--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Wednesday, January 12th. I'm Shamita Basu. And I'm Duarte Giraldino. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: 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: In August, 13-year-old Benny Hargrove told his grandmother that he had stopped a group of teens from beating up a younger boy at school. It made her nervous. She told him, sometimes it's better to stay out of it. He said, that's just not in me.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The next day, Benny confronted one of the teenagers. We know what happened next from police. Washington Post reporter John Woodrow Cox tells us what Benny said.
--:-- John Woodrow Cox: If you're going to pick on anybody, you know, pick on me, confront me, fight me. And the boy took out a gun and shot Benny six times. And he died soon after.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Oh, it's so difficult to hear. You know, this is part of a national trend. In 2021, kids with access to guns fueled a record number of school shootings.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This shooting in Albuquerque, the one that killed 13-year-old Benny, it was one of at least 42 acts of gun violence on K-12 campuses last year.
--:-- John Woodrow Cox: Researchers think the pandemic could be driving some of this. There's been a huge spike in gun sales since the pandemic began. And what that means is that there are many, many more unsecured firearms in kids' homes. Guns that are not being locked up.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So kids have more access to guns than they had before. You know, we also know that kids have been under intense pressure and stress and that they've been separated from their support systems.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There's a bill in Congress that would require adults to keep their guns out of the hands of children. But it hasn't gotten enough traction to pass. Some states have laws dealing with this, but one gun violence prevention group says 20 of them currently don't have laws about securing firearms to prevent kids from accessing them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: School shootings are committed by children who are getting access to guns that they should never have access to. If the one thing that America changed as it related to guns and gun policy was to prevent children from having access to guns well more than half of school shootings in this country would end overnight. Overnight.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Tax season is here, and it seems like the IRS is not ready. Politico has the story of how the Treasury Department is warning this tax season could be very frustrating.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Complaints about the IRS are nothing new. It has struggled with budget cuts, a shrinking workforce, and aging technology. And the pandemic made things worse. It also increased the agency's workload.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Yeah, I mean, to get a sense of the extra work, think about policies that put more money in your pocket. The child tax credits, stimulus payments. The IRS had to deal with that.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Things are so bad at the agency that in the first half of last year, there was one IRS staffer to handle every 16,000 phone calls. And the agency closed the last filing season with more than 35 million unprocessed returns.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So what does all this mean for you? OK, well, the takeaway is try to file early and electronically if you can. If you have questions before you call, try the IRS website first or else, you know, you're probably going to be on hold for quite a long time.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Have you been watching Jeopardy lately? Players have been racking up these serious winning streaks.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There was Matt Amodio, who won 38 games in a row. For a 30-day total of $1,107,401. Jonathan Fisher beat him, and he went on a decent streak of his own. With a 10-day total of $230,100.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And right now, Amy Schneider is at 30 wins and counting. She recently crossed a big money milestone.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So what the deal with everyone going on these streaks Some people have been wondering whether something at the game has changed without Alex Trebek at the helm
--:-- Claire McNair: We have a piece that tries to get some answers. I've been all over the big changes at Jeopardy, and my latest piece has some great insight.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yes, the changes are sort of about the pandemic, but it's also about the internet. For one, in the last couple of years, Jeopardy made it a lot easier to try out. More of the testing and audition process was done online.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: A bigger pull to choose from seems to have led to stronger players. And then there was this little quirk that you might have missed if you're not a Jeopardy expert like this journalist, McNair.
--:-- Claire McNair: There was a point in the summer of 2020 when travel was complicated, of course, and the show only had on players who were within driving distance of their L.A. studios. And that rule seems to have created a backlog of talent from the rest of the country.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So it's possible that now we're seeing the results of them finally getting their turn on the show.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And McNair says maybe the biggest change is how contestants are preparing. It's not just about studying facts anymore. There's so much more strategizing, so many resources and online forums where people are literally gaming it out.
--:-- Claire McNair: It's like we're living in a golden age of Jeopardy knowledge and watching the best, most strategic players make it to the big stage. And they're giving us a season of streaks.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's the type of technology that could change your life in small but significant ways. The Wall Street Journal has a roundup of a few inventions that are being developed, and some of them are just really mind-blowing.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: These are just some of the inventions that researchers are working on that could help millions of people.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yeah, I'll start with my favorite, a spoon that simulates saltiness. There are a lot of health reasons why someone might be advised to cut down on the salt. Especially as you get older.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But, you know, it puts a damper on enjoying food. This spoon sends electric signals to your taste buds, tricking you into the taste of salt. And you could adjust the saltiness with an app on your phone.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There another cool invention from the list the next generation of hearing aids. Some companies are working on models that turn down background noise and turn up the volume of someone you listening to.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But they're also working on hearing aids that might be able to do a whole lot more. In the future, we could see hearing aids that also measure your body temperature, your heart rate, and other vitals.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And they may be able to automatically ping your doctor if they detect you're having an emergency. Beyond health, some companies are even imagining a future where your hearing aid could double as a kind of virtual assistant.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: They're using AI to give hearing aids the ability to be the smart voice in your ear. Imagine if a hearing aid could whisper some quick facts in your ear.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And before we go today, we wanted to let you know about a new podcast from Apple called Wild Things. It's all about Siegfried and Roy.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: If you were around for the 80s and 90s, you know exactly who I'm talking about. The white tigers, the German accents.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Journalist Stephen Leckert is the show's host. It is hard to imagine any performers anywhere in the world, but especially in America, having exotic animals running around on stage without a barrier or a fence to protect the crowd.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I mean, it's absolutely kind of insane that that actually happened.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He told us that for decades, Siegfried and Roy stood as a testament to humanity's dominance over nature, until one night in 2003. When a tiger attacked Roy Horn on stage in front of a live audience, it really planted the seed in my mind of this question, which was, what happened?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Because they'd performed for 40 plus years without incident on stage, so I never felt like we got a suitable answer.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So we basically set out to answer that question and we answered a lot more than just that question.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The show is out today and we're sharing the first episode right here in the Apple News Today feed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you like it, go ahead and give their channel a follow and be sure to like and leave a comment so other people can find it too.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And as usual, you can find the stories we talked about earlier and many more on the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We'll talk with you again tomorrow. Thank you.
