--:-- Gideon Resnick: Good morning. It's Wednesday, May 29th. I'm Gideon Resnick, in for Shemitah Besu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Coming up on today's show, jury deliberations in Trump's criminal trial, investigating abuse of Native American children, and how anger might do a lot more harm to our bodies than we think. But first, a look at some other big stories that are in the news.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: In Gaza, there's new fallout and growing international condemnation of Israel as it pushes deeper into Rafah. Attacks have continued following outrage over a Sunday airstrike that caused a large fire. At least 45 Palestinians in a refugee camp were killed. Israel called it a tragic mistake in an attempt to target Hamas fighters.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Criticism of Israel is getting more intense, with the UN's top court calling on it to stop its Rafa incursion and several European countries moving to recognize Palestine as an independent state. Around the world, an all-eyes-on-Rafa image has been shared tens of millions of times on social media.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: ABC talked to former Marine and Pentagon official Mick Mulroy about the criticism that Israel faces now.
--:-- Mick Mulroy: Certainly when you go after two Hamas militants and 50 civilians are killed, it really does bring in the idea of proportionality and whether this was a strike that needed to happen. It was exactly what the Biden administration was concerned about when it comes to this assault on Rafa, that the civilians would be caught in the crossfire.
--:-- Mick Mulroy: And these were already displaced people. So they already moved to this location in order to try to avoid this. And yet this strike was taken. The Biden administration said yesterday that while this was a tragedy, the strike did not violate red lines for withholding additional weapons from Israel.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: CNN studied footage from the scene and got analysis from weapons experts, concluding that U.S.-made weapons were used in the attack that started the refugee camp fire.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And even before the latest strikes on Rafah, Palestinian civilians faced a desperate situation. It's now even worse. The temporary pier built by the U.S. military has been damaged by heavy seas. It'll take at least a week to repair, shutting down a critical pathway for humanitarian aid.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: That leaves aid workers on the ground struggling to help with what little they have on hand. Jason Nickerson with Doctors Without Borders told CBC about what he's hearing from Gaza.
--:-- Jason Nickerson: Our colleagues are absolutely terrified. I mean the majority of our staff are Palestinians themselves. They're making impossible choices every day of meeting the needs of their families being forcibly displaced while also continuing to provide medical care under an absolutely impossible set of circumstances.
--:-- Jason Nickerson: We're providing medical care, but within a health system that's effectively destroyed.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: In other news, South Africans are voting in an election that could make history. Polls predict that the ruling party, the African National Congress, could lose its majority. That hasn't happened in 30 years since Nelson Mandela was elected in the first free elections after apartheid.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: High unemployment, power outages, and rising crime are key issues in the election. And Major League Baseball is making a big change to its record books. They will now incorporate stats from Negro League games.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: That means the all-time greatest hitter in baseball is Josh Gibson, not Ty Cobb anymore. The years-long project ensures that the achievements of thousands of Black players now get the historical recognition that they've long deserved.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Jury deliberations are today in the first-ever criminal trial of a former American president. Donald Trump faces 34 felony counts in New York.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: He's charged with falsifying business records to conceal hush money paid to adult film actress Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election. Yesterday, both sides offered their closing arguments in a marathon day in the courtroom.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass spent nearly five hours recapping his case, telling the jurors that Trump tried to, quote, hoodwink the American voter when he had his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, pay Daniels for her silence.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Trump's defense team tried to portray payments as routine and at one point called Cohen the greatest liar of all time.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Now it's up to 12 men and women from New York to decide. It could be hours or days before we get a verdict.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: If Trump is convicted, there are huge questions about the consequences that he will face, both legally and politically.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: No chance, as I see it, he's actually incarcerated before November. That's Harry Littman, a former prosecutor on NPR's Trump Trials podcast.
--:-- Harry Littman: A lot of defendants don't get prison time for this type of crime, even though it can have a maximum sentence of four years.
--:-- Harry Littman: If there's a hung jury, meaning at least one juror holds out, I'm skeptical prosecutors will retry the case before November. Mainly because even if you could do it logistically, to bite off another sort of three months in the middle of elections and conventions and homestretch and be subject to that charge of really interfering with the election the way Trump puts it.
