--:-- Mark Garrison: Good morning. It's Wednesday, February 28th. I'm Mark Garrison in for Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Mark Garrison: On the show, the Supreme Court hears a major gun case, why Egypt isn't taking in Palestinians from neighboring Gaza, and how Leap Day keeps chaos away. But first, let's take a quick look at some other major stories in the news.
--:-- Mark Garrison: In Michigan, President Biden won the Democratic primary, as expected. But the protest campaign we talked about yesterday racked up a lot of votes against him. Around 100,000 voters selected uncommitted. Local Arab and Muslim activists encouraged people to vote that way as a protest of Biden's support for Israel's war in Gaza.
--:-- Mark Garrison: They ended up with a lot more votes than their stated goal of 10,000. Michigan activist Leila El Abed spoke to MSNBC about the protest vote.
--:-- Leila El Abed: We focused on the primary to send this message to Joe Biden that he needed to listen to Michiganders when we said we need a permanent ceasefire now. And come November, it's going to be Joe Biden and the Democratic Party that are going to be held accountable for handing the White House to someone like Trump.
--:-- Mark Garrison: In the Republican primary, Trump defeated Nikki Haley by a wide margin. In Alabama, legislators are making moves to protect IVF clinics following the state's Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos are children. Several fertility clinics paused treatments as a result.
--:-- Mark Garrison: New legislation introduced yesterday by Republican lawmakers would give fertility doctors legal immunity. The state's Republican governor, Kay Ivey, said she's ready to sign a bill that would allow IVF clinics to resume services.
--:-- Mark Garrison: In Texas, multiple wildfires are burning through hundreds of thousands of acres in the north of the state. Warm temperatures and strong winds are rapidly spreading the flames through dry grass. Conditions forced a nuclear weapons facility to shut down.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Forecasters say things could get worse with hot, dry conditions set to continue.
--:-- Mark Garrison: The US Supreme Court is hearing arguments today in a gun case that centers on devices that speed up semi rifles. They're called bump stocks. When they're added to a weapon, they allow it to fire much faster, like an automatic rifle.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Machine guns are illegal for civilians. The case is basically about whether adding a bump stock to a legal weapon turns it into an illegal machine gun. The gunman in the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas had multiple rifles with bump stocks.
--:-- Mark Garrison: He fired over 1,000 rounds in 11 minutes. 60 people ultimately died. It was the deadliest mass shooting in American history. The next year, the Trump administration banned bump stocks, saying they fell within the definition of machine guns.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Marsha Coyle, legal analyst for PBS NewsHour, told us how the challenge to the ban on bump stocks is a technical one, different than the typical Second Amendment arguments over gun rights.
--:-- Marsha Coyle: There's not going to be any discussion probably of what the framers of the Constitution thought back in the 1700s and 1800s about guns. What they're asked to do here is to determine whether a bump stock itself fits the definition of machine gun in federal law.
--:-- Marsha Coyle: And if it does, then it is prohibited. Coyle says the arguments may go into great detail on how rifles, machine guns, and bump stocks actually function.
--:-- Marsha Coyle: I can tell you now that there is a fundamental disagreement in the Supreme Court, in the parties. We don't know what the justices think yet, but a fundamental disagreement between the government and the man who was actually challenging this rule over how bump stocks operate.
--:-- Marsha Coyle: So it's going to be, I think, pretty fascinating to see how the justices sort through the mechanics of bump stocks. The case is the latest one on guns the Supreme Court is taking up.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Last fall, it heard a case challenging a federal law that bars anyone subject to a domestic violence restraining order from possessing a gun. The court has not yet ruled on that case.
--:-- Mark Garrison: The UN says a quarter of Gaza population is now one step away from famine The war is making it difficult to get enough food in. Aid workers say a ceasefire is urgently needed to allow more humanitarian supplies in.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Over a million people are taking shelter in Rafah by the Egyptian border. They went there to escape fighting in other parts of Gaza. But there have been Israeli airstrikes in Rafah.
--:-- Mark Garrison: And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said a major ground invasion could follow if hostages held by Hamas aren't released. Egypt is not allowing Palestinians to cross its borders in any significant numbers.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Officials say they're concerned Israel wouldn't let Palestinians come back to Gaza later. Correspondent Aya Batrawi talked about this in a recent report for NPR.
--:-- Aya Batrawi: You know, time and again since Israel's founding in 1948, Palestinians have been forced to flee their homes. And Egyptians, they don't want to be a part of facilitating that happening again now in Gaza.
--:-- Aya Batrawi: Most Palestinians in Gaza are descendants of people displaced decades ago in that first major Israeli-Palestinian war.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Karen Huster, a medical coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, talked to NPR about the fear and uncertainty Palestinians in Rafa are dealing with right now.
--:-- Karen Huster: I've never heard anybody say we want to go to Egypt. They just want to be in a place where they don't get bombarded and where they can sleep and where they can wake up the next day alive.
--:-- Karen Huster: Some people have even told me, you know, I want to go back to my home. And even if it's destroyed, I'll put my tent there and it'll be safer. You know, at least I will die on my home.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Egypt is also keeping tight control of the border in order to avoid being dragged into the conflict. There are concerns that militants could cross and then launch attacks against Israel from Egypt.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Egyptian officials told NPR they're building an enclosed area with cement walls that can hold over 100,000 people in case there's a breach of the border during an Israeli assault on neighboring Rafa.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Egyptian officials have warned that displacing Palestinians by force would be crossing a red line. And diplomats have signaled that if Israel invades Rafa, Egypt could suspend its decades-old peace treaty with Israel.
--:-- Mark Garrison: We finish today with a story about tomorrow. It's the kind of tomorrow that only comes around every four years. February 29th, Leap Day. Leap Day solves for a problem.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Our human calendars don't quite match up with what's actually going on in the solar system. A while back, National Geographic got astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to break it down.
--:-- Neil deGrasse Tyson: It takes like 365 and a quarter days to go around the sun. So we just ignore that quarter day, just sweep it under the rug for three years.
--:-- Neil deGrasse Tyson: That quarter day difference may sound small, but over time, it's a big deal. Without adding a leap day, our calendars would gradually get out of sync.
--:-- Neil deGrasse Tyson: Everything from farming schedules to holidays would fall outside the months we expect them. Before the Romans figured all this out, at one point their calendar was some three months off.
--:-- Neil deGrasse Tyson: It was Julius Caesar, or more likely someone on the staff who was good at astronomy and math, who worked in a leap day. But even that wasn't quite perfect.
--:-- Neil deGrasse Tyson: Centuries later, people realized we needed another tweak. This one's a little complicated, but it might come in handy at a trivia night.
--:-- Neil deGrasse Tyson: Some years that you'd expect to be leap years aren't. You may not have known this because you weren't around when it happened in 1900.
--:-- Mark Garrison: If you're curious, you can read the article for the whole formula. And even that change won't work long term. Astronomers say our current calendar system is going to fall out of whack again.
--:-- Mark Garrison: But no need to stress anytime soon, since it'll take more than 3,000 years before it makes much of a difference. You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Mark Garrison: And if you're already listening in the News app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next from The Atlantic. It's a profile of Jodie Foster and how two of her most recent roles are very different from what she's known for.
--:-- Mark Garrison: She talks about how she's often played solitary women, like the FBI agent in The Silence of the Lambs. But in True Detective and her Oscar-nominated role in Nyad, she's part of a duo.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Foster explains how she previously avoided roles that had a lot of interaction with other actors and why she took on these very different projects. If you're listening in the Podcasts app, follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find the story, and I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
