--:-- Gideon Resnick: Good morning. It's Thursday, May 2nd. I'm Gideon Resnick in for Shemitah Besu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Coming up on today's show, why protesters want universities to divest from Israel, the children who lost limbs in Israel's attacks on Gaza, and a secret society trying to battle short attention spans. But first, let's take a quick look at some big stories that are in the news.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: We're following a standoff between police and protesters on UCLA's campus. The demonstrators against the war in Gaza have been ordered to dismantle their tent encampment, and they've refused. The LA Times reports that police moved into the encampment very early this morning. They faced a lot of resistance from the crowd of demonstrators as they tore through barricades and made arrests.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The demonstration had become more tense Tuesday night when pro-Israel counter-protesters attacked the encampment. That assault went on for hours before law enforcement moved in to stop the fighting. The governor's office says the delayed response was unacceptable.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: This is a fast-moving story, and you can get updates throughout the day on the Apple News app. In regards to the conflict itself, leaders are looking to see if Israel and Hamas can reach a ceasefire deal. There's a proposal on the table that would temporarily pause fighting in Gaza and allow an exchange of hostages held by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Hamas has said it wants a full withdrawal of Israeli troops and not just a pause in fighting. Axios reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has privately told the U.S. that he won't accept that condition. And if Hamas doesn't accept a deal, he'll move ahead with an invasion of Rafa.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And in Arizona, the state Senate has voted to repeal an 1864 law that banned nearly all abortions. The law dates back to a time when women didn't have the right to vote, and the age of consent was 10 years old. Arizona wasn't even a state yet. The governor is expected to sign the repeal.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But the 1864 abortion ban may briefly take effect next month because a repeal can't go into force immediately. More now on the campus protests and a core action that pro-protesters across the country are urging their schools to take.
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--:-- Gideon Resnick: We will not stop. We will not rest. The schools that rest. We will not move until Colombia meets our demands. Without divestment, the siege will not end. We need to put pressure now. We're here until the demands are met or we get dragged away by police.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Demonstrators want universities to cut all investments they've made into companies connected to Israel and its offensive in Gaza. At schools like NYU and Colombia, they want to see satellite campuses or dual degree programs in Israel shuttered as well.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: There is a broad list of companies involved, and each school has different financial ties. But some of the big names include defense contractors and weapons manufacturers like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. And also companies like Google, Amazon, Coca-Cola, and Airbnb.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The Anti-Defamation League and other critics have said that these divestment demands are inherently anti-Semitic, an assertion that protesters, some of whom are Jewish, reject.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Divestment can be complicated. But Charlie Eaton, an economic sociologist from the University of California, Merced, told PBS that it is feasible.
--:-- Charlie Eaton: There's hundreds of socially and environmentally responsible investment managers out there. Any endowment could shift its funds into those socially and environmentally responsible funds that have a range of criteria that guide their investments.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Several years back, the podcast Freakonomics looked at what impact divestment can have or not have. It focused in part on efforts in the 1980s to divest from South Africa's apartheid regime. Once again, Colombia played a big role. It was a site of major sit-ins.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Ivo Welch was a student there at the time and later became a UCLA finance professor. He talked to Freakonomics about the movement and how to study its impact.
--:-- Ivo Welch: There were all sorts of coordinated actions. They were not just in the United States, but all over the world, all designed to bring the South African regime to its knees or at least have an influence on the perception of the public about South Africa.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But roughly a decade after apartheid ended, Welch and his colleagues wanted to see what kind of impact the movement had, economically speaking. Did it work?
--:-- Ivo Welch: Unfortunately, when we started measuring it, we found that it had no impact whatsoever. That's because the efforts were fairly grassroots and ad hoc. There were too many ways to get around the boycott.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And Welch and his colleagues found it hard to change human behavior. You might support a cause but it doesn't mean that you stop buying things you like. Also, even controversial stocks can find buyers.
--:-- Ivo Welch: If you could make it so that everybody in the world who wanted to hold South African stocks wouldn't have bought any shares from South Africa anymore, it would have made a difference. However, that wasn't the case.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: In reality, in real life, there were just too many people that were willing to hold the shares, and they immediately snapped up all the shares that people were willing to sell.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Even if the South African divestment movement wasn't entirely effective at financially destabilizing either the South African government or South African companies, there is something lots of economists agree on. They did change the conversation. They raised the level of national and global awareness of apartheid.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: As for today, in the question of policy around Israel, many universities are not willing to divest. But a few are taking small steps in response to the protests. Northwestern agreed to more disclosure of its investments, and Brown says it'll vote on divestment later this year.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Now to the civilian victims of the war in Gaza, where UNICEF reports that at least 1,000 kids are now amputees. Since Gaza's medical system has effectively collapsed under Israel's offensive, doctors have been forced to perform more amputations than they would otherwise.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Some of the most seriously wounded children have been evacuated to Qatar for care. Nabi Boulos is the Middle East bureau chief for the LA Times. He spent time at a facility in Doha talking to the very young patients, their families, and their doctors.
--:-- Nabi Boulos: And he told us it was a hard scene to witness. The main sort of idea that comes to your head that this is not normal, where you just look down the street and you see all these kids who are playing, and they're on wheelchairs, they're smiling, they're laughing, they're playing.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And yet at the same time, it's just so unnatural to see that level of damage to the human body all concentrated in one spot.
--:-- Nabi Boulos: Boulos told us about five-year-old Bata Nabhan. When missiles hit the apartment where her family was sheltering, her older sister was killed and Bata's leg was crushed.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Unfortunately, by the time that they could do anything about it properly, it was too late. Infection had spread. So it became worse because of waiting.
--:-- Nabi Boulos: I mean in that regard it was a very typical story in the sense that the injuries became worse because of the lack of medical attention.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The Israeli attacks and the damage they do to healthcare infrastructure in Gaza means severely injured patients can get adequate treatment there and evacuations to Qatar take time.
--:-- Nabi Boulos: These delays in treatment can make amputation cases more complicated and require additional surgeries.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The World Health Organization has voiced frustration at the slow pace of moving victims out of Gaza for treatment.
--:-- Nabi Boulos: Boulos described the consequences of delays for these young patients. The striking thing about what this doctor said was that all these people came late. If they had come earlier, they could have radically affected the chance of them having a relatively normal life.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And now that's simply not the case. Child amputees are particularly complicated to treat because their bodies are still growing. Prosthetics have to be replaced regularly, and sometimes more surgeries are needed.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It's not clear when these children can leave Qatar, but they will face a difficult future. Some have lost their parents, and many of them have no home in Gaza to return to.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Finally, in this age of screens and scrolling and multitasking, there's concern about declining attention spans. We are worried about our own ability to focus, let alone our kids.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Marketers are definitely preoccupied with how to grab our attention, knowing that we can easily move on to the next thing when we want to. A marketing exec says the attention span of the average consumer is down to about eight seconds. That is shorter than the attention span of a goldfish.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But there's a group of academics, artists, and writers who believe it doesn't have to be this way. They're part of a secret society with a very secret society-sounding name, the Order of the Third Bird.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: They have this bizarre set of rituals that revolves around paying attention, extreme levels of attention, to works of art. A writer for The New Yorker managed to get inside the quirky group and give their philosophy a try.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: That story is an unusual one, and it's playing for you next if you're listening in the Apple News app. And if you're listening in the podcast app, you can find it by searching Apple News Plus Narrated.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Enjoy listening, and I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
