--:-- Gideon Resnick: Good morning. It's Friday, May 24th. I'm Gideon Resnick, in for Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Coming up on today's show, how some protesters for police reform were charged with terrorism, the impact of changing speed limits on road fatalities, and why U.S. sunscreen is so lacking. But first, a quick look at some major stories that are in the news.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The NCAA and its major conferences are rolling out a nearly $2.8 billion settlement that'll clear the way for schools to pay athletes directly. Michael McCann, senior sports legal reporter at Sportico, talked about the impact of this on NBC.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: That will be, of course, a radical change from the traditions of college sports. Many would say it's the change that's warranted, given that coaches can make millions of dollars and all other sorts of ways in which money is made in college sports. Now the athletes, at least at some schools, will get a direct stake.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The settlement money will go to both current and former college athletes. Revenue sharing is likely to kick in at the start of the 2025 academic year.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Staying with legal news, Norfolk Southern is settling with the Biden administration for $310 million over last year's toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. The money is in addition to hundreds of millions the rail operator has spent on cleanup and a separate settlement with victims.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: In Louisiana, lawmakers have passed legislation to reclassify abortion pills as controlled and dangerous substances. It's a first-of-its-kind bill that would put these drugs in the same category as narcotics.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Doctors have said that once signed into law, this will make it harder for them to prescribe the medicines, which are not only used by patients seeking abortions.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And in a ruling that could have national implications, the U.S. Supreme Court is upholding a South Carolina congressional map that was drawn by the state's Republican-controlled legislature.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: That reverses a lower court decision that said the map diluted Black voting power. The ruling is a potential boost to the GOP and its bid to keep control of the House.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Tomorrow marks four years since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer. In the weeks that followed, some researchers say up to 26 million people protested, which would make it the largest protest movement in American history.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: New York Magazine's Zak Cheney-Rice reports on how local laws in Georgia have been expanding to charge protesters critical of police with terrorism. The story focuses on something called Cop City.
--:-- Zak Cheney-Rice: It's a police training facility being built across 85 acres of forest on the outskirts of Atlanta. Critics have been protesting the facility for years for all sorts of reasons.
--:-- Zak Cheney-Rice: Environmentalists say cutting down the forest would make flooding in the area worse. Criminal justice advocates say the training center will further militarize the police.
--:-- Zak Cheney-Rice: And as I explain it, residents say they've been cut out of the process. Locals in the neighborhood weren't consulted.
--:-- Zak Cheney-Rice: In fact, the pro-policing nonprofit that is sort of coordinating the project very proudly sort of announced that they were intentionally not going to involve local input because they didn't want to slow the construction process down.
--:-- Zak Cheney-Rice: In the past, protesters camped out at the construction site might have been charged with something like criminal damage to property.
--:-- Zak Cheney-Rice: That has changed as Georgia lawmakers in recent years have expanded the definition of terrorism.
--:-- Zak Cheney-Rice: You know, one of the protesters was charged with domestic terrorism and racketeering and conspiracy for sending $50 in Venmo money to protesters camped in the woods so that they could purchase food to feed themselves.
--:-- Zak Cheney-Rice: So this counts as racketeering and conspiracy, for example, under this new approach.
--:-- Zak Cheney-Rice: At one point, authorities said protesters damaged construction equipment and launched fireworks at police.
--:-- Zak Cheney-Rice: One woman named Priscilla Grimm told me elsewhere that same night she was on her way to a nearby concert thrown in solidarity with Cop City protesters.
--:-- Zak Cheney-Rice: As she was walking, she was tackled by police, then taken to jail. She was told that she was being charged with domestic terrorism.
--:-- Zak Cheney-Rice: And the evidence that the police used to determine who those alleged vandals must have been was that they rounded up people with mud on their clothes.
--:-- Zak Cheney-Rice: That was the evidence they had. Priscilla Grimm spent a month in jail and lost a job offer. She told me she was shocked and terrified by the experience.
