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Latest from Afghanistan as the earthquake death toll rises · Apple News Today

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  Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Thursday, June 23rd. I'm Shumita Basu. This is "Apple News Today." Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news, and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
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  Afghanistan is digging out of the aftermath of a massively destructive earthquake. More than 1,000 people are dead, at least another 1,600 people injured, mostly in a remote province in the southeast of the country.
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  We reached out to Diaa Hadid, who's in Islamabad reporting for "NPR."
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  Diaa Hadid: I think it's important to explain where this earthquake happened, so you can understand the magnitude of the disaster that is unfolding before us. It's a very mountainous area. People live in little valleys. They've been long marginalized. They're extremely poor. And they've been living through the worst drought in more than 30 years. And now, they've experienced this enormous, devastating earthquake.
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  Hadid said we still don't have an accurate death toll. It rained heavily last night, turning dirt roads into mud and further complicating relief efforts.
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  Hadid: I spoke to one senior aid official from the Danish Refugee Council who said it could be days before they can even start digging people out, before they can start dispatching professionally trained rescue crews. And that's why we can see videos now being uploaded to social media of residents themselves just using their hands to pull dead people out.
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  According to the Hadid's sources, in one village, 70% of homes were destroyed. In another, 100%.
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  Now, the Taliban is leading recovery efforts after this earthquake. Hadid says it's hoping to show the country and the world that it is a legitimate government.
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  Hadid: One of the really interesting things is that the Taliban are rushing in to help. And they're trying to performatively show that as well. So we can see them flying in with helicopters to extract injured people and send them to hospital. They've been helping dig those mass graves alongside residents.
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  Since the United States pulled out of Afghanistan last summer and the Taliban took over, international aid has dried up. Afghanistan is now facing economic collapse and a humanitarian crisis. Millions of people are going hungry. Hadid was in Kabul just a few weeks ago.
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  Hadid: We saw babies so malnourished and so hungry that they were nothing more than sticks. And I remember one of the women was cradling her son, Ibrahim, and she said, "He'll shrivel up and die."
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  Hadid told us, for Afghanistan, a country that has seen so much turmoil and so much suffering, this earthquake is an added tragedy.
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  Hadid: It's really hard to fathom as a person, as a journalist, how much suffering one country has to bear.
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  Today, the Supreme Court handed down decisions in some of the biggest and most consequential cases from its docket.
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  First, a major decision on guns. In a 6-3 ruling, the Court struck down a New York state law that placed restrictions on who can carry a gun outside the home. The law required gun owners to show "proper cause" to carry a handgun in public for self-defense. This is one of the most significant rulings on the Second Amendment since the Court's 2008 decision affirming the right to bear arms. And it could have huge implications for concealed carry laws in several other states. Here's Joan Walsh from "The Nation" speaking to Brian Lehrer on "WNYC Radio" just as the news broke.
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  Joan Walsh: Justice Thomas, he's really making a case that carrying a gun is one of the core elements of being an American. You shouldn't have to have special circumstances to get a concealed carry license.
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  Mark Joseph Stern covers the Court for "Slate." He calls this decision a "revolution" in Second Amendment law and says the Supreme Court has effectively rendered gun restrictions presumptively unconstitutional. Here's New York Governor Kathy Hochul responding to the decision.
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  Kathleen Hochul: This decision isn't just reckless, it's reprehensible. It's not what New Yorkers want. And we should have the right of determination of what we want to do in terms of our gun laws in our state.
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  This comes amid a wave of gun violence, including the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, just a few weeks ago.
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  The Court also handed down a ruling on Miranda rights, that is, the right to remain silent and consult with a lawyer when confronted with law enforcement. This was another 6-3 decision. The justices ruled that if a police officer fails to read a suspect their Miranda rights, and the government then uses the suspect's statements against them in court, the suspect cannot sue for violating their Fifth Amendment rights. This reverses a long-standing procedure, one that was first established by the Court more than 50 years ago.
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  We're still waiting on several more decisions from the Court, including a case that could impact the federal government's ability to create environmental regulations, whether Trump's Remain in Mexico policy is legal, and of course a decision that will determine the fate of abortion access in this country.
