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As Zelenskyy meets Biden, a look at a key Ukraine battle · Apple News Today

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  Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Wednesday, December 21st. I'm Shumita Basu. This is "Apple News Today." On today's show, new revelations from the January 6th investigation. The reasons so many Americans are dying from a curable disease. And why you may not actually need to drink eight cups of water a day.
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  But first, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is in Washington today, meeting with President Biden and speaking to a joint session of Congress. Biden is expected to announce more weapons for Ukraine. The nearly $2 billion package will, for the first time, include Patriot missiles. Kyiv has long wanted the advanced American missile defense system to defend against Russian airstrikes.
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  Details of this visit were kept secret until late yesterday. It's Zelenskyy's first known trip abroad since Russia invaded in February. Before heading to Washington, he visited Bakhmut, where some of the toughest fighting has been lately. He presented medals to troops there. The fighters gave him a Ukrainian flag with their signatures to bring to the U.S.
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  "Reuters" has analysis of the nearly five-month battle for the small eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. Military analysts say Russia is fighting so hard because this is the first battle in months that it might win. It's been pouring resources into the area, including troops from the Kremlin-linked mercenary force the Wagner Group. Its founder offered people in Russian prisons pardons if they fight. Independent Russian reporting says data shows tens of thousands of incarcerated people seem to have taken the offer.
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  The fighting has been long and hard, with commanders on both sides and Western analysts making some grim comparisons. The battle over Bakhmut is being called a "meat grinder," and compared to the trench warfare of World War I, where both sides had heavy losses for little territorial gain.
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  For Moscow, this is a rare chance for a victory on the ground, which might help sagging morale. For Kyiv, holding the city is a way to show Western allies that Ukraine is still worthy of support, the kind of support that Zelenskyy will be lobbying Biden and Congress for today.
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  The long-awaited final report from the House select committee investigating the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol is set to be released today. We know it's gonna be a lot of material. The executive summary is book-length on its own.
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  This report caps an 18-month investigation that included 11 public hearings. We asked Kyle Cheney, a senior legal affairs reporter for "POLITICO," to explain the significance of this final report, which comes after the committee recommended that Donald Trump be prosecuted.
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  Kyle Cheney: The key is not necessarily the referrals, but what is the evidence that underlies those referrals? And again, some of it we saw in the public hearings, and some of it was described in the executive summary, which is 160 pages, but the actual, the vast majority of the evidence is not yet public.
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  The final report will go into great detail, drawn from nearly 1,200 witness interview transcripts. Cheney says it'll be interesting for the public to see what led the committee to recommend charging Trump. The Department of Justice is looking at the committee's work as well, as part of its own investigation into the attack.
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  Cheney: What is relevant is what is the evidence supporting those charges. Again, some is known, a lot is not yet known. And what DOJ definitely wants to see is all of that underlying raw evidence that they can then put their own prosecutorial analysis on.
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  There's another much-anticipated document coming out soon. Another House committee voted to release Trump's tax returns from while he was in office. He broke with presidential tradition by refusing to make them public and he fought in court to keep them private. Democrats say his returns will be made public in a few days. Until the full January 6th committee report is out, you can read the executive summary and more coverage and analysis on the Apple News app.
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  Waves of people are dying from Hepatitis C, even though there's a very effective cure. The viral infection damages the liver, and can be deadly without treatment.
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  The medical news outlet "STAT" found that more than 1,000 incarcerated people died from Hep C in the six years since the first cure hit the market. That's more than double the death rate in the overall U.S. population. Cost is one reason prisoners aren't getting the life-saving medicine. One full course of treatment can retail for $24,000. But reporter Nicholas Florko found other problems, signs that prisons were creating barriers.
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  Nicholas Florko: And we found that prisons had systematically set up policies to really limit access to this treatment.
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  Some people in prison might never know they have Hepatitis C. Many states don't test widely, even though rates of Hep C in prisons are higher than the U.S. population. "STAT" found some prison systems that gave misleading information about the effectiveness of treatment. And sometimes, Florko says, prisons wait too long to offer it.
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  Florko: These policies that are basically enacted to keep costs down are really gambling with people's lives. I mean, we've seen cases where folks are told, "Hey, you're not sick enough yet," and then suddenly they're too sick and they end up dying as a result.
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  Some incarcerated people are fighting for their health in court. One lawsuit forced the state of Maine to ramp up Hep C treatment in prisons. But there are so many stories of people who just didn't get help in time. One is John Ritchie, who tried to get treatment for Hepatitis C in a Missouri prison. He died last year, almost five years after asking for the drug that could've saved his life.
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  You can read the full series from "STAT." It includes interviews with some heavy-hitters in medicine and policy about this problem, including the former head of the CDC and Chelsea Clinton. That's in the Apple News app.
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  Here at "Apple News Today," we are fans of a good debunking. You've probably heard this rule before: you're supposed to drink eight glasses of water a day. Well, a new study says, that's actually the wrong way of thinking about hydration.
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  "The Washington Post" gets into the origins of this rule. The whole "eight cups a day" thing comes from a 1945 recommendation from the Food and Nutrition Board. But that number got misinterpreted over time. It doesn't take into account how much water you get from eating food and drinking other beverages, like tea or coffee, which, by the way, do count toward hydration, despite all that anti-caffeine slander out there! Just don't overdo it.
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  What this new study finds is hydration needs are super personal. These researchers studied thousands of people in dozens of countries from all walks of life, from farmworkers to athletes to office workers. And they concluded water needs vary from person to person, and are determined by so many different factors: gender, body size, physical activity, climate. Even age. Our water needs peak between the ages of 20 and 50, and then decline as our metabolism slows down.
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  So the bottom line is, don't stress so much over counting your water bottle refills. The one recommendation that experts can safely make, across the board: drink when you're thirsty. One of the authors of the study explained it this way, "Drinking eight cups a day won't hurt. You might just end up taking more trips to the bathroom."
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  You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the News app right now, stick around. We've got a narrated article coming up next from "Bloomberg Businessweek," with deep reporting on the first few weeks of Elon Musk running Twitter. He recently said he'll abide by the poll that he took on Twitter, where users voted for him to step down. Musk says he'll resign as soon as he finds someone, quote, "foolish enough to take the job." That's queued up next. I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
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