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--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Monday, December 13th. 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: Rescuers are looking for survivors of tornadoes that killed dozens of people in multiple states over the weekend. Kentucky was the hardest hit. In some parts of the country, it looks like winds were so strong, debris was thrown 30,000 feet high at times. That's around the cruising altitude of a passenger plane.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Scientists are trying to figure out why these unusually powerful and widespread tornadoes happened. President Biden is asking the EPA to investigate a potential connection between climate change and what could be the worst tornadoes in a century.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The fact is that we all know everything is more intense when the climate is warming. PBS NewsHour looks into what the science can tell us. And in short, it's a bit soon to be sure what impact climate change had here. Unusually warm weather was an important factor in this tornado outbreak. One meteorologist called it remarkable, even unbelievable, to see tornadoes this strong in December rather than late spring.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But it's hard to firmly pin this one on climate change, partly because there's a lot we still don't know about why tornadoes form. Only a very small amount of severe thunderstorms spawn tornadoes. Generally, scientists say as the planet warms up, we're likely to see more tornadoes in the winter. And also in different places.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The term Tornado Alley has historically meant Kansas and Oklahoma, but these storms were far to the east of that. Kentucky and other areas in the Mississippi River Valley are getting warmer and wetter. So in the future they may need to brace for more powerful tornadoes
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In 2018, Caroline O'Connor came across her grandson Joshua's red notebook. She found disturbing messages and pictures that glorified the 1999 Columbine high school shootings and a detailed plan of his own to attack a school with guns and bombs.
--:-- John Woodrow Cox: From The Washington Post, I'm here to describe the moment she found a semi-automatic rifle hidden in a guitar case. At that point, she was faced with a really difficult decision. And that was, do I notify authorities? And she did that really without much hesitation, even though I think that's a thing for many parents that could be difficult to do.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So she thought that he needed help really beyond what she could give him. Police got to O'Connor's grandson before he could attack. He received a 22-year prison term, but this story, it's an outlier. Many parents and guardians overlook warning signs that teens are capable of violence. And adults are rarely held accountable in school shootings.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This is why it stands out that it's not just a 15-year-old charged with killing four students in Michigan. His parents also face involuntary manslaughter charges. All have pleaded not guilty.
--:-- John Woodrow Cox: We know, according to the prosecutor, that three days before the shooting, Jennifer Crumbly posted that she and her son were at the gun range, quote, testing out his new Christmas present. And then one day before the shooting, again, according to authorities, a teacher caught Ethan searching online for ammunition. And the school alerted her and was concerned about that. And instead, she texted her son, quote, LOL, I'm not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Post looked at some of the numbers around school shootings. In cases where police could trace the weapon nearly 80 were taken from the child's own home or from relatives or friends. But since 1999, The Post only found five cases where the adult owners of the weapons were criminally punished for failing to lock up the guns.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: NASA is about to launch a massive new telescope into space, and it's headed for a really special spot in our universe. The Atlantic has a new article on this that caught our eye.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The James Webb Space Telescope is being sent to one of only a handful of places where gravity acts in this really peculiar way. Yeah, it's a type of spot made possible by a quirk of physics. If you were in exactly the right place, the gravitational pull between the sun and the earth kind of cancel each other out. And it leaves you just locked in place, suspended, which makes it a great parking spot for a telescope.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This telescope, it's headed for a spot about a million miles away. Compare that to where Hubble, NASA's most famous space telescope so far, hangs out. It's just about 340 miles above the Earth. That's like a grocery run compared to where the new one is headed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This special place is worth the trip because from there, the telescope will be able to see deeper into the universe than ever before. This could be NASA's most important mission in a generation. But there are some risks. If anything goes wrong with the telescope, it is too far out for astronauts to reach it for repairs.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This telescope, it is cutting-edge technology, but that special spot that it's going to, we've known about it for centuries. It was in the late 1700s when a couple of mathematicians first made sense of spots like this. One astrophysicist tells The Atlantic, It's pretty neat that calculations done hundreds of years ago became a treasure map for future generations.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As the astrophysicist puts it, just imagine the response if you told them their work would help launch a spacecraft. He says it would blow their minds.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In 2013, a guy in the UK, he accidentally threw a hard drive in the garbage. For the past eight years, he's been obsessed with trying to get it back. He knows it's probably in a nearby dump, and he's been desperately trying to convince local officials to let him dig it up.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, I know what you're thinking. What could possibly be worth sifting through tons of garbage? How about a half billion dollars in cryptocurrency? The New Yorker has the bizarre story of James Howells, a Bitcoin early adopter.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And way before many people heard of cryptocurrency, he was able to amass a pretty big stockpile, about 8,000 Bitcoins. At the time, it wasn't worth much, and he ended up throwing out the hard drive where he stashed his private key.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It wasn't until later, when Bitcoin started shooting up in value, that he remembered what he had done and kind of panicked. But he can't spend his half billion dollars without that private key that was on the hard drive. It's kind of like a password for Bitcoin, but you just can't reset it the way you can if you forget your email password. If you lose it, you can't get the money.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now, when he went to the city and asked them to let him get his hands in the landfill, they rejected the idea. They called it impractical. He would have to sift through 15 soccer fields worth of garbage piled up over the years. He even offered the city a 25 percent cut of the buried Bitcoin treasure. But it still has not okayed the dig.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I mean, this story is just wild. And you really need to check out the entire article in The New Yorker. You can read it or hear it as an audio story in the Apple News app. Just tap the notification we sent you halfway through the show for a link. And you can also find all the other stories we talked about in the Apple News app.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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