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What parents can do if their kid is planning violence · Apple News Today

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  Shumita Basu, Narrating: Hey there. Before we get started, a quick request. On an upcoming episode of "In Conversation," we're going to be talking about why air travel is so bad right now. And we want to hear from you about nightmare air travel from the past few months. Have you missed a flight because of an endless security line? I almost did. Did your bags get lost on a month-long trip to the other side of the world? Tell us about it. Just use your iPhone's voice memo app to record yourself. Tell us your name, where you're from and your air travel story. And please, try to keep it under a minute. You can send it to us at applenewstoday@apple.com. Again, that's applenewstoday@apple.com. We might include your story on the show. And thanks!
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  Good morning! It's Thursday, July 14th. 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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  In September of 2019, Nichole Schubert found her 17-year-old son's journal on a cluttered shelf in their dining room.
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  Tawnell Hobbes: She started reading it, and she was just shocked. At one point she said, "What do I do?"
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  Tawnell Hobbes reports on the family's story in "The Wall Street Journal."
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  Hobbes: Mind you, several months prior, she had come across in her son's closet what looked to be bomb-making materials. So she's already thinking about that. The journal was so detailed to the hour. 5:00 a.m., kill mom, kill her boyfriend. He wanted this massacre at his school to take place on April 20th, which is the Columbine massacre anniversary.
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  Schubert's son was planning an act of violence. She thought about the students at her son's school and their families, so she made a call that no mom wants to make. She called the police on her son. He was arrested and banned from the school that he planned to attack.
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  Hobbes: For the parents that I've talked to, the difficulty is the unknown. Though a lot of them do wanna protect their child, but then they're weighing it because they're like, protect your kid or your kid becomes the next school shooter. That's the choice that they often find themselves making.
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  A study funded by the Department of Justice looked at 171 planned school attacks that were stopped in the last couple of decades. And there was a pattern.
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  Hobbes: About 51% of them were thwarted by peers. Classmates, basically telling, "Hey, my classmate is planning on bombing or shooting up the school." The next big number was about 18% came from school staff. And that would be including your school resource officers. But just 4% were from the parents of the suspects.
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  Authorities say they need more parents to be looking out for signs of disturbing behavior in their children and to report them. But it's not so easy. The "Journal" spoke to another mother who called in her son's plans to commit a mass shooting. She says, what she really wanted was for him to get long-term residential mental health care. Instead, he received short-term inpatient care and a felony charge for planning an act of violence. Her son spoke to the "Journal" too, and he said he was angry with his life and struggling with poverty at the time. He still thinks his mom shouldn't have gotten the police involved. For Nichole Schubert, the mother who found her son's journal, the decision was heart wrenching. But she says she wouldn't have been able to forgive herself if she didn't make that call.
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  For the first time ever, Gen Z'ers are running for Congress. This is the first year that some of them turn 25 years old, which makes them eligible to serve. "NPR" spoke to Maxwell Alejandro Frost, who's running as a Democrat in Florida.
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  Maxwell Alejandro Frost: Our generation has been born into a lot of trauma and a lot of civil unrest. And I think because of that, our generation naturally thinks about things in a bit of a different way.
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  Frost is a gun-violence survivor who says that school shootings and racist violence are motivating people his age to get involved in politics. Like several Gen Z candidates, he comes from the more progressive side of the Democratic party. He's eager to pass a Green New Deal and cancel student debt.
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  But they don't all lean progressive. There are Gen Z Republicans running as well. One of them is Karoline Leavitt, a conservative who's hoping to flip a New Hampshire House seat. Leavitt told "NPR" that her generation should have a voice in national politics.
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  Karoline Leavitt: It's a very one-sided culture that we live in. How do we break through that mold? It's by electing young people to office that can resonate with these voters, have a platform at the national stage that can show them ideas, policies, values that they're not hearing elsewhere at all.
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  If any of these young candidates win, they'll stand out on Capitol Hill. The average age of a member in the GOP leadership is 55. On the Democratic side, it's 71. The Republican Party has been a bit more successful in elevating younger members of Congress into leadership roles.
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  As a pollster explains to "NPR," many millennials who were elected to Congress during the Obama years talked about compromise and working across the aisle. She says Gen Z'ers are not about that. Instead, they want to disrupt the existing system and fight to get exactly what they believe is right.
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  This week, the movie "Where the Crawdads Sing" is out in theaters. It's an adaptation of the best-selling novel by Delia Owens. Maybe you've read it or you plan to see the movie, but here's something you might not know. The author, her ex-husband and stepson are all wanted for questioning in a murder investigation. It involves the shooting of a suspected animal poacher in Zambia nearly three decades ago.
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  Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor-in-chief of "The Atlantic" and he's been following this story for more than a decade. One of the twists is, this killing was actually caught on camera and included in a 1996 "ABC" documentary.
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  Documentary Narrator: On this mission, we would witness the ultimate price paid by a suspected poacher.
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  "ABC" followed Delia and her then-husband, Mark, who were working as wildlife conservationists. This was at a time when poachers were hunting elephants in Zambia. And as the cameras were rolling, a person gets shot.
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  Documentary Narrator: The bodies of the poachers are often left where they fall for the animals to eat.
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  After the documentary aired, Zambian police launched an investigation. They wanted to question Delia and Mark and his son Christopher. But the family had already left the country. And there's no treaty to extradite them. Goldberg wrote about the case for "The New Yorker" a few years back. And in a video for the magazine, he talked about what he found.
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  Jeffrey Goldberg: The questions that I was left with when I first saw it included, was this man really a poacher? Why was he alone if he was a poacher? Who did the shooting? "ABC" never tells us if they investigated who this alleged poacher was, if they ever learned his name or what village he came from, or whether he was in fact a poacher at all.
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  Goldberg spoke with the photographer who filmed the fatal shooting, and he said Mark's son Christopher pulled the trigger. We also learned from Goldberg's reporting that Mark had bragged in the past in writing about the killing of poachers when he was overseeing anti-poaching efforts.
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  Now, if you're familiar with the plot of "Where the Crawdads Sing," this might sound eerily familiar. The book is about a nature-lover accused of murdering someone with a bad reputation. Mark, Delia and Christopher have denied wrongdoing. The prosecutor isn't backing down. He told Goldberg, Zambia has no statute of limitations on murder.
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  Heated seats in the car, it's one of those features that feels super luxurious and has become more common in non-luxury cars over the years. But would you spring for heated seats if you had to pay a monthly subscription for it?
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  It might sound far-fetched, but the "Verge" looks into how some automakers are now exploring subscription models for different features. It's a way for them to keep making money on customers long after they drive off the lot.
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  Now, the most recent news is that BMW is charging a monthly subscription fee to turn on heated seats in a few places overseas. It'll cost about $18 a month. It's also offering drivers what it calls the "IconicSounds Sport package." That means that you can pay a one-time fee of $117 to get that classic vroom-vroom engine sound playing inside your car for anyone who wants to feel really cool and sporty. Is it worth it? I don't know, you tell me.
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  The transport editor at "The Verge" is not sold on all of this. In fact, he calls it a "nightmare." And it would be a huge change in how cars are priced. Some subscription efforts have failed in the past. One industry watcher is skeptical that drivers are gonna buy in when the average car price now tops $48,000, the highest in history.
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  You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And when you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News+ partners. I'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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