--:-- Zak Cheney-Rice: She's from New York and lived through 9/11. To her, that was terrorism – not attending a protest concert.
--:-- Zak Cheney-Rice: And so this is designed to have a chilling effect, and I think inevitably will, as people think twice about whether it's worth the risk, whether 20 years in prison is a worthwhile trade-off for exercising your First Amendment right.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: You can read the full story on the Apple News app.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The U.S. has a deadly problem on its roads. Compared to Western Europe, Canada, and Australia, we have 50% more traffic-related fatalities.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: One major factor is speeding. In 2021, data shows it played a role in nearly one out of three traffic-related deaths.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Which is why lawmakers in Washington, D.C., New York, and California are taking steps to lower speed limits in cities to 20 miles per hour.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: At that speed, most people hit by a car have a good chance of surviving. When speed limits are higher, their risk of injury and death rises significantly.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: In New York, a new state law allows New York City to set its own speed limits.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Vox reporter Maren Kogan told us about Sammy's law.
--:-- Maren Kogan: So the law is named after Sammy Cohen-Ekstein. He was a boy who was killed about 10 years ago in Brooklyn when his ball, the ball that he was playing with, dribbled out into traffic, essentially, and he went after it and was struck and killed.
--:-- Maren Kogan: Research shows reducing speed limits in cities to 20 miles per hour led to a nearly 70 percent reduction in collisions involving kids.
--:-- Maren Kogan: It's not just speed limits. Urban planning is also a factor in street safety.
--:-- Maren Kogan: The way we've designed roads in the U.S. is so that cars can go very fast.
--:-- Maren Kogan: And you have a number of roads across the U.S. where there are several lanes designed for high-speed travel for cars.
--:-- Maren Kogan: But at the same time, there's a number of people who need to access the area by foot. Maybe there are restaurants or different shops. Maybe they don't have access to a vehicle. They don't have access to public transportation.
--:-- Maren Kogan: So you have a lot of people walking on what are essentially highways and it's very, very deadly.
--:-- Maren Kogan: What Americans drive also matters. Our cars have been getting bigger and heavier.
--:-- Maren Kogan: Bigger and heavier cars are more dangerous to people outside of them than the smaller cars are.
--:-- Maren Kogan: All of these things are sort of working together to make our roads even more deadly for pedestrians and cyclists than they were before.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Lowering speed limits is one step that will help save lives. But Kogan writes, it'll take a combination of safety reforms to help make American streets safer.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Americans are about to start another summer with inferior sunscreen.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: As NPR reports, other countries like Japan, South Korea, and France have sunscreens with newer chemical ingredients, some of which have been shown to provide broader protection against UV rays.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: These newer sunscreens have been around for years overseas. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been slow to approve these products.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: There's a backstory here. The FDA follows a 1938 law that requires chemical sunscreens to be tested on animals and classified as drugs.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But in much of the rest of the world, sunscreens are classified as cosmetics, and they're not tested on animals.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: In fact, the European Union bans animal testing for cosmetics.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: A lack of access to these better sunscreens has real-world consequences.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Every hour, at least two people die of skin cancer in the U.S.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It's highly treatable, but also the most common form of cancer in the country. And it's largely preventable.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The FDA has defended its review process as a way to ensure the safety of products that many people use daily.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But there's now a bipartisan effort in Congress to change things and to speed up approvals of new ingredients.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: A House bill was introduced earlier this year that would require the FDA to allow non-animal testing on sunscreen.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But Americans still won't have these options in time for this summer, or likely even next.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: If you do head to the beach this weekend, though, it's better to use something than nothing at all.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And as we mentioned, the narrated article of that New York Magazine story on Cop City protesters is playing next.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News Plus Narrated to hear that story.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Our team will be off on Monday for Memorial Day. Enjoy your holiday weekend, and I'll be back with the news on Tuesday.