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  Ever since the Supreme Court leak last month, when we got a good sense of how the Court will rule on abortion rights, it's been a race against the clock for doctors in training. Abortion providers are moving as fast as they can to train the next generation of specialists in their field.
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  Nick Anderson: If abortion procedures are outlawed in a given state, then abortion training will be very hard to find in that state, and perhaps impossible.
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  That's "Washington Post" reporter Nick Anderson. He spent some time with Dr. Aaron Campbell, the director of the Knoxville Center for Reproductive Health in Tennessee. The state has a trigger law on the books that would outlaw the procedure the moment the Supreme Court hands down its decision.
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  Anderson: He is trying to continue to provide abortions for patients in Tennessee who need them. And he's also trying to train medical residents and medical students who desire that training because, as he told me, you can have all the state laws concerning abortion that you want, but if you don't have trained providers, you don't have choice.
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  Dr. Campbell has a tattoo on his arm of a wire clothes hanger. It's a reminder of what could happen if abortions are illegal. A recent study out of UCLA and UCSF found, if Roe is overturned, 44% of OB/GYN residents across the country won't get the training they need. That's because they won't be able to observe the procedure in their state, the way that a medical student or resident normally would. And that could have serious consequences for women's reproductive health.
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  Anderson: Many doctors told me that miscarriage situations and other types of pregnancy situations, where you have potentially high risk or complicated pregnancies, it is perhaps useful to have performed the abortion procedure enough times to understand how to use that procedure after a miscarriage, or in another pregnancy kind of situation where there might be a need to terminate the pregnancy.
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  What's expected to happen, if Roe is overturned at the federal level, is some states will continue to provide full access to abortion training for medical residents, and others will have virtually no access. While some students might be able to travel for training, Anderson told us the doctors he spoke to said hands-on, regular practice is what makes the difference.
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  Anderson: These doctors are telling me there's no substitute for it. You've gotta do it dozens and dozens of times in order to feel comfortable and to have a comfort level that you can sustain professionally. The Knoxville Center for Reproductive Health tells me it's been around for 47 years, and they are literally making plans right now to close if the Supreme Court decision overturns Roe v. Wade. They don't see a way forward with their work.
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  Today marks 50 years since Title IX was signed into law. The legislation made it illegal for schools receiving federal funding to discriminate on the basis of sex. And it was revolutionary. It changed the playing field, I mean literally, for girls and women. But Rachel Axon from "USA TODAY" says a lot of colleges are still falling short.
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  Rachel Axon: They certainly have not, you know, in many cases, lived up to the letter or the intent of the law, yet.
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  An analysis of more than a hundred public and private schools that competed in the highest level of college football last year found that nearly 90% of them are not offering athletic opportunities to women proportionate to their enrollment. And schools typically spend way more on sports for men than they do on sports for women.
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  Axon: As an example, let's take Louisville basketball. We found that in the two year period we looked at, the school spent 13 times the amount of money on equipment for the men's team as it did for women. In one purchase, they spent more than $2,500 on socks for the men's team. That amount represents more than 10% of what the women's team spent on all equipment, period, over two years.
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  That's a lot of money on socks. Men's socks. Another example, the University of Indiana, which is a huge basketball school, spent six times more on recruiting for its men's team. And that includes more than $660,000 on things like charter flights and car services.
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  For months now, Axon and her colleagues at "USA TODAY" have been looking into Title IX abuses and failures.
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  Axon: When you hear the stories of, you know, the women who came before us, who, you know, were playing softball in parking lots or washing their own laundry or, you know, all the stories from the '60s and '70s really put into perspective just how far we've come. But what motivated this project is, you know, in all our reporting, we've been told over and over, like, "Nobody's complying, nobody's complying." Like we all know nobody's complying and nobody's gonna do anything about it.
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  We'll link to some of their reporting on our show notes page. And if you'd prefer the TLDR version, I'll also retweet Axon's really illuminating twitter thread on this. It's what caught our team's attention in the first place.
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  You can find all the stories we talked about today in the Apple News app. Also, we're expanding our local coverage. As of this week, we're now offering quality local journalism from news outlets in Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth. That's on top of what we already offer in areas like New York, San Francisco, D.C., Miami, Charlotte and many more. Just search "local news" in the app to check it out. I'll talk with you
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  again tomorrow.
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