-year-old Cohen, speaking with the local NBC affiliate in West Virginia.
--:-- Ryan Craddock: He says his son took a bad hit during practice drills while wearing a helmet and died the next day after experiencing brain bleeding and swelling.
--:-- Shumita Basu: According to a national research group that tracks traumatic sports injuries, last year, at least 16 young people died in incidents either directly or indirectly related to football.
--:-- Dr. Robert Cantu: That's looking at youth leagues up through the college level. The medical director of this research group, Dr. Robert Cantu, told NBC he's as alarmed as he's been for 30 years.
--:-- Shumita Basu: He says looking at the data, football is by far and away the most dangerous sport for kids.
--:-- Ryan Craddock: Some parents, including Cohen's dad, are now pushing for better headgear as a potential solution.
--:-- Shumita Basu: They want to see schools embrace using a type of padded cap that goes on top of the helmet called guardian caps.
--:-- Dr. Robert Cantu: You might even spot them on the field this week when the new NFL season kicks off.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The professional league has embraced this product in recent years. And for the first time, players will be allowed to wear the caps in regular season games.
--:-- Dr. Robert Cantu: The NFL claims these caps have cut down the number of concussions in the league by up to 50 percent.
--:-- Shumita Basu: But CNN reports scientists are generally skeptical of those claims because the NFL hasn't yet released data to back them up.
--:-- Dr. Robert Cantu: Several independent research groups say the jury is out on whether these caps make a meaningful difference to player safety.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And one expert on standards for sports equipment pointed out to NBC, helmets can only do so much to prevent fatal injuries because they ultimately can't control how hard or how often a player is hit or how their body might respond to being hit, all of which play a role in traumatic injuries.
--:-- Dr. Robert Cantu: What really needs to happen is we need to reduce collisions in football. No hits to the head are good, and you can eliminate most of the hits to the head in these collision sports by practicing the sport in a non-collision way.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Cohen dad said he just wants to see more kids protected so other families don't have to go through what his is experiencing
--:-- Shumita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories being featured in the Apple News app. Starting in Ukraine, which is under more Russian attacks today in the western parts of the country.
--:-- Shumita Basu: This comes after one of the most deadly attacks in the war so far in eastern Ukraine, where over 50 people were killed when missiles struck a military academy and hospital yesterday.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Ukraine's foreign minister is now resigning, joining five other ministers who stepped down in recent days.
--:-- Shumita Basu: That means one-third of Ukraine's cabinet is now vacant.
--:-- Shumita Basu: In Gaza, the World Health Organization says the initial efforts to vaccinate children against polio are surpassing expectations.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Israel and Hamas have agreed to a series of pauses in fighting to allow health workers to distribute the vaccine for polio, which Gaza had not seen for over 25 years until last month, when a 10-month-old was left partially paralyzed.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The goal is to vaccinate a total of 640,000 children, and the WHO is roughly a quarter of the way there.
--:-- Shumita Basu: In other news, the Department of Justice charged six senior Hamas leaders with planning the October 7th terrorist attack and for directing a decades-long campaign to endanger the security of the United States.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The defendants include current MS leader Yaya Sinwar, the mastermind of the attack.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The charges were filed in February and kept under seal so the U.S. could potentially take these leaders into custody.
--:-- Shumita Basu: But the department says it chose to unseal them since half of the defendants have been reported dead.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And finally, to the Paralympics in Paris, where an American teenager is leaving with two gold medals that he didn't totally see coming.
--:-- Shumita Basu: First, 19-year-old Ezra Freck clinched gold in the men's 100-meter race.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Ezra Freck is getting into the mix. Ezra Freck gold! But see, that was just supposed to be his warm-up.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Freck is a high jumper, primarily, and he mostly ran the 100-meter to get ready for that competition, which he also won yesterday with a jump just over 6 feet 4 inches.
--:-- Shumita Basu: After the games, he'll head to the University of Southern California, where he'll be the track and field program's first athlete to compete with an above-the-knee amputation.
--:-- Shumita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And if you're already listening in the News app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next. The New Yorker explores a growing real estate market for people who believe the end times are near.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The bunker market is booming, and the magazine toured a couple of them to better understand the appeal.
--:-- Shumita Basu: If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