--:-- Harry Littman: I think they will not want to own it. So I think they will retry it but not until after the election.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And of course, once the election happens, all bets are off. It's possible a guilty verdict would hurt Trump in the election. But the New Yorker Susan Glasser said on a recent episode of Apple News and Conversation, the opposite could be true.
--:-- Susan Glasser: He's been running this campaign of, I'm persecuted, grievance, this is terrible, look at me. I'm a victim of a system that's being weaponized against me. So it could be a motivator for some of Trump's base.
--:-- Susan Glasser: I do think that's a real factor.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Any legal result could shape the remainder of the presidential campaign and is likely to feature prominently in the first presidential debate, now just a few weeks away.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: A warning to listeners that this segment references child abuse. The Washington Post is out with new reporting that shines a light on sexual abuse of Native American children.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It's one of the Post's biggest investigative projects of the year. Dana Hedgepeth is one of the reporters. She's also an enrolled member of the Halawa-Saponi tribe of North Carolina.
--:-- Dana Hedgepeth: To understand the scale of abuse, you have to start with the story of how these kids were forcibly removed from their homes and enrolled in boarding schools where they were made to assimilate to white culture.
--:-- Dana Hedgepeth: In every culture around the world, children, children are people's most prized possession. When you take young people and try to transform them and force them into a culture, religion, ways of education, you have hit at the core of trying to eradicate Native Americans.
--:-- Dana Hedgepeth: For 150 years, until 1969, tens of thousands of children were sent to hundreds of boarding schools across the United States, the majority of them run or funded by the U.S. government.
--:-- Dana Hedgepeth: When children arrived, they were stripped of their names, their hair was cut, and they were beaten for speaking their languages, and many were subject to sexual abuse.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Hedgepeth and her colleagues identified well over 100 clergy members assigned to 22 schools who were accused of abuse. One story the Post highlights is that of the Charbonneau sisters.
--:-- Dana Hedgepeth: The nine girls were sent hundreds of miles away from their home to a boarding school. And they were all abused in various forms, physical, emotional, and sexual.
--:-- Dana Hedgepeth: One was raped at 16 by a priest and forced to undergo an abortion by several priests an Indian health services doctor and several sisters. Sit with that for a moment.
--:-- Dana Hedgepeth: In 2008 the sisters sued the priests and others at the school as well as the Catholic Diocese of Sioux Falls. It and other religious organizations denied wrongdoing.
--:-- Dana Hedgepeth: But as the case was about to go to trial, the South Dakota legislature passed a law that prohibits victims of alleged sexual abuse who are 40 or older from suing institutions.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Other survivors have said they want recognition of the harm done. To this day, they want apologies. They want apologies from the White House, the president, the Pope.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Pope Francis visited Canada and apologized for the church's role in forced assimilation there. But he hasn't addressed abuse at Catholic-run boarding schools in the U.S.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The White House didn't respond to the Post's request for comment. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet Secretary, is working on the issue.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Her own relatives were taken to boarding schools. She embarked on a listening tour to hear survivors' stories. And she's pushed for legislation to investigate and to document Native American boarding schools.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The legislation has not yet reached the Senate or House floor for a vote.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Finally, we all know how it goes. Someone cuts you off in traffic, a glitch causes you to lose work on your computer. These little random happenstances of life can make us, well, mad.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And of course, that's okay. But getting mad for too long or too often can be damaging not only to our mental well-being, but to our bodies.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The Wall Street Journal reports on new research that shows just how unhealthy sustained or chronic anger can be.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: One study found that anger decreased blood flow, and that can raise the risk of heart disease. Anger also messes with our gastrointestinal system, and it can even damage cells in our brains.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The takeaway here is that it's impossible to avoid life's little frustrations, but taking stock of sustained anger is really important to our health.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And there are little ways to cope along the way, like meditation and breathing exercises, or even just simply talking it out.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: You can read more about that on the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the News app right now, we have a Narrated article coming up next.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The Wall Street Journal looks into how nearly a year after the deadly submersible implosion on the way to the Titanic shipwreck, the ultra-wealthy are still spending big on underwater travel.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: If you're listening in the podcast app, you can follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And I'll be back with the news tomorrow. Thank you.
